From About.com You can find out more information at www.dollwear.com, or e-mail Margaret Wolfe-Wilson, dollady45@adelphia.net for purchasing information. Hope this helps!

I was going to give my usual recommendation for Punch! design software, which I used for our design and liked for its simplicity and the fact that it was cheap...but their prices have gone from $10 to $50 for the basic version! (Or rather, they seem to have gotten rid of the cheap kitchens-only version so now you have to buy the basic version for all the rooms.) Eek. You can still buy the pared down version called "Sunset Kitchen Designer" that comes with the Sunset Kitchen book for $15 or so, but that's only if you also want the book (I did). That's the one we used, and it's more limited but worked fine for playing around with design. (I even printed it out to use for our permits and my city was fine with it.) We have Sketchup too, but it does have a steep learning curve. I use it for work and still didn't have the patience to do the kitchen design with it, but if you do, it's a beautiful outcome. Far more control over the details. Last but not least, if you have the Adobe suite, my very favorite program for layout was Illustrator. The Sunset program was valuable because it did 3-D perspectives and fly-throughs, but nothing beats Illustrator for pure and simple layout. I think that's what I used for plans I posted here, more than anything else.

I've never imported things into Home Designer, but I have hacked a few looks from it's inherent objects. So, here is what I see when I look at that photo: On top we have one long cabinet, no hardware on the doors or panels. On either side we have a soffit. In the center is a mantel. First get a cabinet type with crown molding, some do, some don't and it's based on the type of plan you start with. If you start with the wrong plan, no problem start a new plan with one that has molding, create an upper cabinet copy and paste it into your existing plan. Make that cabinet the overall width of the piece, the height is the height of the block. On either side create soffits that go from the counter to the bottom of the cabinet. In front of this create a mantel, size it down and move it into place. It will either be very shallow or overlap into the cabinets and soffits. Make them all the same color and whamo, an ornate hood. If you have any problems, post back here and I can try and help you out.

People curse it, but I choose to plug stuff into the IKEA planner. The NKBA has a similar free planner that I think has a kitchen version. I've only used it for bathrooms a few times. when I was planning my own house I loved using graph paper, automatic pencil, a good eraser and a straight edge. My husband thinks sketch up is fun (I DON'T) so I'd draw things up on graph paper and he'd plug it all in to sketchup for me.