After spending a much needed break in the Delaware River Valley, I think I actually learned a few things about what's essential for a country home. Having lived in both San Francisco and New York over the past 12 years, I've unfortunately not spent too much time outside of an urban environment. Here are our must-haves for practical, yet glamorous country living:

Kitchens and bathrooms are by far the most important rooms in the house when it comes to remodeling, selling and buying. Interest in these highly specialized and technical areas of the home gobbles up a huge portion of HGTV and DIY Web sites, and is a specialty among designers like me.

Put simply, an induction-cooker element ("burner") is a powerful, high-frequency electromagnet, with the electromagnetism generated by sophisticated electronics in the "element" under the unit's ceramic surface. When a good-sized piece of magnetic material such as a stainless steel skillet is placed in the magnetic field that the element is generating, the field transfers ("induces") energy into that metal.