TEXAS HOUSE TOUR - Inside Amy Havins' Luxurious Dallas Home

Hi Homeworthy, I'm Aimee. Welcome to Arbol Manor. You're watching Homeworthy, where we believe every home has a story. Before today's episode, click the join button below to support all of the storytelling we do on this channel. Our growing community of members help to directly fund more videos so we can capture these extraordinary homes from around the world. So join today to receive early and exclusive access to new Homeworthy videos. Hi you guys, I'm Aimee Havens. I'm a content creator and you're at my house in Dallas, Texas. After an extremely long 18-month renovation, we are now finally in our house and we have been here for eight months. In the summer of 2020, my husband and I drove by this home and we just felt like we needed to live here. We'd never walked through it. There were no photos of it online. There was just something about this house that we were just drawn to. So in the fall of 2020, I actually hand wrote a note to this lady who lived here and I put our family photo in it and I said, there's something about your home. We love it. If you ever want to sell it, we would be interested in looking at it and buying it. Always include a family photo. Whenever we first walked through the house, it was a little scary but I knew the bones were so good. I walked in the home and I saw the dental molding and I was like, this is it. You had me at the dental molding. That's a real story because I just, I thought it was so charming and pretty and it felt like an old English manor and I just had to get my hands on it and start this project. Welcome to the foyer. This, as I've mentioned, this has been a full-scale project and the one thing I've been adamant about the entire time is the floors. I have always wanted a black and white marble checkered floor. The Ralph Lauren store in Highland Park Village, they used to have a black and white checkered floor and I was like, there's going to be a house one day where I can do this on my own. So I did it and this is our foyer and I love this foyer so much because it is such like very casual but also like feels very grand at the same time. If you notice or you will notice throughout the house, all the hallway sconces are the same which I think is like something that makes the house like very cohesive. Also on a large-scale project, it makes it very simple because you have one, we call this the house sconce and so we have one sconce style that is throughout the home. Even the runner that's going up the main staircase, we call this the house sisal. So all the rugs are the same in common areas which again on any size scale project, it makes it like very uncomplicated when you need you know seven of the same runners. It just makes it easy which we like things that are easy and not complicated. My favorite thing from the foyer is this portrait. We call him Uncle George. This man, we have no idea who he is but it was in my grandmother's home since my mom was a little girl and my grandmother moved into an apartment like a year ago and she asked everyone in the family like who wants Uncle George and I was like I will not waste a phone a friend except for this and this is like the one thing that I like grabbed from her like forever home that I thought like I was like I know the perfect place for him so he kind of he's just like our guy. He's kind of creepy but I kind of like it. He's like the house like we do have florals regularly. Sometimes they look a little hodgepodge because I do them myself. I did not do this myself which is why it looks beautiful. When deciding what we wanted in this space in the foyer, I'm not sure if you can tell but it's like a bit rounded. It gets wider right here. I feel like the natural thing to do with your foyer is put a bench. You're like oh I need a built-in bench like a mudroom kind of thing and I'm like well my kids can learn to like put their things up when we come in the door. So I found this at our designer's store down the street Process Home. I just thought like a marble pedestal felt like grand but you can also do so much with it because I don't know we could eventually maybe get like a pretty sculpture. We can stack books or we can do florals like there's so much you can do with a pedestal which low-key I guess I'm a pedestal person now. I had no idea that they were such a thing. This chair I actually have six of them so I've got one here. We've got one in the office and we've got four in another room that you'll see eventually. You guys Etsy is amazing. You can find the most beautiful treasures on Etsy. I had no idea until we started this house project but I'm searching like vintage or antique King Louis French chairs. Sure enough there's a dealer on Etsy straight from France that has the perfect chair. Shipping did take a bit of a minute but I mean whatever it's worth it. Look at this beautiful antique. I'm an antiquer now. I think the house made me an antiquer. So when you first come in the house this is the first thing that you actually see which it's very simple. It's actually a place where my husband and I put our car keys because it's easy to like grab the keys and run out the door. Also this is like my favorite thing. We have this little like again Etsy antique bucket and we put house slippers in it. So you know there's a lot of people in and out of the house and if someone wants to like feel like more casual they can grab a pair of house slippers and just feel comfortable in our house which is always the goal. We want everyone to feel comfortable. Okay you probably heard me mention Arbol Manor which is the name of our house. My husband and I love to name and brand all of our houses. So you'll see in a little bit the backyard but it's beautiful and there are so many trees, arbols. So our favorite restaurant in Cabo is at Las Ventanas and it's called Arbol and we love to like make a play on words with a favorite place that my husband and I enjoy and then something that makes sense in Dallas. So we also have these little, which will make sense, this little umbrella holder. I'll show you the Arbol branding. So we've got the little Arbol logo that our graphic designer made for us. Kind of like little like spots throughout the house. We've got them on matchbooks, we put them on robes, we put them on guest towels, we put them on styrofoam roadie cups, we put them on linens. Literally everything. It's silly but it's kind of fun to do because it's another way my husband and I get to be creative together. I would say the short version of my career path was in 2011 I started a wardrobe consulting company and I would go into people's homes and I would clean out their closets and I would organize things for them. I would go shopping and the guys who built my original website they suggested that I add a tab to my website called a blog and this was when blogging was kind of new and not my vibe at all. I actually laughed at them and I was like oh yeah right like I'm going to post photos of myself on the internet like how embarrassing. One day I'm going to be driving through the carpool line and you know be mortified that there's all these photos out there. Well fast forward to 2024 and the jokes on me because there are a lot of photos of me that are silly and hopefully inspiring but on the internet and so the wardrobe consulting business turned into a full-time blog and that's what I do now. I create content and I share bits and pieces of my life along the way. I share my family, my home, occasionally like what's for dinner if I cook which is rare and just all different aspects of my life. Oh and I actually do share clothing that's like the main thing but somehow everyone else along the way has been showcased as well. This is our formal living room. My husband and I use this room actually quite a bit whenever guests first arrive we normally just kind of like hang out in here. It's just another place to like have great conversation. I love this room because this is the first room that I fell in love with in the house because you can see the dental molding which is original to the home and also this fireplace. So the home was originally built in 2004 but they kept the fireplace from the house that was previously here and so I kept it as it came. It just has a sealant on it. It's the natural wood that was already here and I just felt like it like starts it's like the first thing you see in the house and I feel like it's how the house started so I wanted to keep it here. One really cool thing that my husband and I did with this house is we added trim throughout. So yes the dental molding was here but the trim that is on the ceiling and like on all the walls we added. We felt like it added like another layer which I think is like what makes this house so special. Another like really fun thing that I think people are not sure about or they don't really know how to do is create like a mirror. So there's a mirrors are a dime a dozen online. You can find them anywhere but also they're so hard to find like if you need that perfect mirror. So we worked with a glass company and we actually got to draw out this mirror and it's now the first thing you see about the fireplace when you walk in the house. I even ordered these little again Etsy these little medallion pieces just to add like a little extra detail which I think makes it like kind of special. It's like art projects but as an adult so it's really fun. As I've mentioned probably a hundred times so far is we love to keep a home cohesive. I feel like it just brings everything together and it makes the home make sense. Kind of like when you're in a hotel like you don't know why it feels so good but then you realize if you really think about it everything goes together and flows. So when picking these sconces for the formal living room we wanted like a little bit of sparkle because this room overlooks or talks to the dining room and the dining room. I actually picked these sconces before I found the dining room light fixture but in my head I knew that I wanted like a big crystally like sparkly dining room fixture. The house called for it. Okay one of my favorite things in this room is this book. This book was a gift from my grandmother for Christmas maybe like four years ago. It's Annie Leibovitz's Toshin book and what's so cool about it is it truly is a piece of art and so it's so special they recommend that you wear gloves to turn the pages so you don't get the oils of your hands on the pages. But we we love this book so much because like I said it is art. There's a lot of naked people in this one. Oh I love this one. This is a good one. No this is very clean. So yeah you can change the pages or flip the pages to kind of change the way the space feels. We often keep it on the Ralph Lauren page because he's a vibe. Again as I said the house is called Arbol Manor after like our favorite restaurant at Las Ventanas. You guys we got this piece from Las Ventanas they from a Mexican artisan and we thought it was really cool. So we've always kind of liked to collect like pieces from places that my husband and I like because again it kind of makes the house feel like us. It's quirky but it also just works. I think that that's like a fun thing with your home in general is when decorating your home like it doesn't matter like if you like it put it in your house. In terms of decorating the house that was actually such an afterthought. It was first off how are we going to renovate this house. We touched every single surface in the home. New windows, new doors, new floors, new walls, new sheetrock, new molding, new trim, every single thing. New lighting. We even built a structure in the front with a garage and a apartment above it. It was a very large project and I think looking back on it had I known what a large scale this would be I would not have done it but I have no regrets and I'm so happy that we're finally in the home. Now I'm going to take you guys into the office. The wood in this space is all original. It's actually the only thing we did not touch in this house. It just felt like so warm and cozy and I knew that we could fill it with so many fun treasures from places and things that we like. Also we filled it with a lot of treasures from half-price books because who has this many books just like lying around. So everything is intentional but it's become somewhat of a One thing that I do want to point out is the photographs behind me. What's so cool about these is my husband and I made them. When our little boy was about to be born we really wanted some car art for his room. I feel like they're a dime a dozen online and they don't feel very personable so we hired a photographer to take photos of one of the Porsches that we have and so I don't know if my husband's in he's not in these but there's some that like you can see his arm or you can see a watch and then we just had them matted and framed and now it's art in our house and it's it's very us and we love that. Whenever I moved into this house I went on like a very big Etsy kick and so this was more Etsy stuff. I was like who? I mean I need an old phone. My kids pick this up and they're like what is this? So we're also educating at our house. My husband uses this space the most. I occasionally come in here and I'll like take a phone call if one of our kids is in trouble. One of us will sit at the desk and they get to sit here and we have a chat. It's just a very good meeting place and I love how you can see the front and then when you are sitting at the desk you just have like a very lovely view. We always love to keep fresh orchids. Yes these are real. She's a planter. So we try to keep these alive which is always kind of a struggle but they look really good today so I'm happy about that. This is a library table and the lady who lived here before us we actually bought it from her. She was an antique collector hence why the house had like the best bones. So before we closed on the house we got to walk through the home and put little tabs on if she would let us buy some things from her. So there's like still a little bit of her in the house which is cool because she started all of this and she had the original vision and I feel like I just like got to come in and like finish it for her. So we're in Texas and so we love Texas Artist. This piece is by John Fleming. It's one of my favorites. We have a lot of his pieces throughout the home which he's a friend and so it also is like fun to have your friends work hanging in your home. One funny thing that my husband has done throughout this home is he has cigar boxes everywhere. They're little humidors and so when people come over he always offers them a cigar. I am such a fan of websites like Cherish or First Dibs so I actually found this chair on Cherish and it was the same colorway but the cushion was not my style. So we picked out this fabric and had the chair recovered and now it looks very much like a chair that belongs in this house and it feels like us. Another thing that I did was do the little matchback pillows to tie the office chair and the office seating chairs together. Now I'm going to take you guys to the dining room. Welcome to our dining room. We actually use this space all the time. One of my biggest things with a dining room if you're not using the spaces in your home then either change the space or change what the room is supposed to be used for to accommodate your lifestyle and your family. I know I'm probably going to say this about every room in our house but this is actually one of my favorite spaces because of the chandelier which this chandelier I call it my best treasure hunt find ever. I was out of town and aimlessly scrolling through Instagram and I saw this chandelier in the back of a photo from a local consignment store so I immediately zoomed in I called the store and I'm like hi what is that like dingy light fixture in the back and they're like oh no one wants it here's the price and I bargained with them. This is the best deal of my entire life. I had it redone rewired polished shined up and now it just sits in our house and it's one of the first things you see when you walk in the home and I am obsessed with it. One thing I love about this dining room are the built-in cabinets. These are original we just had to have the new door fronts and new hardware and new glass but the actual cabinet did exist. We added the mirror in the back to reflect light and make it feel like a little bit more moody and dressy so we like to put all of our glassware and just different little things that we've gotten along the way. This is actually my favorite side this is where I keep like a lot of my china. These little tea cups are all from my grandmother again when she moved like a year and a half ago she had all of these little tea cups and so I thought that they would be perfect in our home. I have a lot of different china and place settings that I just think are like very pretty. Just it's always fun to set a table. I mean for valentine's this year we set the dining room table my kids helped me and our family just the four of us had dinner in the dining room. We actually ordered pizza and ate off of china in here and my kids thought it was the most fun night they've ever had. So again I encourage you to use all of your spaces because don't always save your china for a fancy dinner like eat pizza off of them. I often get asked what color are the walls in the dining room this is actually like a very subtle grass cloth which I think it looks really cool it adds like a layer of texture. Another thing I did not mention were the drapes. We have again I've mentioned that we have a house sconce a house sisal these are the house drapes. I actually used the same fabric for window panels in every single room in the house except for the office. My kids rooms all the guest rooms all the living spaces have the same fabric which in my opinion makes decorating a home so much easier. You pick one and then you get them all done for every space. Welcome to our kitchen which is such a lovely space in my opinion. We completely redid this as I mentioned we redid pretty much everything in the house. The kitchen island used to actually have a cooktop on it the refrigerator was over here this was a where the fridge currently is was a china cabinet with this space I really wanted to see like wood and so I feel like in our previous homes we had white kitchens and I love a white kitchen but I wanted to really mix it up and just feel like this house had been here for a very long time. So the whole kitchen started with obviously the cabinetry and me committing to committing to the wood cabinetry and then we picked all these slabs it was one of the first slabs that I saw at the marble slab yard I think that's what they're called the slab yard and so I just thought it was like very it just was loud but also like refined at the same time which I think made it really cool. I also decided on this countertop edge just to give like a little bit more detail in the kitchen which I feel like a lot of kitchens you're just play it safe and I kind of wanted to get like a little crazy with the marble edge. When it comes to cooking entertaining all the things I am very good at ordering in. I often get asked like are you worried about your marble like getting damaged like with cooking and parties and kitchens I do not care. I actually call it party marble because I think that marble in general tells a story with all the veining but with every you know ring mark or stain or anything it's just kind of like oh well it's okay like you have to live in your house. I would rather have marble and live than I just don't want to worry about it and I don't worry about it. Also we did a honed marble which I think does help cover up a lot of like the stains if you are worried about that. So with this kitchen I knew that I also I'd already committed to doing the wood grain or the white oak wood but I also wanted a lot of like gold and brass. I just think it's very timeless. I saw this stove at the showroom. It's Bertazzoni. It's Italian. It's beautiful. It also works very well and I just think it elevates the kitchen and also ties in with the brass on the stove with all the different with all the brass hardware. I think it looks really pretty. Something that is very original to the house is the fireplace. This is actually a double-sided fireplace so our main family room is on the other side so it still feels like you're connected to like if someone's in there watching a movie or the kids are like reading but you're also like in the kitchen and I just I love a fireplace in a kitchen. It makes it feel like a really old house. Welcome to our breakfast nook. This is where we have almost every single meal. What makes this space so special is this table. So again this is another exquisite piece done by Process Home and we use it all the time. Whenever we first like found this house, this was a space. This was actually a doorway that went to the outside and that just didn't like work for us. There's a lot of doors in this house and if you have little kids like you really don't want that many doors. It's like more places for them to escape. So we decided to swap the door, change it to a window and just build in this like grand built-in banquette and so we can fit so many people around this table. It's fun for game nights. It's fun for casual dinners. Last Thanksgiving we actually ate in here. We set the table and had friends and family over. Had it catered and it was truly the most perfect first Thanksgiving in this house because I didn't have to cook and we had the football game on and it just felt like very casual and very fun. From the breakfast nook we'll go into the main family room which we actually opened up this wall to make the main family room feel more, have a better flow with the kitchen and the breakfast nook. So this is where we watch movies, football games, all the things and where I feel like one of our most used spaces in the house. I'm going to say that about every space because we really do use all the spaces. This is the other side to the double-sided fireplace. This fireplace is actually original which I think it's really cool. I wanted to keep a lot of the original things that the previous owner had done because I feel like her taste was just so cool. Something we did add to this room on the first floor we added all the trim on the ceilings, we added the sconces and we added everything to the room or to the house but I just feel like those things make the room feel more warm and I feel like sconce lighting is probably the most underrated thing you can do for your home. It just makes everything feel like very cozy and really lovely especially at night with like a soft light. See how we wanted in this space we wanted a big sectional where we can cram like a bunch of family and kids and everything or everyone on this like couch and so we are here all the time. Okay I'm going to show you guys this piece. I think it's so cool. We do have a playroom on the third floor but my kids don't always want to go up two flights of stairs so we have some toys and games and some of their favorite things stored away in here. So again kids do live here but you'll never be able to tell because of all the like organization that I've gotten to do throughout the house. So these built-ins, this built-in reading nook and then these built-in shelves are original to the house. We had everything you know painted and refinished which another thing I didn't mention we do have a house paint. So the only color paint that we use in the home is white dove and so it just makes it very uncomplicated. My kids often like sit here and they cozy up and read a book. My daughter hides her treasures in these little drawers. So yeah it's just like a fun fun little corners in our house and I love like all the family photos. You know we do live here and it's it just makes it look very cozy and my kids always like to see pictures of when they were little or fun family things that we've done together. So one thing about my husband and I is we love a project and we love doing projects together. This is actually our fourth home renovation. This is the largest scale project we've ever done. We've renovated a few homes in Dallas. I built a home long distance in another state and then this was kind of like the grand finale which I say it's the grand finale but you never know. But truly I'm already implanting in my kids minds that they will get married here. So hopefully this really will be our forever home. But the way I got started sharing the house was I've always shared my life online or I guess for the last 13 years which is a big chunk of my life and this house just organically became something very easy to share. It's really silly when you think about it but you know people want to know like what goes into renovating a home and for me it's second nature at this point but it's people are curious. Also people are nosy. People want to know like what you're doing and what changes you're making or what selections you're making but it it just became something that was very natural for me to share and so I did it. I've shared majority of it the highs and the lows of this project. Everything from you know finding like a beautiful light fixture at a consignment store or install days or when wallpaper goes up to I call those the highs of the project and then the lows of the project would be you know the company the landscape architects putting the pool in the wrong place and the pool had to be demoed and moved and it's just been quite quite a journey. So I've showed you guys the main family room. I'm going to show you the fun adult room aka the green room so come with me. Welcome to the green room aka our bar at home. Like I've mentioned we love to name a space and so my husband named this space the green room for very obvious reasons. The green room started with us kind of wanting our own like at home bar or gathering place so I found this wallpaper at a showroom and I loved like the horses and all the colors and I loved the green. I also had said that when we started this home project that I wanted to find a place to incorporate green marble and so the green room kind of like came about because of that. I was like I really want to just like go for it because this room or this house really is like very cohesive. This is kind of like me being wild I guess like having a green room. So we have a lot of like parties or we'll come here with friends and just hang out. My husband and I often just sit in here and like have a conversation or just like hang out if you will. It's just it's truly like our biggest like hangout place and everyone kind of knows like oh we're going to go to the green room. It's kind of where you start the night or where you end the night which makes it a very fun space. My husband also collects tequila so he has a lot of different options. If I knew anything about tequila I would like guide you through but I just know that the bottles are really pretty and they really enhance my green room vibe. So yeah this is where we often just kind of like hang and we'll sometimes have a bartender come in and just make margaritas for everyone because it's they always taste better when someone else makes it. We also have you know some wine storage. One thing that is like really cool about this space is this is actually a dishwasher. So I kind of put them in like throughout the house like dishwasher drawers, refrigerator drawers, we've got freezers. It just kind of makes things like disappear but also like you can really exist like on this side of the house without having to run over to the kitchen. Okay so I introduced you guys to Uncle George the art piece in the foyer. I want to introduce you guys to Jose. This is a piece my husband and I bought I believe in 2011 when we had just gotten married. It was 75 dollars at a local consignment store and the piece was called No Way Jose and somehow Jose has always ended up he was in the dining room at our old house at another house he was in a formal living room. He just kind of like always makes his way to like a very special place in our house and so whenever the bar started coming about my husband obviously is a big big fan of tequila. He loves trying different tequilas. Jose just like he just vibed in this space. So Jose really is the the green room mascot if you will. So yeah we we love Jose and we love the art. I want to show you guys these little styros. I think they're so cute. It's the green room. It's a little play on the Beverly Hills Hotel font. We love doing that. One more thing I want to show you. Like I said the house is called Arbol Manor and so for like cocktail hours and all the things we had these pretty glasses sketched with the house logo and the name. It's kind of fun. Okay as I mentioned we have the house logo kind of everywhere but like kind of hidden at the same time. These are kind of fun I added to around the house. They're on bedside tables, in bathrooms, in the bar, in all the rooms around the house. These are little Arbol Manor matchboxes. So when my husband decides to like have his friends over and again another cigar box they've got matches for them to light all the cigars. We should play a game. Can you spot the cigar boxes because they're everywhere in my house. One of my favorite restaurants is the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel which when we came up with the name the green room which is why we did the Beverly Hills Hotel font on the cups. So we also kind of wanted to make this room feel like a polo lounge but in our house. So we to make it feel very loungy we did a built-in banquette. We've done the bistro tables. We did the sconces that kind of felt like very masculine and that gave this like Ralph Lauren like aesthetic. One other thing that we did that's pretty cool in my opinion is we wallpapered the ceiling. We wanted something that was like very reflective but also made the ceiling just feel like lower and made the whole house just very cozy. One thing that I think is like kind of fun is this little champagne bucket which again this is filed under an Etsy treasure find which we love a treasure hunt. I think if you gave me an item to find online I could I could find anything. We added these little seats for extra seating just we can they're on casters so we can roll them around we can move them into another space that's right off of this room. This room just really like it flows with the house and it also like really just works. One thing that's like kind of cool that you can do in your home is you know we have the can lighting surrounds we had them painted to match the wallpaper. Another thing that we did is all of the speakers they don't really look like speakers they were painted over to kind of like blend with the ceiling. Basically the sound system is really good in this room but you don't even know that there's speakers in here which I think is really cool. Now I'm going to take you guys upstairs to see some of the bedrooms in our house. So excited! Welcome to the entryway to Wade and I's bedroom. I wanted to point out something that is one of my favorite pieces of art in the house. It's the these two pieces that are in the entryway to our bedroom. These actually are from our honeymoon. We got married almost 13 years ago and 13 years ago when we were on our honeymoon we were sat next to an Argentinian artist at dinner. We were in Monaco for our honeymoon and we were at Hotel de Paris and we were next to his name was Horatio Cordero and he's now deceased but his works of art are shown all over the world. They're in the Met, they're in South America. He's just so talented and so this was a napkin from Hotel de Paris when we were actually having cocktails with him. You know again it's like when you join tables in Europe everyone's just like friends over there and he took a sharpie out of his bag and sketched this piece on the linen napkins from the bar at Hotel de Paris and it says just married like viva los novios has the date when we were there and then says Monaco and then this is one of the cooler things. This was another night we actually like befriended them and they invited us because you know we're the two little kids we were 24 when we got married and so they invited us to dinner. This was the night before Prince Albert got married in Monaco and so Giorgio Armani was there doing the princess-to-be her wedding dress and so somehow we ended up at dinner with the same artist Horatio Cordero and we were with Giorgio Armani and this whole like fun group of people and all these pieces were made and so I just put in my bag because they gifted them to us just said you know congratulations on getting married so we've always like kept them in like very special places in our home and it's again it's art that you can do with whomever you live with or wherever you live you can just make it yourself like art doesn't have to be this like intimidating thing it can be something as simple as a special linen napkin that you frame beautifully and you end up putting in your home. Welcome to Wade and I's bedroom. Whenever we were envisioning this space we knew that there was so much natural light we kind of refer to it as almost a tree house because the views are amazing. We can see the water from our bedroom which I think is really unique especially in the heart of Dallas. I wanted our bedroom to just feel like very crisp clean cozy but also like you're in a hotel because I feel like at the end of the day you really want to just like unwind and just put your head on a pillow where you just feel like very relaxed and our bedroom just makes us feel like very like at ease and relaxed which is why I love it. So what's kind of fun about this bedroom is I'm going to show you guys a piece in the corner it's another piece from the original homeowner. She had this in a downstairs bedroom and I just thought it was so so pretty. I store it or I use it to store old calendars but I just think it's like very nice to have collected pieces throughout your home. This is one of my favorite little nooks in our bedroom. This is a place where my husband and I will drink morning coffee, admire the water, watch a little tv. It's just like very calm in here which I think is something that is very important when you're creating your bedroom and your your personal space. This is another really cool light fixture. This one is actually from a local antique store. I think what's so special about this house is how intentional everything is and I think that by adding an antique it just makes it feel like very lived in and very cozy. I feel like with this house in particular it just felt like it needed to be very collected and cohesive which in our previous homes I've always been very big on like making the home cohesive but there's something about this house that I just wanted it to feel like very warm and kind of like a store I guess. I know that's kind of a weird way to describe your home but someone once told me you should always walk into someone's home and never know if children or dogs live there and I don't know if that's like a good thing to say or a bad thing to say but it really resonated with me and so I've found myself when creating this space or a home in general to find a place for everything. So we truly have used every inch of this home. You could open any cabinet, any drawer and I've organized it. Everything has a place but in regards to decorating the home I just wanted it to feel like very moody and like a vibe like where you come in here and normally we have like music playing throughout the home and it just you kind of feel like you're in a hotel and maybe some people don't like that but we like that and so that's kind of all that matters. Welcome to Wade and I's bathroom. This bathroom is so good in my opinion. I think something that makes it like very unique is that we decided to do the wood floors in the bathroom. Something that's like often asked is does your wood floor like is it does water get on it? Is that weird having wood floors in your bathroom? We're adults and so we know not to like throw bath water out of the bathtub so wood floors are great in a bathroom if you're just looking to like make it like a little bit more warm. With this space we kept the bones of how it originally was. We just completely started from scratch-ish I guess. I picked out this marble. I thought it was like very pretty. It just felt like very much like a bathroom marble if you will. I mean actually I'd put this marble anywhere but I loved it so much. I wanted to see it all the time so I put it in our bathroom. We did it on the countertops. We did it in the shower and then also surrounding the bathtub. I wanted to do it like or put the marble like up the walls and around the bathtub. Another question I often get asked about bathtub, a freestanding versus a built-in. I've had both. I love both but with this house I really wanted a built-in tub because there's nothing nicer than sitting in the bath and being able to put like all your products along the side or even your phone because if you have a freestanding tub I feel like all my stuff would just fall off the side or into the tub which defeats the purpose. Something that's really pretty about this bathroom is this antique light fixture. As I've mentioned we wanted to just like incorporate like a lot of unique things into the space. One thing that is one of my favorite things I guess with our shower, we put speakers in the shower which it's so fun to like get dressed and like you're you turn up the music turn on your favorite songs and just listen to music like while you're shaving your which is a luxury to say the least. So yeah this is our bathroom. Wade and I both have our own vanities. This is my side. I have the little space where I can sit on this happy little stool and do my makeup, get dressed. We just we love this space and it flows like very well for us and our kids when they're in here. Welcome to my daughter's room. This is my daughter or our daughter Vivian's room. She's three and a half and it's truly like such a like a happy girly space but also childish but also like young adult at the same time. I feel like she's really going to be able to grow into this space. So this whole room started with the wallpaper. I feel like when I was little I had floral wallpaper and I wanted to do something similar for Vivian and so we picked this like very girly kind of like not too pink not too blue just kind of very like subtle wallpaper and then we did a matchback fabric for her bed frame which I think is very charming and pretty. As you'll see when you see our little boy's room he has a chair in his room so for my daughter I wanted to mix it up and do a really cute little couch. She often reads here. She takes naps. She does all the things on this and I feel like maybe when she gets older if she needed a desk in her room this would be a really nice place for a desk but for now like a nice loveseat where we can like read stories at night works very well. I want to point out one of my favorite things about Vivian's room is her bathroom. It is so girly and the most fun thing. Like I mentioned for the green room I wanted a green marble. For my daughter's room I wanted a pink marble because what is more girly than pink marble? So we kind of went with this like peachy pink Beverly Hills Hotel marble and I think it's so fun and we did a pretty color to match back to the to the marbles. Cute little like just little little brass knobs. I did brass in her bathroom just to make it like a little bit different throughout the rest of the house besides the kitchen. We have just polished nickel but I think it's just so cute and one thing that I have admired for years even when my son was born were these little bow sconces. I think they're just the cutest thing ever and so I knew immediately that I wanted to do those bow sconces when we figured we were going to redo this bathroom and move into the house. This bathroom actually used to belong to another guest room that is next door. Originally in this house my son's room and my daughter's room were connected via a large bathroom and they were Jack and Jill but having a boy and a girl I wanted Vivian to have her own space and so we knocked out this wall. We added the double doors and we made her own bathroom for her. Vivian loves this bathroom so much. She has cute little drawers filled with like all of her bows. She has her pretend makeup which she does her morning glam every morning. By glam I mean she puts her pretend lipstick and pretend blush on before she goes to school. Pretty cute. What do I love most about my home? You guys I love everything about it. Everything. There's not a room that I don't care for. Actually there's one thing I don't like about it. We've got a tiny closet in the back that I'm about to like redo in wallpaper like that's how like crazy this house is but I just love how everything is like so pretty. I think it's a beautiful house. I love that it's on the water which there's a pond in the back which is pretty cool. It's very like whimsical for our kids. Our kids can run around and they can play but they can't hurt anything and so I think that that's something that's really cool about this home is it it looks beautiful it is beautiful but it's also like very functional for a family to live in it and we do use every single room. Welcome to Ralph's room. When we started designing this space with Lonnie I knew I wanted Ralph to have a similar color palette as his sister Vivian. We've kind of kept with like the sky blues and the light blues but I also wanted it to feel like he's really going to also grow into this space and so we decided to do this upholstered bed for him in this like lovely sky blue fabric the windowpane sky blue and one of my favorite things that Process Home did were these bedside tables. I feel like he is going to have them forever or if he doesn't have them forever I will have them forever because they are so refined so classic also masculine. They're lovely for a six-year-old's bedroom in my opinion. One thing that we did keep from the original owner of the house was the paneling in the wall. We redid we refinished the paneling but I thought it was so cool to do something different or keep something different than my daughter has wallpaper my son has this like really beautiful wood paneling. Something that I've mentioned throughout this home tour is art and I mentioned it down in the office the Porsche photos that we had done whenever before Ralph was born and this was another one. This is actually my husband's arm and again we had a photographer do this and this was in his original nursery and so I just think it's a really cool way to make something your own and make it feel like very personal. So now Ralph has a really cool picture of his dad in one of his dad's favorite cars in his room which I think is like very it's really special. Something that's really fun is Ralph's fixture. This is actually his original fixture from his nursery when he was born in 2017. It's actually moved with us to three different houses. I just I think I get really attached to fixtures. I mean I still have a piece of a light fixture from when I was a little girl so maybe that's a whole another thing that I need to dive into but this is an antique. It was actually originally brass and we had it sprayed like or paint matched to the original like sky blue color that was in his nursery which is something that I didn't even know you could do until you know probably six years ago but you can take all these like really cool light fixtures and if the color's off or if you want it to be an actual color or the finish is off you can change it to anything. So this was a shiny brass and now it's a lovely sky powder blue. I just think it's really cool that you can you can literally paint anything or change anything with just like a little bit of time and effort. It you know it's very makes it unique. So this is the bathroom that I was talking about. It originally was a Jack and Jill and it was a shared bathroom which connected my daughter's room and my son's room and so we walled it off. We ended up doing like a really cool mirror so it doesn't look like it was a breeze through but this is his bathroom. I would take this bathroom. It has so much storage has the double sink. Something that I think is really cool is that it has a bathtub and it has a separate shower so it really was built to function for like multiple children but now Ralph just gets to enjoy it so that's pretty fun. He has so many little like storage spaces that were here. I just you know put my own spin on it if you will. The wood paneling was originally like a wood and so I had it all refinished and painted to white dove which is the house paint. When we saw this house for the first time we walked up to the third floor and it was nothing. It was an attic. There were no walls. There were no there was nothing and so we knew that this was an opportunity to build out like an amazing amazing space for our family. So of course my husband said the number one thing that he wanted in the house was a golf simulator room and so that's what we did. This is our golf simulator room which surprisingly is one of our most used spaces. I think that I've said that about every space in the house but this truly is used so much. This is also like such a a brain of Lonnie Grover. He designed and made this space truly functional for our family. We wanted the golf simulator space to look very non-commercial and like an extended arm of the home and so that's what this space is. What's so cool about it is instead of doing like the traditional black tarps that they normally put in these we padded and did fabric on all the walls which makes it feel like very cool and elevated. Something that I learned with this house is the size of stairwells matters and I think that probably a lot of people deal with this. I've never had to deal with this because I've always lived in a home but with this house going up to the third floor the stairwell was a bit tight. So this couch or these two oversized chairs were actually originally a couch and Lonnie has brought to my attention that you can cut anything and so they cut the couch in half to like allow them to be taken up the stairwells. So now we have two oversized we call them chair and a halves which is also the perfect spot to sit down and relax and watch whomever is hitting on the golf simulator. This is probably going to be the cheesiest answer to the question what makes a house a home but I would say the people that are in it because that's the biggest thing that we've tried to implement with our children is things don't matter stuff doesn't matter it's just the people that you're with and so for us what makes a house a home is the voices and the people and the the parties and the the gathering spaces and you know sparking joy to others I guess I don't know. A place where everyone feels comfortable makes us happy. 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