(MONEY Magazine) – The market forces now working for the home buyer are motivating home renovators as well. They too see low borrowing rates, soft prices and builders willing to make concessions. With new-home starts at a nine-year low, restless contractors are shaving prices up to 10%. Homeowners themselves are increasingly choosing to superimpose their dreams. In the most recent Americans and Their Money poll by the Gallup Organization, only 20% of 253 respondents said they plan to trade up to a more expensive home in the next five years -- yet 29% intend to renovate. When they do, baths and kitchens are the rooms most likely to improve. Some 4.5 million kitchens and 5.3 million baths were redone last year, costing $24 billion and $12 billion respectively. And bed/living suites are gaining. ''It's a real hot button,'' says Oregon real estate agent Elizabeth Barrett. Maybe it's yours. If so, check out Sharon Landa's master suite at right. Or adapt the smart ideas in Paul and Mary Ann Murphy's new bath (pages 94 and 95) and Bob and Anne Hyland's kitchen (pages 96 and 97). Whatever your dream, the advice on pages 100 and 101 will help you do it right.

Like many renovators, Paul and Mary Ann Murphy wanted to add more comfort to their 1908 Queen Anne Victorian home in New Orleans, while retaining its historic charm. Paul, 47, an executive with a natural-resources company, and Mary Ann, 48, a travel consultant, worked out a plan that knocked down a wall to combine two small rooms into a 120-foot master bath. ''We wanted to open the upstairs to light,'' Mary Ann explains. The bath needed to be large enough to avoid morning traffic jams -- dictating two doors into the room plus his- and-hers sinks -- yet sufficiently sybaritic to encourage winding down in the evening. As in most successful renovations, the house's vintage defined the design. Mary Ann haunted New Orleans' numerous architectural salvage shops -- a great source for missing parts ranging from handmade keys to structural elements to a slate roof. ''What we did was in large part decided by what I could find,'' she says, ''and my contractor helped pull it all together.'' Example: five turn-of-the-century solid cypress doors ($60 each) determined the impressive floor-to-ceiling storage for laundry machines and linens at one end of the bath. For plumbing, however, the couple wanted everything very up to date. ''The sheer weight of an antique cast-iron tub, filled with water as well as one of us, would have strained our floors,'' Mary Ann says. They chose instead a contemporary acrylic Jacuzzi model ($1,300) with the bright white look of appliances of the period. Brass bath fixtures that came with the house were stripped and relacquered, but the doorknobs ($3.60 each) are Victorian reproductions; they simply couldn't find 18 old ones that matched. The final tab for the sun-drenched bath: four months of disruption and $10,000.

Inspired by the Art Moderne style of the 1924 house, this welcome-home kitchen is the third one renovated by L.A. owners Bob Hyland, general manager at KCBS- TV, and his wife Anne, story coordinator at Inside Edition. They've obviously learned a thing or two. Spacious counters of impervious granite ($85 a square foot) accommodate sous-chefs and kibitzers. Sculptural hanging lamps were nickel-plated to lend a 1920s patina ($227 each; mail order from the Brass Light Gallery, 414-271-8300). And strings of tiny lights in the pantry are usually found on restaurant stair treads.''I'm nearsighted,'' says Anne, ''so I wanted strong light everywhere.'' The organizing principle was, simply, a place for everything: vertical compartments for baking pans, appliances accessible but behind doors. The renovation took four months to plan, eight months to complete and cost a small fortune. ''It was excruciating,'' Anne recalls, ''but it now has everything I love.''

Record producer Mike Chapman, 44, had designed his own kitchen in Beverly Hills but pronounced the room boring. So when he and his wife Suzanne, 24, moved to Easton, Conn., they enlisted architect McKee Patterson of Austin Patterson Associates. Nine months later came the finale: double Viking stoves ($2,800 each), double Thermador ovens ($3,200 for both), and a rich mix of marble, maple and steel surfaces.''Spectacular,'' says Chapman, who has written songs for Rod Stewart and Tina Turner. ''Mike wanted something fun,'' says Patterson, ''where friends and dish towels could just hang out.''