5 ‘Dream Kitchen’ Upgrades That Homeowners Tend to Regret

A YEAR AGO I found myself teetering demi-pointe on the soapstone counter of my newly renovated kitchen wondering why I had asked for cupboards up so high.

Why had I fallen prey to the Instagram Reels and TikTok videos that malign the gap between cabinets and ceiling? My top cupboards, which hiked the cost of my cabinets about 35%, finished the millwork handsomely, but they were basically unusable.

Before you, too, succumb to custom-kitchen lust, here are five “must-haves” that design pros, and some reality-checked clients, say you almost certainly don’t need.

1. Continent-Sized Kitchen Islands

When rapper Cardi B revealed her new New Jersey kitchen island on Twitter, now X, she strutted across its surface—and got quite a ways without even nearing the edge of what appears to be a six-slab marble behemoth. In marginally less flamboyant kitchens across America, islands of 15 to 18 feet, roughly the size of SUVs, roost.

Debbie Travis, a veteran host of home-design TV, wanted one for a villa in Tuscany where she welcomes guests for retreats. Her self-described vision: a 16-foot counter surrounded by “a dozen women making pasta, drinking prosecco and laughing.” With the dishwasher and sink on one side and the stove on the other, she says she’s “constantly pushing the cutting board across the island and running left or right to the other side.”

Said Atlanta-based kitchen designer Matthew Quinn of these expansive surfaces, “You literally have to use a Swiffer to clean the middle.”

2. Pot Fillers

“A wall-mounted faucet near a range in theory is great because you can fill a big pot with water and not have to carry it from the sink,” says Christopher Peacock, owner of an eponymous luxury cabinet company in New York. “But it’s ridiculous,” he pointed out. After you’re done, say, boiling several pounds of pasta, you have to carry the pot to the sink to drain the water. “For $5,000, this one’s often a complete waste of time.”

If you don’t use the tap frequently enough, Quinn warns, “you have to open the valve, drain it into a vessel and dump out that water, which will be full of sediment.”

3. Over-Glowing Pantries

“LED-lit shelves and drawers are huge,” said Jaqui Seerman. The interior designer says her Los Angeles studio creates pantries in which everything is decanted and then lit like a boutique. “A surge of people are asking themselves, ‘If I’m creating a Reel of myself cooking, how does the olive oil look and how does its background look too,’ ” she said, “but it’s vanity, not utility.”

4. Workstation Sinks

Brands from Delta to the Galley, a high-end purveyor, offer workstation sinks—trough-size basins up to 7 feet long with myriad inset components, including cutting boards, colanders, dish racks and entertaining kits rife with metal ramekins. Moving the parts looks cool on video.

The drawbacks? De-gunking the slim horizontal ledges and tight corners that support the layers of add-ons, not to mention storing these accoutrements. And those cutting boards? Architect-builder Robert M. Berger, in Westport, Conn., says they’ll often discolour, stain and warp. He advises sanding and treating them with mineral oil pre-use.

Quinn objects to the ergonomics. “We designers create work zones and task areas for comfort and efficiency,” he said, “and now everyone’s jammed into the sink trying to cut and prep and wash.”

5. Library Ladders

They may evoke sweetly analog book stores and reading rooms, but in a kitchen, library ladders “are 98% charm, 2% utility,” said Peacock.

Colleen Silverthorn had designer Meredith Heron install a single ladder that hooks onto rails in the kitchen, laundry and family room in her Regina, Saskatchewan, home. “You need two hands to bring down anything, but you have to hang on while you’re up there, so you only have one,” she admits. “It’s absolutely beautiful [but] doesn’t work at all in the kitchen.” In the other rooms she uses it to retrieve wrapping paper or books, “anything you can toss down onto the floor.”

Sophie Donelson is the author of “Uncommon Kitchens: A Revolutionary Approach to the Most Popular Room in the House” (Abrams).

Former President Donald Trump said he would ban undocumented immigrants from obtaining home mortgages, a move he indicated would help ease home prices even though these buyers account for a tiny fraction of U.S. home sales.

Home loans to undocumented people living in the U.S. are legal but they aren’t especially common. Between 5,000 and 6,000 mortgages of this kind were issued last year, according to estimates from researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington.

Overall, lenders issued more than 3.4 million mortgages to all home purchasers in 2023, federal government data show.

Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, made his comments Thursday during a policy speech to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan.

Housing remains a top economic issue for voters during this presidential election. Rent and home prices grew at historic rates during the pandemic and mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen in more than two decades. A July Wall Street Journal poll showed that voters rank housing as their second-biggest inflation concern after groceries.

Both major candidates for the 2024 presidential election have made appeals to voters on housing during recent campaign stops, though the issue has so far featured more prominently in Vice President Kamala Harris ’s campaign.

Trump has blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s woes, including crime and unemployment. Now, he is pointing to immigrants as a cause of the nation’s housing-affordability crisis. Yet some affordable-housing advocates and real-estate professionals said Trump’s mortgage proposal would fail to bring relief to priced-out home buyers.

“It’s unfortunate that given the significant housing affordability crisis that is widely acknowledged across most partisan lines, we are arguing about a minuscule segment of the market,” said David Dworkin, president of the National Housing Conference, an affordable-housing advocacy group.

Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, a trade organization, said, “It’s just another effort to vilify immigrants and to continue to scapegoat them for any issues that we have here in the United States.”

A Trump campaign spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. can obtain an obscure type of mortgage designed for taxpayers without Social Security numbers, most of whom are Hispanic. The passage of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowed banks to use identification numbers from the Internal Revenue Service as an alternative to Social Security, extending a number of financial services to people without legal status for the first time.

Mortgage loans for undocumented immigrants are typically higher interest and borrowers include legal residents who have undocumented spouses, Acosta said. Lenders include regional credit unions and community-development financial institutions.

In his speech, Trump said that “the flood” of undocumented immigrants is driving up housing costs. “That’s why my plan will ban mortgages for illegal aliens,” he said.

Trump didn’t elaborate on how he would enact a ban on such loans.

Though mortgages for undocumented people living in the U.S. are relatively rare, residential real-estate purchases by foreign nationals are big business , especially in expensive coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles. These sales have declined in recent years, however.

Close to half of foreign purchases are made by people residing abroad, while the other half are made by recent immigrants or residents on nonimmigrant visas, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Realtors. Many affluent foreigners buy U.S. homes with cash instead of obtaining mortgage financing.

In his Thursday speech, which focused mostly on other economic matters such as energy and taxation, Trump proposed other measures to bring down housing costs, including cutting regulations for builders and allowing more building on federal land. Similar ideas appeared in the housing policy outline Harris released in August .

The former president has spoken on housing-related issues in speeches at other recent campaign stops, including in Michigan last month, where he touted his administration’s 2020 overturn of a policy that had encouraged cities to reduce racial segregation .

“I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump said. “I stopped low-income towers from rising right alongside of their house. And I’m keeping the illegal aliens away from the suburbs.”