Sunroom Before

The Transitional Lakeside Hangout
This will forever be one of my favourite spaces and couples. The clients came to us after having a previous experience with an interior designer that wasn’t so great. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only time that we’ve come into a relationship with someone who was extremely hesitant due to poor experiences with other Interior Designers.
To be honest, they don’t teach us how to run a business in design school. We learn all about construction elements, interior architecture, drafting, and 3D modelling but you may be surprised to learn that there is absolutely no training around budgeting for a project, project management, or running a business with the client experience at the forefront. This is why it is SO important to understand what your design team brings to the table in terms of other experiences.
Needless to say, it was a very successful project. The clients were SO thrilled that they hired us to do another room in their home and referred us to their mom (always my favourite type of referrals!)
Sunroom After





Living Room Before

Living Room After

Living Room Before

Living Room After

Fireplace & Mantle Before

Fireplace & Mantle After




TRANSCRIPT:
Do you want to see how we transitioned this space into a gorgeous transitional lakeside retreat?
Now, depending on when we see this post or when this post goes up, you might have already seen the reveal pictures for it over on our social media channels, but I think it’s really cool to see how the renderings and the design plan have come to life. So let me share this with you. I’m really excited because it is a huge transformation.
Now, talking about the colour story, because this home is on the lake, we really wanted to bring in a lot of different tones of blue. So going into the navy’s, a little bit of light blues, pulling in a little bit of those wood tones. The floor was going to be changing in this room and then some off whites, and then just really repeating those throughout the space. Some sand colours worked their way into this space as well.
So here it is before. You can see we have these arches that we were going to deal with here, and also some built in cabinetry that the clients had had done. So with looking really nice with the cabinetry and things like that, I just think that we could do even a little bit better on this wall. So let’s take a look.
This is the design plan. Really, really excited. By just lightening up the walls a little bit, it gives us this ability to pop off the blue, painting out the cabinets in a blue, bringing that up into the archways and adding in a couple of shelves and then doing a wallpaper here around the TV and fireplace really helped to add just a lot more depth and texture and things like that into the room.
A lot of people will be really afraid of doing a colour on their cabinets, but just look at how much more drama this brings into the space and how it balances off really nicely, and it just makes those cabinets a star and a focal point in the room instead of your eye being drawn to this big black box of a TV, right? Now your eye is drawn more so to the architectural elements of the home instead.
Rounding out the furniture plan here, so this wall was really short, everything else was pretty open. This seemed like the best layout of the room. We did add a second chair in here to what they had before and added a bench in front of the windows that they gained a lot more seating. Before they had a sofa and a chair and then a couple of little stools that would be pretty uncomfortable to sit on, but instead now we have room for about eight people in here comfortably.
So this view right here as we can see, we brought in some gorgeous drapery. They already had some fairly nice drapery in here, but we wanted to bring in a little bit more of that blue. The clients were brave. They trusted me, they went with that blue. So fun, I’m really excited that they did because you can see how now repeating that blue three times in this space.
Had we just done say blue curtains as a pop of colour (you guys know I hate that phrase “pop of colour”), because it just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t look good when we have only the colour in one space. We need to balance it throughout the room to balance out that colour, so that one part of the room does not feel heavy. Had we just had blue here and everything else was the creamy or the white or the beige, it would’ve looked really, really unbalanced and really flat, and they probably wouldn’t have liked the drapes. But now coming in there, they’re already so excited because their cabinets are painted blue, they have the blue drapes in. They’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is looking really good”, and they’re very excited to see it and so am I.
So another view of the fireplace here, I’m going to skip it just for time and just giving you a secondary view here of the space. So really excited. And then on the other side, we have this sunroom area and this room they never sat in ever. And I can see why, it’s a little bit uncomfortable, right? With this teeny tiny little love seat and a couple of outdoor chairs that weren’t the comfiest, most cozy parts of the space, but they had this great cased opening, these beautiful windows, this beautiful door and a lake view right outside of this door, right? So we wanted to take advantage of that. It was going to be amazing.
So as you can see, we brought in, again, some draperies to really make those windows the focal point in that space. The clients were super thrilled once they were up! So as we went in here, instead of having this smaller seating that isn’t as cushy, I wanted to draw people in here.
They never use this sunroom, so I wanted to make it the most comfortable area of the house to ensure that people are more likely to come in here and to actually hang out. And so we moved their plant over to here and then brought in this nice big cozy sectional. Pushed together two coffee tables so that we could get a large enough coffee table in this space. Great big rug in here and a little cabinet off to the side, which we’ll probably see better in a different view. So right over here, we did a little cabinet off to the side with a little mirror here, lamps, things like that.
Really excited to see this come together. Here’s another great view of that wall here. Just so that now we have this L-shape, so these guys here can be connected into the living room. These guys over here can enjoy the view out of this door. And I’m very, very excited to share it with you.
Hope you guys enjoy this transformation, hope that it’s given you some ideas for your space. Check out the before and afters below!