What Were the Remodelista Considered Design Awards?

The Remodelista Considered Design Awards were created to recognize exceptional home design from both industry professionals and ordinary readers. The competition began in 2013 and developed into an annual showcase of renovations, interiors, gardens, and practical design solutions.

The word “considered” was central to the awards’ identity. A considered home is not merely photogenic. It reflects deliberate decisions about layout, materials, storage, light, comfort, craftsmanship, and the way people actually live. A marble counter may look wonderful, but it becomes more meaningful when it improves workflow, ages gracefully, and survives an encounter with lemon juice.

The competition also challenged the idea that excellent residential design must fit one visual style. Past entries included historic renovations, compact apartments, contemporary additions, rustic kitchens, highly organized utility spaces, and rooms that mixed modern elements with inherited or vintage pieces.

A Competition for Professionals and Amateurs

One of the program’s strongest features was its separation of amateur and professional categories. Homeowners and renters did not have to compete directly against architecture firms with professional photographers, drafting teams, and an alarming ability to hide electrical outlets.

At the same time, the professional divisions gave architects and interior designers an opportunity to explain the reasoning behind polished projects. This structure made the awards useful to a broad audience. Readers could admire sophisticated professional work while also discovering achievable ideas from people who designed and renovated their own homes.

Why the June 1 Launch Mattered

The June 1 launch officially opened a three-week submission period ending at midnight Pacific Time on June 22, 2018. Eligible participants in the United States and Canada, excluding Quebec, could submit completed projects in the appropriate categories.

The timing gave participants a manageable but meaningful deadline. Three weeks was long enough to select photographs, prepare captions, and write a project description, yet short enough to discourage the classic renovation habit of saying, “We will photograph it after we replace that one cabinet handle,” for six consecutive months.

The 2018 competition was described as the fifth annual Considered Design Awards. Its format combined editorial selection with community involvement: guest judges chose finalists, and readers later voted for the winners. This balance helped preserve professional credibility while giving the Remodelista and Gardenista audiences an active role in the outcome.

The Complete 2018 Timeline

• May 22: Remodelista previewed the return of the awards.
• June 1: Submissions officially opened.
• June 22: The submission period closed at midnight Pacific Time.
• July 9: Finalists were scheduled to be announced.
• July 9 through August 3: Readers could vote for their favorite projects.
• August 6: Winning projects were scheduled to be announced.

Remodelista Considered Design Awards Categories

The interior awards focused on the rooms where daily life tends to leave the most fingerprints. Professional and amateur entrants competed separately in three principal categories:

• Best Kitchen
• Best Bath
• Best Living and/or Dining Room

These categories were broad enough to welcome projects with very different budgets, architectural styles, and design challenges. A dramatic full-scale renovation could appear alongside a carefully edited room transformed through paint, restored materials, better storage, and a smarter arrangement of furniture.

The New Kitchen Organization Category

The major addition in 2018 was Best Kitchen Organization Project, presented in connection with The Organized Home. Unlike the main room categories, it was open to both professionals and amateurs.

This category acknowledged an important design truth: organization is not separate from aesthetics. A kitchen can have handcrafted cabinets and a beautiful range, but if opening the pantry causes three baking sheets to attack your ankles, the design conversation is not finished.

Entrants could highlight purposeful storage ideas, efficient cabinet interiors, orderly pantries, accessible shelves, labeled containers, drawer systems, or other solutions that improved how a kitchen functioned. The addition broadened the definition of award-worthy design by recognizing systems rather than surfaces alone.

Gardenista’s Outdoor Categories

Remodelista’s sister publication, Gardenista, ran related outdoor awards. Its categories included gardens, professional landscapes, outdoor living spaces, hardscape, curb appeal, and edible gardens.

Together, the two competitions treated a home and its surroundings as a connected design environment. A successful interior might frame a view of the garden, while a thoughtful landscape could extend dining, entertaining, and daily living beyond the walls.

Who Judged the 2018 Awards?

The guest judges brought experience from architecture, interiors, fashion, landscape design, textiles, and home organization. Remodelista’s interior finalists were evaluated by Stephen Alesch, co-founder of Roman and Williams, and fashion and lifestyle designer Jenni Kayne.

Landscape designer Brook Klausing and designer Erica Tanov participated on the Gardenista side, while Blisshaus founder Wiebke Liu judged the kitchen organization category.

The mix of disciplines was significant. Residential design is rarely only about architecture. A room’s success may depend on color, texture, furniture placement, storage habits, natural light, landscaping, and the emotional atmosphere created by all those elements working together.

After the judges selected finalists, readers voted for their favorites. Public voting gave strong visual communication an additional role. Entrants needed projects that worked in real life, but they also needed photographs and descriptions that helped online viewers understand why those projects worked.

Prizes and Professional Recognition

Each category winner was offered a $500 Schoolhouse gift card, redeemable online or through the company’s stores. Winning projects also received full editorial profiles on Remodelista, Gardenista, or The Organized Home.

For many participants, the editorial feature may have been more valuable than the merchandise prize. A detailed project profile could introduce an architect, designer, or homeowner to a large design-conscious audience. It could also preserve the story behind a renovation rather than reducing the project to a single attractive photograph.

Professional winners received automatic entry into Remodelista’s Architect/Designer Directory. That benefit gave firms a path toward continuing exposure among readers actively searching for renovation and design professionals.

What Entrants Were Asked to Submit

Participants could submit multiple qualifying projects. Each entry could include as many as 10 photographs, with images measuring at least 1,000 pixels wide. Entrants were also expected to provide a concise project description and individual captions.

Projects previously featured on Remodelista were excluded, helping the contest surface new work. The rules encouraged participants to show enough of a room to communicate its layout, materials, details, and relationship to the rest of the home.

Photography Needed to Explain the Design

A strong design-award photograph does more than make a room look expensive. It explains the project. Wide views establish the layout, while detail photographs reveal craftsmanship, hardware, storage, transitions, and material choices.

A useful image sequence might begin with the overall room, move through important functional zones, and finish with the details that give the project character. For a kitchen, that could mean showing the relationship among the sink, range, island, dining area, and storage. Ten nearly identical photographs of a faucet, however handsome, are unlikely to tell the full story.

Natural-looking light, clean compositions, straight vertical lines, and realistic color help viewers understand a space. Styling should support the design rather than overwhelm it. A bowl of lemons can be charming. Forty-seven artfully scattered lemons may suggest the kitchen has been taken hostage by citrus.

The Description Needed a Clear Narrative

The most effective project descriptions usually follow a simple structure:

1. Explain the original problem.
2. Describe the design goal.
3. Identify the most important decisions.
4. Show how those decisions improved daily life.

Specific details are more persuasive than decorative language. Instead of saying a renovation produced “a breathtaking modern oasis,” an entrant could explain that removing a wall brought daylight into the center of the house, created a direct path to the garden, and allowed the family to cook while supervising young children.

What Past Winners Reveal About Considered Design

The award winners were not united by one trend, color palette, or luxury price point. They were united by clarity of intention.

The 2018 Best Professional Kitchen winner, the Montlake Residence in Seattle by Mowery Marsh Architects and Kaylen Flugel Design, transformed a compartmentalized midcentury house by opening the upper level, introducing a smaller mezzanine, and reconnecting the interior with surrounding trees. Warm wood, black cabinetry, marble, concrete, and brass balanced drama with comfort.

The project demonstrates why design awards often respond to stories of transformation. The winning idea was not simply “install black cabinets.” It was the way spatial editing, daylight, views, restored details, and carefully tested finishes worked together.

Amateur winners similarly proved that thoughtful design is not limited to professional studios. Earlier recognized projects included a black-and-white Toronto kitchen that blended rustic and refined elements, a living and dining space on an organic Hawaiian farm, and carefully remodeled bungalow bathrooms.

These spaces had recognizable personalities because they responded to their owners, buildings, and locations. They did not appear to have been ordered as complete matching sets from a showroom labeled “Tasteful Person, Package B.”

Why the Awards Still Matter to Homeowners

Design competitions can serve as public libraries of problem-solving. Even readers who never entered the Remodelista Considered Design Awards could browse submissions and study hundreds of approaches to kitchens, baths, living rooms, landscapes, and storage.

A homeowner planning a renovation might compare ways to handle a narrow kitchen, preserve original architecture, incorporate modern appliances, organize open shelving, or make a compact bathroom feel calmer. Because the competition included amateur work, the archive offered examples that felt approachable as well as aspirational.

Good Design Became More Inclusive

Opening categories to renters, DIYers, homeowners, contractors, architects, and interior designers expanded the meaning of design authority. Expertise still mattered, but it was not defined exclusively by a professional title.

Someone who has lived in a difficult room for years may understand its problems with extraordinary precision. A renter may develop an ingenious reversible storage system. A homeowner restoring an old house may learn more about its original millwork than anyone expected, including several relatives who now regret asking casual questions at dinner.

Function Received Equal Billing

The inclusion of kitchen organization made the awards especially relevant to everyday life. It suggested that a design solution could be worthy of recognition because it reduced clutter, simplified cooking, or made frequently used tools easier to reach.

That emphasis remains useful today. Sustainable and long-lasting interiors are often created not by constant replacement but by selecting durable materials, preserving useful existing features, and arranging possessions so the home can function without requiring a daily wrestling match.

Experience-Based Lessons From Preparing a Design Award Entry

The experience of preparing a design award submission often changes how people see their own homes. A room that once felt “finished enough” suddenly becomes a collection of decisions that need to be explained. Why was the doorway moved? Why was the original floor preserved? Why does one cabinet stop six inches before the ceiling? Sometimes there is a brilliant reason. Sometimes the contractor had to leave early on Friday.

The first practical lesson is to document the project before, during, and after construction. Before photographs establish the challenge. Progress images reveal hidden work, such as repaired framing, relocated plumbing, or restored brick. Final photographs show the result, but the earlier images prove that the transformation involved more than attractive cushions.

Participants also learn that living in a room can improve the submission story. After several weeks of use, the homeowner may discover that the new island has become a homework station, breakfast counter, serving surface, and unofficial place where everyone leaves their keys. These observations demonstrate how a design performs beyond the photo shoot.

Another common experience is the struggle to edit. When entrants are allowed up to 10 images, the temptation is to submit every photograph that contains a beloved tile. Strong entries are usually more disciplined. Each image should contribute new information: the overall plan, a key view, an important transition, a storage solution, a material detail, or evidence of how people use the space.

Writing the description can be equally revealing. Owners frequently begin with style labels such as modern farmhouse, Scandinavian, traditional, or industrial. Yet the more interesting story often concerns constraints. A low ceiling required careful lighting. A limited budget encouraged the reuse of cabinets. A historic structure demanded custom solutions. A small footprint led to furniture that performs two jobs without looking like gym equipment.

The process also teaches entrants to separate genuine design choices from decoration added for photographs. Fresh flowers and neatly folded towels may improve an image, but judges and readers still look for spatial logic, proportion, material harmony, and practical value. Styling is the punctuation, not the entire sentence.

Collaboration becomes more visible as well. A seemingly simple room may involve homeowners, architects, interior designers, builders, cabinetmakers, electricians, landscape designers, photographers, and patient friends asked to move the same chair nine times. Crediting those contributors is both ethical and useful because it explains how the project came together.

Finally, submitting a project requires accepting that thoughtful work may not win. Public voting, jury preferences, photography quality, and the strength of competing entries all affect the outcome. The worthwhile part is learning to articulate what the project accomplished. A clear record of the renovation can support a professional portfolio, preserve the history of a home, or simply remind the owners why months of dust, decisions, and mysteriously delayed faucets were worth enduring.

How to Apply the Considered Design Approach Today

The 2018 entry period has long since closed, but the principles behind the Remodelista Considered Design Awards remain practical. Before changing a room, begin with the problem rather than the shopping list. Observe where clutter forms, how people move, when daylight enters, which materials are aging well, and which features deserve preservation.

Then make choices that support a coherent purpose. A considered kitchen may prioritize cooking efficiency, family gathering, historic character, accessibility, or compact storage. It does not need to satisfy every trend currently sprinting across social media.

Document the process, test samples in the actual room, and allow the space to develop a personality connected to its occupants. The goal is not to produce a home that looks untouched. It is to create one that works so well that living in it feels natural.