Forget the bathroom with the Jacuzzi tub for two, or a bedroom sumptuous enough to suit a Bourbon king and his mistress.

For couples who cook, the kitchen is the room where romance can first take root.

Designed correctly, with enough room and burners for four elbows and two cooking styles, a good kitchen is where foodophiles can share their passion in a pas de deux between the island, the refrigerator, the pantry and the range.

For more than a quarter-century, the Belvedere Valentine Kitchen Tour has celebrated the love that not only comes out of the kitchen, but goes into it.

Each year a handful of residents with kitchens splendid enough to make a chef weep open their homes to 1,000 "guests." For an afternoon, visitors are allowed to rub the countertops, ogle the range, admire the tiles and maybe daydream about how life would be enhanced with a double-wide dishwasher, marble sinks or an LED TV that rises out of the center island for tuning in to the Food Network.

All of these bells and whistles can be seen on this year's 27th annual tour Tuesday. Five cutting-edge kitchens in Belvedere, Tiburon and Corinthian Island will be featured. Guests catch a shuttle at the San Francisco Yacht Club in Belvedere for a guided tour that will take them to some of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the North Bay. Four of the homes will also offer chef's demonstrations and tastings. The day ends with an optional luncheon at the yacht club.

For many ticket-holders, a trip to the enclaves of Corinthian or Belvedere islands is an exercise in wishful thinking. These neighborhoods, once separate islands and now connected to Tiburon by landfill, are reminiscent of those charming little villages that hug the coast of Italy, with their narrow, winding streets and old buildings that seem to tumble down the cliffs to the sea.

There are only about 50 homes on Corinthian Island and in each remodeling almost everything is custom-made and professionally designed, with budgets as incomprehensibly awesome as the views of San Francisco Bay through the kitchen windows.

One Corinthian Island kitchen featured on the tour is an Old World confection where virtually all vestiges of modern convenience are concealed within cabinets designed and distressed to look like they have been used for generations in a Mediterranean country house.

But Sausalito interior designer Linda Applewhite whipped this up from scratch, virtually gutting a 1920s house and turning it into something that would fit neatly onto Italy's Amalfi Coast, complete with tiled terraces and potted lemon trees outside.

Into the light

Applewhite, familiar as a frequent guest designer on HGTV's "Curb Appeal" and "Sensible Chic," said the home's original 1927 Art Deco styling had been remodeled so many times that there was little worth saving.

"It was ugly," she declared. "It just wasn't cool detailing."

Working in collaboration with architect Hank Bruce and builder Tom Maddox, Applewhite pushed the original kitchen, darkly cloistered on an end of the house facing a hillside, out into the light. Now it has its own views of the bay and San Francisco beyond and opens into a dining room that overlooks the bobbing boats of the yacht club. The old kitchen space has been reconfigured into a library nook complete with suede love seat, leather Bergere chair and concrete fireplace aged with stamped French molds and corbels.

"This little room, as it turns out, is just a great little space, because you can sit here, hear the fountain on the terrace, see the bay, enjoy the fire and talk to the cook," said Applewhite, appropriately wrapped in a chartreuse car coat the color of a brightly polished Granny Smith.

Homeowners on the kitchen tour virtually all remain anonymous, vanishing like ghosts for the day while the public pokes around their private spaces.

"So many of the clients are really well-known people and they don't want anyone to know. It's amazing they're willing to donate their homes," said Gigi Dixon, a spokeswoman for The Belvedere-Hawthorne Nursery Schools, which puts on the tour each year as a fund-raiser.

Applewhite's client is a financier who lives in Boston but visits his $6 million Pacific Coast getaway about every six weeks. The 4,000-square-foot house marches down the western slope of the island, traversing four levels and dropping from one street at the top to a whole other streetfront on the bottom floor.

Coved ceilings

Many details large and small went into making a California home look believably European.

Applewhite and the architect and contractor coved the ceilings, added big crown molding, bought and rewired vintage French light fixtures from Habite in San Francisco and plastered and faux finished the walls in warm Mediterranean colors like terra cotta, apricot and linen.

Incorporated throughout the house, in everything from the tiles to the walls, are fleur de lis designs and Corinthian columns in homage to the island.

"Good design is always repeated," Applewhite said.

She enlisted Bulgarian-born artist Zdravko Terziev, who developed a technique for applying three-dimensional designs to walls that he calls "wall flowering." Inspired by the creative patterns in pastry design, he uses a plaster-filled pastry tube to squeeze out frosty floral designs in a unique bas relief. His delicate designs can be found in both the dining room and a downstairs powder room.

The most striking feature of the kitchen is the cabinetry. Applewhite designed all the pieces with Sweetheart Cabinets of Santa Rosa to look like antiques. All modern kitchen accoutrements are concealed, from the 27-inch-wide Sub-Zero refrigerator and separate freezer, to a recycling bin under the center island to the European-styled Fisher and Paykel dishwasher. There are actually two smaller drawer-style dishwashers set on either side of the farm-style concrete sink made by Sonoma Cast Stone.

"The cabinets are really designed to look like furniture, which they are," said Rand Moeller, owner of Sweetheart Cabinets. "That really seems to be the trend that is going now; people want their kitchen to remind them of a wonderful trip or some nostalgic memory."

Dentil molding

Even the stove has an old-fashioned look that is deceiving. Made by LaCanche of Lyon, France, this $10,000 custom range has a warming oven, two ovens, a grille and five burners to accommodate large meals and two cooks.

The onyx-topped island also is couple-friendly, with its own small prep sink.

Applewhite sees the timeless beauty of European styling holding firm in the public's favor, despite a competing trend toward stark modernism.

"I call it European country," she said, standing before a picture window with views of the fog-shrouded city. "My house has stuff in it from Spain, Italy and France. It's all a mixture. It's elegant but rustic and I don't think it will ever go out of style."