Photograph by Marc Christian, Courtesy of Bob Burmeister
What difference can one updated room make in the overall feel of your home? As these homeowners discovered, it can make your house flow more seamlessly, help you to better cook and entertain, allow you to get a more restful night’s sleep, or encourage you to find inspiration while you’re in the shower. One freshly redone room, as it turns out, can make all the difference in the world.
Strictly Ballroom
“At first they thought they would try to live with this kitchen,” says Corinne Jones (9904 Clayton, Ste. 133, 314-993-5877, corinnejonesinteriors.com) of the empty-nesters who hired her to decorate their new detached town house. “But the more we got working on all the luxurious decorating around it, both the husband and wife said, ‘Let’s attack the kitchen.’ They wanted it to be this gracious, beautiful kind of space where people walk in the door and say, ‘Oh, wow.’”
The existing kitchen, Jones says, felt “dark, dreary, like a big dark cave,” with lots of stained wood. She brightened it up with a light creamy color palette. Its polished feel comes from custom architectural accents—columns around the center island and built-in glass-front cabinetry hand-built by local craftspeople, including Bob Burmeister, of Marc Christian Fine Cabinetry, and Koch Brothers. Although the footprint didn’t change, the room looks far larger thanks to the pale glazed walls, recessed lighting in the ceiling, and hidden appliances.
“The new owners love to cook and entertain,” Jones says. “They wanted a big pretty stove. They didn’t like the placement of the appliances, and they wanted them to be fancier.” After choosing brass and crystal chandeliers, Jones selected hardware to match, including Schaub fixtures in a Monticello brass finish for the knobs and pulls. She also installed a hardwood maple floor, a white porcelain backsplash, and a Rohl faucet and pot filler in Inca brass at the back of the stove. The homeowners also enjoy a wine cabinet and beverage center; a dressed-up cocktail area for entertaining; a Fisher & Paykel 24-inch single dishwasher drawer that can be used to wash glasses while entertaining; and an island topped with cherry wood butcher block to contrast with the light cabinetry and ivory pearl granite countertops.
Now the kitchen is the heart of the house, the perfect complement to the formal dining room on one side and a traditional family room (complete with a fireplace), on the other side. As for fancier, it’s definitely that, too. “The husband calls it ‘the ballroom,’” Jones says with a laugh.
Room With a View
When his client requested a window—in the shower—Jay Eiler of Castle Design (7707 Clayton, 314-727-6622, emilycastle.com) was skeptical. But the homeowners, particularly the husband, are very outdoorsy, and the hinged window is a way to bring the outdoors in. It’s also essentially invisible, because the shower is on an exterior wall.
Although the initial plan for this redo was to both smooth the transition from the bedroom and expand the square footage of the master bath, Eiler ended up keeping basically the same footprint. He made the space feel larger by raising the ceiling and incorporating skylights that flood the room with natural light. (The skylights are motorized and automatically shut when it rains, or the homeowners can manually open and shut them via remote.)
Eiler also reworked the layout to create more space, designing a custom-built two-tiered floating vanity with lots of storage built from salvaged maple from the couple’s second home in the country. The wall behind the vanity is tiled with glass that reaches all the way to the floor and is visible between the two tiers of the vanity. He hung a 72-inch-long electric mirror with LED strips (and a small vanity mirror for the wife), which illuminates the white quartz countertop and crystal sink bowls. “I use a lot of that in hospitality applications,” he says of the lighting treatment, “but it looks really special here.”
The slim Franz Wagner sink fixtures not only look streamlined but also save lots of space. The floor is marble. “It’s a clean, sophisticated look, which is what we wanted to achieve,” Eiler says. “We knew we wanted to use some kind of amazing stone but didn’t want it to be cold—I wanted to keep the tones similar, since they’re happy with the bedroom. So it’s a very warm vein, with taupe-y browns, which created a really organic feel. We ran it all the way up the shower wall.” The walk-in steam shower, which has his-and-hers temperature settings and an option for aromatherapy, replaces a shower/tub combo; it also has a little bench inside made of the same marble. Eiler designed another storage cabinet from salvaged maple stained with a dark finish to float above the Toto Washlet toilet.
As for the window in the shower, Eiler says that once he realized it would be so subtle, he was all on board. “With the window, which I thought was a brilliant idea, I was just concerned about how it was going to look from the exterior of the building,” he says. “In the end, I was really happy with it, and we found some really good-looking salvaged glass to incorporate, too.”
Something New, Something Blue
When interior design firm Hip & Gable (314-308-3096, hipandgableinteriors.com) began working with this homeowner, her house was so new she was not allowed to paint or cover the walls for one year—a condition of the builder. So designers Retta Leritz and Laura Murray worked around the existing neutral paint colors. They wanted to keep to a simple color palette anyway, in order to create a master bedroom that is calming and restful—but the result is anything but bland or uninspired.
“She wanted to have her wedding dress framed. So we started with that and kind of worked outward from there,” says Murray. “We had it custom-framed, with a blue linen background, kind of a pale aqua that hints at the ‘something blue’ for a wedding.” The same aqua was used for the bedside tables and the piping for the leather couch. Other elements were inspired by the gilded frame. The bench underneath the wedding dress is upholstered in Kelly Wearstler fabric, a tobacco color with “squiggles of gold in it,” in a pattern that echoes the custom wool rug. The bedside tables, by Redford House, are topped with a pair of contemporary brass lamps by Arteriors. “We accented everything with brass and gold to work off of the frame, and there is also gold threading in the dress,” Murray explains.
The bed, which sports a white leather headboard, is custom-made and accented with metallic snakeskin-embossed leather. The woven silk draperies, milled in India, are a taupe-gold color, trimmed in russet orange. “We used a lot of repetition in color and a lot of pattern to create interest but still keep it a quiet, comforting room,” Murray says. Because so many of the elements are custom—including the bed linens, made from Kravet fabric—the room took 10 months, start to finish.
The trickiest part, Murray says, was framing the dress “so that it didn’t look like a jersey and still had depth to it. We used a frame that was deep enough and artfully arranged the folding to the background so that it didn’t look flat and lifeless, filled out a bit, but not stuffed. It was a fun project to work on because we hadn’t done that before… The framer said he took a gazillion pictures of it, and hands down it’s the neatest project he’s ever done.”
