Design Reveal: Updating a Bungalow with a Small Floorplan

Hey everyone! I wanted to share with you another behind the scenes sneak peek at a design that we’re working on for a client.

So here in front of us is the before. It’s another challenging layout with a small room but there’s a little bit of awkwardness inside of this space. One thing you maybe can’t see from the before photos is the way that this wall juts out. There’s an old chimney stack here right beside this TV that kind of juts out like this, and made this room really, really challenging.

The other challenge is the piano itself. Upright pianos typically should be on an inside wall. When they’re being put on an outside wall, they become out of tune more frequently (the strings tend to tighten up). So we had this piano that the client wanted to keep, but we wanted to try to get it on an inside wall, but there were no inside walls because we have the chimney stack on the one side and that wall wasn’t big enough because that chimney stack was really blocking the way and there was nowhere else that we could put this piano inside of the house, so we needed to work it into the room.

We have a little dining table over here, and this client does like to entertain her family and her friends, and this house had some great character.

We had this cove ceiling molding right up here.

The floors were going to get replaced, so that was on the client’s list for this particular project.

She had these great windows, and the windows themselves, you can’t see because the shades were drawn, but the windows are actually wood windows. That means that we have the ability to paint them and really do whatever we want to with them.

She’s also looking to really get rid of all of this big bulky furniture and start fresh with some new furniture in the space.

On the other side of the room here you can see, so this is where that problematic chimneys stack is. So again, got this teeny tiny wall here, this teeny tiny wall here, and the mirror of this would be on the other side of this chimney stack here. Not really any interior walls, because we couldn’t put the piano here. This is actually the entry and the front door, you can see that down in this picture, that this is actually the front door right here and there’s a bit of a partition.

Again, another client who has a dog and the little puppy needs a crate inside of the home.

We obviously need to work on the TV and really bring some more light into this space.

So let me show you what we did with this design. I’m super excited about this one. It turned out really, really great!

This is what we ended up doing…

We ended up rotating the sofa along this back wall. If you can remember, the piano used to be about here, right? And so we rotated to create a really beautiful focal point when you first walk in the room.

We used a natural Jute Sisal rug here, kept the floors really light inside of this space and painted out the inner of the window frames in a black.

We replaced the curtains with roller shades instead, so gave it a little bit more of a clean look, but also, that was because we didn’t have the wall space.

Usually, if we’d be hanging curtains, the curtains would need to hang over this way, and so we didn’t really have the space to do that if we wanted to place the sofa here and we didn’t really have the wall space to do it on this side either, because we want to be able to fit an end table in there. So instead of going with curtains, we went with nice clean roller shades instead, and layering out, keeping the main upholstery pieces a little bit more neutral, but keeping in with the character of the home.

This home has these beautiful moldings, beautiful windows, and we wanted to keep with the character of the home by bringing in some wood pieces, and that was also intentional because we did have the wood piano. When we have a tone in this space, we really want to be able to repeat it throughout the space. We repeated the tone of the piano in the coffee table and also in the side table to help the piano not stick out so much like a sore thumb.

Now, you might be wondering how is this piano sitting over here? That’s where that weird little chimney wall is. So let me show you our solution that we came up for with that, and you can see here what we ended up doing is placing these angled shelves on either side. You can see it really well down here in the layout. We placed these angled shelves on either side of the chimney wall to bump it out and really fill in that space so that we could put the piano up against that wall. It was a really clever solution. The reason we did the angle, so it was nice and narrow up at the top was so that we still kept our sight lines clear, but this allowed us to shift the piano over onto this wall that was really too small to hold the TV or to do anything else with.

This is where we plan to have the dog crate, and obviously we’re not going to put him in a closed crate like that, but building something cute around the dog crate. This was just more for design purposes and to really show her where that would go, and hanging the TV on this little partition wall instead really gave that wall some purpose and allowed us to tuck the TV away but still make it very easy to view when you’re sitting on the sofa that is across from it right here. The sight line to the TV is still really easy to see. The TV used to live, the TV used to live on an angle right in here and the sofa was here before, so we still kept that same kind of angle view and the client is comfortable with that.

You can see up against the entry, we have this big long wall. We really wanted to make something pretty there, so we did a paneling in this gorgeous, grayed out blue colour, added a bench and a mirror and some lighting just to give it really that entryway feel and give it a little bit more function. Now you have a place to kick off your shoes. I recognized when I came into this space that I was holding onto the wall, taking off my shoes. There was no good place to just sit down and take off the shoes and really function with that or to drop a bag or anything like that.

Then around the corner, we went into a round table, this time bringing that same blue from the wall here into the chairs on the other side of the space, updating the lighting into a more modern fixture and really allowing, all throughout this space what I loved is that really my signature style is mixing the old within new.

We have the antique photo, the antique art right here, and the old piano, and some of the more traditional styles in the bench, but we mixed it in with a really modern sofa and really modern chairs that are nice and colourful, really modern plant stands and Sisal rug. That really helps to bring us some warmth that helped the look feel updated and helped the look feel really, really fresh.

So, I hope you guys are enjoying seeing some of these before and afters, seeing some of the behind the scenes of what we do. If you are, definitely let me know so that I can keep doing them for you and we will see you in the next one.

Bye for now.