Lindy Design Build

There is a temptation in small bathrooms to use as many tile lines as the budget allows. A bold floor, a different shower floor, a feature wall, a coordinated accent somewhere. The pieces look fine in isolation. Pulled together in a room that fits two people, they might start to read as competing.
This bathroom uses one tile collection. The Bedrosians Sahara line, specified in three formats and colorways: a dark twelve-by-twenty-four on the bathroom floor, a dark crosshatch on the shower floor for grip, ecru on the shower walls, and a taupe one-by-twelve running up the vanity wall. The room has texture and depth without any one tile fighting another for attention.

In small spaces, restraint at the spec stage is usually what separates a bathroom that feels considered from one that feels a little too busy. Working inside a single collection and letting the format, scale, and colorway carry the variation does more for a room this size than any single statement piece could.

All tile is the Sahara collection by Bedrosians Tile & Stone

The shower in this primary suite measured thirty inches by thirty inches, and you could not turn around in it. That was the obvious problem.

The less obvious problem was the bedroom right next door, which had more square footage than it actually needed. Primary bedrooms in homes built between roughly 1995 and 2015 tend to share this issue. The bedroom became oversized at the expense of the bathroom, based on the theory that people wanted bigger sleeping quarters. What people actually want, once they live with it for a few years, is a bathroom they can move around in.

We took some of that bedroom and gave it to the bath. The new shower has a teak bench, heated floors, a recessed niche, and a Mr. Steam system.

The trade was a bedroom that is now slightly smaller and exactly right, and a bathroom that has become the favorite room in the house. We have never had a client regret making that trade.

Steam shower system by Mr. Steam, heated flooring by WarmlyYours Radiant, shower fixtures by Delta Faucet, and tile by Bedrosians Tile & Stone.

We have lost count of how many beautiful renovations we have walked through where the staircase is still pure builder grade, untouched since the framing went up.
The reason most people give for not changing theirs is that the original works fine, which it does. The problem is that it also does nothing else, and within a week of moving in, you stop seeing it. The pieces of a house you stop noticing are the pieces that have given up on you.

This one we replaced with a custom steel and wood railing made by a local metalworker, with a dark finish that picks up the same notes running through the kitchen hardware and the light fixtures. The pale wall behind it lets the railing read almost like sculpture from the living room.

The clients liked the railing immediately. What they noticed a few months in was that the upstairs and downstairs finally felt like one unified house.

Photography by .

Open-plan floors have a quiet problem nobody warns first-time clients about. The rooms stop having opinions of their own.
It happens gradually. The flooring runs through the whole main level, which makes sense. The wall color carries across in the same way, and the furniture comes in as a coordinated set. Every one of those choices is defensible, and by the time the work is finished, the rooms are all having the same conversation in the same voice. The family ends up gravitating to one corner without quite knowing why.

The double-sided fireplace at the center of this house gave us a way to push the other direction. The living room side has no television and is wrapped in reclaimed wood planks, set up for the slower part of the evening. The family room side has the TV and the movie nights, finished in a travertine ledger stone that ties back to the kitchen. Two rooms feeding off the same fire, designed to feel related rather than identical.

Photography by . Travertine ledger stone by , fireplace tile by , cabinetry by , and hardware by .

Dining rooms have an attendance problem.

A surprising number of the dining rooms we see in pre-renovation homes are barely used. The clients describe them with a slight apology, as if they should be using the space more and cannot quite figure out why they are not.

The answer is usually that the room is in the wrong place functionally, even when it looks architecturally fine. It got built somewhere the family does not naturally flow to. People do not walk into a separate room to eat dinner on a Tuesday. They eat near where the food is, and a dining room placed off to the side of that path gets reserved for holidays whether it was meant to be or not.

In this house we ran the kitchen through the butler’s pantry and let the dining room sit at the end of that path instead of beside it.

Photography by .

A year into living in a finished house, the mudroom is usually the room that clients tell us mattered most.
The reason is not complicated. There is one door the family actually uses, and whatever ends up next to it sets the temperature for the rest of the house. If there is no real place for backpacks and shoes and coats and dog leashes and the things people meant to bring upstairs, every other room starts holding the overflow. The living room becomes part-time storage, the kitchen counter becomes a mail collection point, and the chaos shows up in rooms that have nothing to do with the mudroom at all.

We gave this family a small one with closed cabinetry, a real bench, and more hooks than they thought they needed. It is doing more for the house than any single design move in the rest of the project.

Photography by . Cabinetry by .

There is a pattern that shows up in almost every project we work on. The room a client describes most often after the renovation is finished is rarely the room they came in asking for.
In this house it is the butler’s pantry, which started as a circulation fix between the kitchen and the dining room. We needed to connect those two rooms differently, and the easiest path happened to have enough width to be its own space. So we made it one.

The kegerator was the clients’ idea, with tap handles made specifically for the family. The butcher block counter and open shelving warm the room up, and the herringbone backsplash gives it just enough of its own personality without breaking from the kitchen it grew out of. They pour a beer in there at the end of the day now, and friends linger in there before dinner.

Photography by . Cabinetry by , hardware by , shelf brackets by , and backsplash tile by . Sink by , faucet by , wall sconces by , and the kegerator by . Barn doors by Artisan Hardware.

Our Coal Creek clients did not ask us for a beautiful kitchen. They asked us for the kitchen the family would actually use. There is a difference, and it changes nearly every decision that follows.

Beautiful kitchens get designed around photographs and perhaps current trends. Used kitchens get designed around mornings, rituals, and every day needs. Where does the coffee live before anyone else is up? Where does the flour land when baking takes over? Where do people stand when they are not cooking but want to be in the room anyway? That is the brief we worked from here.

Photography by . Cabinetry by , quartz countertops by , backsplash tile by , and hardware by . Pendant lighting by , appliances through and , and range hood by . Sink and faucet sourced through , featuring a Whitehaus fireclay farmhouse sink and a faucet.

Behind the cabinet doors in the laundry room, you’ll find the steam unit for the bathroom on the other side of the wall. Two rooms, one piece of equipment, and not a single inch of vanity storage given up to make the math work.

The walk-in closet next door rounds out everything the new main level needed. Coats and towels and all the keepsakes that used to live in boxes upstairs are within reach now, the laundry has earned every square foot of wallpaper we threw at it, and the closet finally has room to breathe.

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Cabinetry · Walnut benchtop by Manor House from · Appliances · Wallpaper · Steam

There was a moment in design where the vanity sconces almost didn’t make it. We loved the clean silhouette of these alabaster fixtures, and we loved the dimensional 3D tile we’d chosen for the wall behind them, but the two were never going to share that wall comfortably without a little help. The texture of the tile was simply too much company for the lines of the sconce.

The fix was to fabricate a backplate from the same solid surface we’d used on the countertop, which let us lift the sconce just slightly off the wall and gave the tile a clean edge to resolve into. It took our GC, our electrician, our tiler, and the fabricator all agreeing on the same vision before any of it could happen, and they did. We think the result is worth every conversation it took to get there!

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Cabinetry in quarter sawn white oak · Wall tile , Strata in Roble · Backsplash , Nabi Harlequin · Faucet , Litze in Luxe Gold · Sconces , Caesar · Counter , Pental Catera · Hardware , Archie in Aged Brass · Sink and mirror