deer clover way
Our client loved her home and her neighborhood, and she wasn't ready to leave either one behind. A change in her health had made stairs harder to navigate, and with the only full bathroom on the second floor, she was left with very few options if she couldn't make it upstairs. We wanted her to be able to stay where she belonged, so we set out to build her a main level that could meet her where she was. The answer turned out to be hiding in plain sight, in the third bay of her three-car garage. Once we converted that square footage into livable space, the entire floor plan opened up and the home she loved was able to keep loving her back.
the main level bathroom
This bathroom carries a lot of weight. It's the room that allowed our client to keep living on the main level of her home, and we wanted it to feel like a place she'd want to spend time, not just a room she had to use. A quarter sawn white oak vanity grounds the space with warmth, and the hand-cast 3D wall tile behind it picks up the light differently as the day moves through. The brass on the faucet, the hardware, the sconce frames, and the mirror is all meant to look like it has lived a few years already, because everything in this room was supposed to feel earned rather than installed.
The shower is where most of the accessibility work is happening, and most of it is hiding on purpose. The floor flows in from the rest of the bathroom without a curb or a transition strip, with a linear drain tucked into the wall so the water disappears under the reveal of the tile. A 36 inch ledge wall runs along one side of the shower to give our client a steady surface to lean on, and it sits at exactly the right height to push up from when she's seated on the bench. A recessed niche on the opposite side offers a 30 inch alternative for a different angle. Aged brass grab bars at the toilet and the shower handle the support work without ever calling attention to themselves, and the steam unit lives in the adjoining closet so the shower itself never has to play host to mechanicals.
The vanity sconces deserve their own moment of credit. The clean silhouette of the alabaster fixtures and the dimensional 3D tile behind them needed a mediator, so we fabricated a backplate from the countertop material that lifted the sconce off the wall and gave the tile a clean edge to resolve into. It took the GC, the electrician, the tiler, and the solid surface fabricator all agreeing on the move before any of it could happen. They did, and we think it shows.
THE mudroom + laundry
The bathroom went warm and quiet, so when we got to the mudroom we let it head somewhere else entirely. A deep moody blue carries the cabinetry and the board and batten paneling, and above the panel line the walls dissolve into Rebel Walls' Vintage Foliage in Dark Blue, which turns the upper half of the room into a forest you walk into every time you come home. Walnut wraps the ceiling overhead, picked up again in the butcher block benchtop where the day's mail and bags and coats land first. Underfoot, a patterned blue tile from The Tile Shop takes whatever Colorado weather drags in without making a fuss about it.
The laundry tucks neatly into the same room, with a generous walnut counter spanning the washer and dryer for folding and a tall storage cabinet that hides more than it lets on. The steam unit for the bathroom on the other side of the wall actually lives in this cabinet, which let us keep the bathroom's vanity storage entirely intact. Two rooms, one piece of equipment, and not a single inch of usable space sacrificed to make the math work.
the walk-in closet
Bringing a full closet onto the main level was one of those quiet additions that ends up making the biggest day-to-day difference. Coats, towels, the boots that come out for snowy mornings, and the keepsakes that used to live in boxes upstairs all have a place to land within easy reach now. We kept the cabinetry painted out clean and bright to balance the deeper tones in the rest of the new footprint, and built the storage system to flex around different kinds of belongings rather than forcing everything into the same shape. A small stool tucks underneath the lower shelf for help reaching the upper rod, and there's room to sit while pulling on boots on the way out the door.
