The Modern Monochromatic Main Floor

TRANSCRIPT

Let’s talk about how we have designed and transformed this home!

So we’re going to look at the main floor, the main living areas of this front floor. We can see that we’ve got lots of arched windows to play with here. And we do have this really large living room. So going into the colour story of the home, these clients loved white, black, and grey, and that was it. They didn’t want any colour. They didn’t want anything about white, black, and grey. So we needed to make it still feel warm, because white, black, and grey are all very cold colours. So we really wanted to make sure that this space still felt very warm, very cozy, very inviting. Let me see if we achieved it here.

In the living room, we decided to actually flip the TV from this short wall here over to the larger wall over on this side. And to actually divide this space from the entry with the sectional instead. So this is what that kind of looked like here, building in some great built-ins. We need to angle off the side so that it wouldn’t interfere with the windows here and adding in some really nice paneling in behind it. Super excited the construction on this one. I’m hoping it’s going to start in a few months and we’re going to really start to see this play together. So I’m very excited to show you that when that happens, but it’s going to be quite awhile because this is a really big project.

You can see we brought in a great big sectional here to help to divide the space. And really the scale of the items in the room were off. This sectional was actually a pretty good size for the space, but we needed a much larger rug, a much larger coffee table, a much larger area for the TV. Everything just needed to get bigger to help fill the volume of the space and make it feel more cohesive.

Here’s another view of that living room. So you can see this partition wall, which led out into the entry. The floors will be changing throughout the entire main floor to a bit of a warmer wood. And then we dropped in a chandelier in the middle of this room just to help to fill the volume of this space. Because when we have a vaulted ceiling, we want to really fill not just the floor space, but we need to fill the volume of the space with something. So we’re dropping in a light fixture using large pieces of art. That can be a really great way to make a space feel a lot more expensive and a lot more elevated for not a lot of money.

I think the chandelier in this space was around $500. I don’t think it was a whole lot more than that. And the art prints we found on Juniper Print Shop, which is one of my favourites. You can get prints on there that are oversized for like $150, and then have them framed for just a couple of hundred dollars and it can make such a big impact in the space. Here’s kind of the other view and we can really start to see some changes on the other side. So let’s pop into that.

Actually, before we do, let’s look at the entryway here. So again, the new flooring is going to go all the way throughout. And we knew that they actually have a mudroom right around the corner here, so they didn’t need this front entry closet. We were going to close this up and we’re going to put the doors on the other side. So it becomes a pantry off of the kitchen area instead of being a front entry closet, because they’re using it for food anyway. So it made a lot of sense to do that.

And we needed to change out the chandelier. We’ve got the fun boob chandelier. So we need to get rid of all of the boob fixtures in our homes. I don’t know why builders loved using the boob fixture so much, but they just don’t work. We added a little console here, some artwork, some great lamps, some little ottoman so that when guests come over, they still have a place to take off their shoes and things like that. Right now the clients have a little table over here set up for hand sanitizer or things like that. So this is just a little bit more welcoming. Drop your keys, sanitize your hands, come on in. Have some fun.

I think sanitization of hands is going to be more of a thing moving forward. I don’t know that people are going to stop doing that when the pandemic is over. I think that more and more often, we’re going to be building that into our front entryways. We definitely wanted to have that function. And then just putting a great, big, beautiful mirror here. As you walk into this space, added that gorgeous reflection, help to

shine back into the living area and also gives you a place just to check your hair as you’re going out the door. 

So let’s take a look here at what used to be the dining room, but is now going to turn into the kitchen. So the kitchen right now was pretty small and we couldn’t extend the footprint of the kitchen any other way. The house was originally planned to be built in this way with the kitchen on this side of the space. Downstairs they had discovered while doing that renovation, that it had already been gassed and plumbed to have the kitchen on that side. So we’re hoping when the walls open up, that that is true for the site as well.

You can see by using two tone cabinetry up top here helped to warm up the space a little bit. And by doing a waterfall on the island, it adds that architectural element and helps to just really cast off of all of the painted wood in this space, because we’ve got painted on the ceiling, painted on the cabinetry. There was just a lot of cabinetry. So we needed to break it up a little bit by bringing in some of that stone.

Here’s another view of that. We can fit four really comfy stools at the island. Really excited for that. You can get a sneak peek here of the breakfast nook. Two dishwashers for this family. They cook a lot. And in this little nook here, you can see, let’s go back to the before. There was just nothing in here, it was dead space. So we decided that if we built a little bench outlining this, that would allow us to have a really nice table in here for just a little space for casual dining or for doing homework, or just hanging out in this space or when they have guests, it’s right off the door, out to the pool.

This was the current kitchen. Unfortunately the cabinetry was just not in great shape anymore. Things were starting to warp and bend. It was only maybe seven or eight years old, but it just wasn’t holding up well. And you can see there was just nowhere really to expand it. It was already open. There’s no walls we could take down because the only wall in here was this one, leading into the entry, or this one leading into their bathrooms. So in order to do that, we just flipped the dining room into this space, did floor to ceiling built-ins and a bar along this back wall. So one would be an appliance centre. One will be a pantry. This is the doors for that closet off the entry. So that’s going to become even more pantry storage and then their table is going to fit in there quite nicely.

Hope you guys enjoyed this. I’m really excited to show you the final images, because I know, especially with black and white type of rooms, you don’t get to see all the textures and all the beauty that really pull that together. But this one is going to be just a stunner. Cannot wait to share it with you guys and hope you like it. Hope it gives you some ideas for your place.

Bye for now.