A winner of the National Kitchen & Bath Associations annual local design competition shares ideas that gave an old house new life.
What do you do when you want to sell your house but just cant get a decent offer for it? For an Elmhurst couple, the answer was to pull theirs off the market and have it rebuilt so that it suited their growing family and became a dream home all over again.
Completing this task is what Gladys Schanstra of Drury Design was hired to do. A two - floor addition and a savvy new floor plan gave the family a contemporary kitchen with an adjoining family room and a long - desired master suite for Mom and Dad.
"My clients had to be willing to take some leaps of faith to go for a transitional - modern look inside, even though their house has a Colonial - style exterior," says Schanstra, who used clean lines and dark tones paired with whites to freshen up both the kitchen and the master bathroom without letting anything skew too modern.
The primary goals for the dated kitchen were to modernize it and to allow space for a central island large enough to seat four. What could be done, however, about a load - bearing column, newly exposed, in the expanded room?
"The architect had drawn matching columns on either side of the island," says Schanstra. "One was the load - bearing column; the other was for \isual balance. As the space evolved, I thought it would be better to get rid of the decorative one to keep the room more open." Schanstra used the column that needed to be there to subtly separate the food - prep portion of the island from the part thaf s a high - top table, surrounded by four chairs. At the same end of the kitchen, a cabinet containing a message center is set back slightly from the rest of the built - ins - a recess that creates room for the wider girth of the island on that side.