With their great room i used the term loosely because while it is a room that includes a kitchen a living area and a dining area it's not a very large room. what was it like when you first saw it was really rough it was basically a room. with a kitchen on one side and a giant fireplace floating on the other side the fireplace is a box fireplace attached to the wall with no chimney or hearth or anything and it stuck about two feet o
ut of the wall. so you couldn't even put seating in front of it because there wasn't enough room between that and the back of the island. so it was really non-functional in terms of furniture they had a dining table that seated them and their kids and then they had two tiny chairs that looked like children's chairs i believe they came with the house. when they bought it and that's pretty much all that fit in here but their huge dilemma was this is where they spend all their time this is where kids do homework watch tv hang out while they're cooking this is the space but the reality was there wasn't enough seating for everybody and it wasn't meeting their needs. we started with figuring out obviously we're gonna keep the modular kitchen what can we do on the other side of the room to make it work better and the key here was multi-functional spaces.
So we started with personal favorite a banquette obviously the banquette means we can have a bigger table we have more comfortable seating it becomes more of a loungy area and then we also wanted to get a TV in here because this is where the family watches television and knowing that we needed to get good seating in for four people was definitely a challenge. so what we did was use chairs that work at the banquette that are upholstered with arms that can flip around and be part of the family space they sit at the table and they are there most of the time but they also flip around and become part of the desk or part of the living area. really easily and that means that there's still lots of circulation space but everyone can sit together and watch tv and everyone can sit together at the dining table when necessary were definitely on board for a big change.
So we presented this whole scheme of removing the fireplace patching the floor new millwork all along that wall we used a textured vinyl grass cloth on the wall just to define that wall a little bit and balance it with the kitchen opposite final for two reasons number one it's super durable if people are eating and stuff there and they rub their hands on it you can wipe it down, number two grass cloth is beautiful but grass cloth has a lot of seams and can get really busy really quickly that's real glass cloth real grass cloth so the vinyl stuff because you get that textured look but since it. installs seamless it looks a lot more relaxed and clean and you don't have the messiness of the real glass cloth. it's hard to say grass gloves the clients liked a lot of things that seemed more relaxed and beachy and obviously i think that's a great style but. we also want to make sure that it works for the rest of the house that they have so we talked a lot about mixing in some warmer neutral colors. which super into gray so we started with the basis for that and the idea of painting all the cabinetry and then punctuating that warm neutral color. with black to modernize it and make it feel more updated and then also we added the backsplash what about the backswatch is it's stone and each piece is a slightly different color. so it just creates this organic textured feeling of the backsplash and also picks up on the existing white countertop which we didn't want to change for cost reasons so now we have the light neutral cabinetry and then the countertop and then the backsplash incorporates both colors most people that have glass cabinets the issue is always you can't really junk them up inside.
Because it looks like garbage so we put solid doors on the uppers that used to be glass that added a lot of storage for them and we also added the pantry. so the pantry has a built-in microwave which previously a microwave saw on the counter taking up a lot of valuable counter space exactly that's the face i made rico who builds a modular kitchen now with a microwave just sitting on a counter and the new pantry's also taller and also has a broom closet the old pantry did not have a room closet. so that gives us some extra storage by the back door shoes for gardening some sports balls for sports games hear people do those when i first came there was a basket of balls by the back door and a bar fridge. which is also the old lights were again like a really dated glass teardrop you know those ones that look like belong on a track lighting there were those. so we got rid of those and replace them with these which add a nice warmth to the space and the black detailing looks really modern and punctuates the beautiful omni color behind them another area that. we are trying to figure out is on the main floor somewhere to put bills mail quick things like that and sometimes work with a laptop. so previously they had kind of a little set up like that at the island since there wasn't an outlet in the island previously they had a power bar. that was taped to the back of the island. so that they could work with a laptop there so we resolved that problem by putting in an outlet on the island and also creating a little office area so that's somewhere to just dump mail that needs to be addressed before it gets moved out to somewhere else or work quickly with a laptop in the kitchen they were actually using space. a lot before but it was just not pleasant to be in here and now they're using it way more because they have space for all the different activities they want to do and eventually you know we want to carry the aesthetic through the main floor but for now this has become the main hangout area that they really wanted it to be yo