News — TheWallStreetJournal

Douglas Gilman put a new designer kitchen in his Manhattan apartment last year with entertaining in mind. He placed the sleek marble-accented Dada kitchen, from Italy’s Molteni&C, at the center of the airy 2,800-square-foot home that he created from combining two adjacent units in a former West Village printing house. He figured it would give him easier access to his guests. But the arrival of Covid-19 restrictions has meant much more cooking, and next to no entertaining, and it’s his high-tech German appliances that have come to the rescue, including an induction cooktop that can sense where he places a...

For nearly $100,000, Matthew and Nina Christensen got exactly the landscaping they wanted. The 2,029-square-foot area around their home in Newport Beach, Calif., has several shades of green, gentle slopes and altering lengths of bluntly cut grass that make it look freshly mowed no matter the season. Three lush living walls cover an exterior concrete wall. What’s more, it is basically maintenance-free. “Our neighbors on both sides are in contact with our landscaper,” says Mr. Christensen, 39 years old, a commercial real-estate developer. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. The greenery is almost all artificial. The...