The kitchen, which is actually a section of the great room, allows the eyes to travel directly from the picture window to the cooking area with an unbroken view of the water.

Designer Linda Woodrum wanted a distinctive kitchen that still worked in harmony with the great room. "There is such a sense of wood — in the walls, ceilings and floors — that I felt there should be little, if any, wood in the kitchen," she says.

The kitchen purposefully and gracefully allows the spotlight to shine on the great room. But with an art piece adorning the tile wall, the kitchen further establishes the entire area as a sophisticated, informal, living space.

Architect Randy Johnson decided on a greenhouse during the initial stage of development, and the mudroom was a natural extension of that. "The mudroom was meant to end the (horizontal) axis," Johnson says. "You have a garden prep room — which is a mudroom — but you have a functioning reason to have this room. It's more than a mudroom. It's a prep area. Then you have the greenhouse."