This Modern Family Home Is Filled With Genius Design Details

What we like to consider ourselves is not necessarily home flippers, that's what most people call us, but rather we do the complete home transformation. We will buy the house, completely renovate them, transform them into single-family homes. We often complete the entire project by finishing the landscaping, that way when someone moves into one of our homes they don't really have to do any work. However, we try to design the house in a way that it gives the person who's buying it a little bit of flexibility to add their own personal style to the home. The front was pretty unattractive when I bought the house. It was very flat and boxy. The brick was yellow and not attractive. I went to the extent of not just wanting to paint the but to completely change the brick because I wanted the longevity of having new brick there that you wouldn't have problems with over time and paint peeling etc. I do like white a lot. All my homes are painted white inside and in this case I felt like there was an opportunity to just draw more attention to the house because it's set back from the street rather than make it a dark home. I felt like the white would be really fresh and a little bit mid-century Palm Springs. Even though we have a winter climate here, I kind of challenged that and just decided to just do something that was as fresh as possible. I just wanted the foyer to feel open and welcoming. You have your closet, there's a powder room there. It's also tucked away from the living areas where people are sensitive to that. The dining area and the kitchen and if you have three or four people or everyone's piling to the house at the same time there's no congestion there and people can move quickly through the space as well without a lot of obstruction. The house is almost 65 feet long which is pretty long for most homes. I wanted the house to be fairly open concept so part of the challenge is how do you deal with that length of a home and break up the space so that it becomes divided but visually interesting as well. If you had clients coming in you could bring them in very easily to the front of the house without them having to pass through your home. I also liked the fact that it had a very large window so the working space is nice during the day. You get a lot of natural light in there. It's a great space to work in. Even though it is a home office I made the space flexible so if somebody chooses to have it as a den and they have more books and they want more storage they can set it up as such. When I think about dining rooms I always think about yes on a daily basis there's a family or a couple or somebody eating at the dining room table but what happens when you have your entire family over for Thanksgiving or a big celebration like Christmas so I always try to make the dining room space a generous size so that you can add another table or if you have a big long table it all fits in there and there's some nice flow and it doesn't feel too congested. The kitchen I was sort of confined by the shape of the home. It sort of dictated that I would have a galley kitchen there and that is why I ended up putting in a 16-foot island because I had this narrow space but a fairly long space to work in and so whatever I could not accomplish in terms of pantry and tall cabinets on one side of the wall I had the opportunity to put in more base cabinets into the 16-foot island as well as accommodate seating at the island for people as well. Sometimes some of those challenges force you to do something that is not necessarily your first choice and how you might design something but if you flush out the ideas and get practical about it there's always a solution and I think in this house it turned out pretty well. The living room in this house is the addition on the home and it's quite big it's 19 by 19 feet which is the biggest living room that we have had a chance to create and because it backs on to such an exceptionally large backyard that we landscaped there was a great opportunity to put a lot of glass back there and not compromise the ability to put in built-ins and have a lot of seating and accommodate a lot of people in the room. The nice thing about that room is that yes it's large but it feels like you're sitting almost outside. One of the things that's unique about the living room is the cedar ceiling and I got my inspiration from looking back at pictures of the mid-century period. During that time there were a lot of teak ceilings, teak furniture. Teak is very expensive but I wanted to kind of mimic that idea. I did that with cedar and then it was stained and varnished. What it does is it also helps break up the length of the home. The change from drywall to the wood ceiling is helping create a sense that that room is its own unique space and one nice thing about the ceiling is that it also mimics the fencing that's outside and so when you're sitting in there you kind of feel like the outdoors is inside and you're inside is kind of part of the outdoors. The house is built on a pretty significant inverse grade and when we had to deal with the backyard it was pretty challenging. There was nothing there, there was no division between us and the neighbor, no fence had ever been built. It was a little bit like a jungle. So in considering the whole design for the backyard we chose to create different spaces because we're trying to make the backyard interesting and accommodate possibly the way that different people might want to live back there. There's a beautiful limestone patio so you can just step outside and dine and have quite a few people back there as well. Then we sort of transitioned to a smaller limestone patio that you can sit in and enjoy just being in the garden and then we have two cored concrete areas that are near the back of the yard. You could have more comfortable seating back there, your kids could have their own little zone and what's nice about all those plains back there is that when it snows in the winter you get this beautiful canopy with these different levels and then the green bushes and when you're sitting in the living room and you're overlooking that backyard it's still quite beautiful. The feedback I get on a lot of the homes is that it doesn't feel like I spent all of my money on the main floor and then I just kind of let things get more typical upstairs or they're sort of less designed or maybe the finishes are a little bit less expensive even though people do tend to spend most of their time on the main floor of the home. I wouldn't say that I would allot a certain amount of my budget to one floor or one room. The second floor of the house has three bedrooms, a laundry room and two bathrooms. To go from the third story all the way down to the basement to do your laundry can be a bit of a hike so this house accommodated to be able to have the second floor laundry which is nice. Because it is such a large house we were able to put in fairly generous sized bedrooms but in this case I have staged and prepared the three bedrooms on the second floor to be children's rooms. They are all generous sizes. I have done all the built-in California closets in there so people can just move in. They have shelving, they have hanging space but because the system is fairly modular if that setup does not work for them what I've put in what's great is that the owner can go to California closets and buy their own fittings and fixtures and make changes that are going to accommodate them. The reason for the two bathrooms, I never know how many people are going to live in the home so the second bathroom allows a flexibility to accommodate sort of a different scenario that might exist on that second floor. The large kids bathroom is generous in size. When you get up in the morning you go to the bathroom I think you want it to be light and bright a very positive experience. Also if you have kids and you're bathing them often it's together and you're kneeling down in there and I think about all of those things when I design the bathroom so for me it's not just a bathroom it's a living space and that's what I'm always trying to create is a place that you're really living in not just going about your business. Up on the third floor of the house is the master en suite. I think this is a little bit of a dream for a lot of people to have sort of their own space off of the same floor as their kids so I try to create that space so that it is almost like a little apartment and when you come up onto the landing there's a coffee bar. It has a little bar fridge and then attached to that coffee bar is an extra linen closet as well. The master bathroom is very large. I like to think that people will go in there and it's a little bit of a spa experience for them. The tub is quite large. I was lucky enough to be able to put in a double shower as well so that people have their own place to stand or if they need to shower at the same time because they're on the same schedule in the morning it's possible to do it. I'm always trying to bring in as much natural light as I can into every room including the bathrooms. Whether I put in a really large window or I put in the addition of a skylight like I did in this master bathroom I like the idea that the longer days of the year you can wake up and have as much natural light as possible and also just trying to accommodate as much storage as I can. In this case there's a double vanity. I put a little makeup drawer there so you could sit in the bathroom and put your makeup on and then the glass shower keeps everything open so even though you're in the shower you have the skylight there and the natural light is still coming in and then inside the shower I had a design and custom built shower divider which not only divides the two spaces but it also allows you to put all of your soaps and shampoos and your washcloths and everything that you know we forget people actually have in their bathrooms. The master bedroom I really love it because it's so bright. What's great about the size of the room is that it not only accommodates a king-size bed and a dresser and a sitting area to be able to not have to sit on your bed but you could sit in chairs if you want to get up and have your coffee in the morning the space is large enough to do that. The double wardrobes I did that instead of putting in a walk-in closet and I try to design the closets in a way so that when they move in they're actually really helpful and functional. I tend to pick fairly natural elements that are timeless like to use a lot of marble neutral tones things that feel nice to people I really love tactility I hope that people touch the elements that I put into the home whether it's their feet on the hardwood and how that feels or with the surface of you know tumbled marble and your feet might feel like I'm trying to find that connection between natural materials and people's experience in the home the light the plants the wood you know is that comfortable does it feel nice is it practical is it awkward all those things are important it also has to feel good and it has to be functional