Cooking Up Cool

1/ Black & Light

You might not expect a data engineer to design—brilliantly—her own kitchen, but that’s exactly what Emily Hagedorn did for her newly built home in Vail. “I basically spent all of my free time on this project for a year and a half—I taught myself SketchUp, learned about interior design, all of it,” she says. Emily’s husband, Brad, who owns real estate development firm ArcWest Properties, worked alongside architects at TAB Associates to execute her vision. And that vision was…black. “It was sort of an agonizing decision—kitchens are so expensive, you don’t want to make a mistake,” Emily says. But the dark hue was calling to her. “A white-on-white kitchen