Audacious color defines this artist's home: Yahoo Homes' Flickr Focus of the Week

At Yahoo Homes, we love finding inspiration in how people live, across the nation and around the world. Our Flickr Photo of the Day is one way we've showcased that inspiration. And now we've added a goal for 2014: to bring more focus to our Flickr feature.

You're looking at our reboot, which we've dubbed Yahoo Homes' Flickr Focus of the Week. Each week, we're going to select one Flickr user's home, work and/or project to feature on all five weekdays. Loosely, our plan is to start with a broad slideshow on Monday, then take deeper dives into specific aspects of the Flickr user's photos on the successive weekdays.

We'd love your feedback and suggestions as this work in progress evolves. You can email us at yahoohomes@yahoo-inc.com. Or, if your questions are specific to one week's focus, leave questions and suggestions in the blog post or slideshow comments. Yahoo Homes promises to keep a close eye on the comments section -- and sometimes, the person whose home or work we're featuring will also participate in the comments to answer your questions, too.

For future installments, we very much welcome your submissions at http://bit.ly/yahoohomesflickr. Toot your own horn or someone else's! This would be a fantastic opportunity to spread the word about a designer, contractor (before-and-after pictures would be fabulous), home stager, blogger, even perhaps real estate agent (maybe one who specializes in period properties?) -- anyone who does creative home-related work that can be illustrated in photographs. Just go to http://bit.ly/yahoohomesflickr to join Yahoo Homes' Flickr group and share photos; that's where we pull our photos from.

Without further ado, let us introduce you to Rachel Stuart-Haas, a self-described "artist and mama living in Louisiana" -- Shreveport, to be exact.

As we went through her Flickr photostream, we were continually surprised and delighted by her brazen color choices. This is a woman who seems to find it practically tame to paint a living room in celery green or aqua or navy blue. She's also gone for red kitchen countertops, a red dining room (including a red painted ceiling) and even a black kitchen. (On Friday, we'll let you know which of those were too much even for her, and which surprising choice she actually finds "utterly peaceful.")

As you click through the slideshow here, you'll find that the photos are from two different houses. That's because we learned through emailing with her that the photos in her "Home" set were taken before she moved two years ago. She sent along pictures of her current house and of course they were amazing too, so we decided to tour both. (And by the way: Much of the art on her walls is her own. Stuart-Haas sells some of it through Blue Gallery in Kansas City; you can also find her sometimes-risque work on Tumblr. And she maintains a blog too. Busy woman! She even does astrology readings.)

Keep checking Yahoo Homes' Spaces blog daily throughout the workweek as we investigate her home(s) more closely. We've got a lot of fun elements to show you, including her living diary of homes she's visited; what she's learned about red paint and how to avoid the "crime scene" look; cheap and easy DIYs; and much more:

• Tuesday: Amassing a 'slow collection' of art
• Wednesday: Rachel reveals her most unusual trick for a special home (it involves friendly 'theft')
• Thursday: Rachel's cheap (really!) and easy (really!) DIY art projects
• Friday: Her boldest color choices (including one failure)

And remember: If you'd like to be a candidate for an upcoming Flickr Focus of the Week, join our Flickr group at http://bit.ly/yahoohomesflickr or email us at yahoohomes@yahoo-inc.com.