Willow Bend Upstairs Project
Above: A render of the “before” arrangement of the room
Below: A galley of the finished product
The story from beginning to end…
We moved into our house almost 9 years ago, and at the time my wife was pregnant with our second son. We were moving from 1800 sq ft into nearly 3500 sq ft - so we didn’t need to evaluate much to be able to fit into our new house. We simply moved in and focused on the kids.
The upstairs of our new house was a little bit of an odd arrangement. Seemingly intended as a loft apartment or master bedroom, it was essentially one big room with tons of windows on almost every wall. This made for a bright and airy room, but it was a bit of challenge for using the space since due to the lack of wall space. One other oddity was a glass half-wall that ran along the stairwell. We settled on putting a row of IKEA bookshelves in front of the half-wall and creating a defacto wall on that side of the room.
This render makes the space look a little bit better that it did in reality… on its worst day this room looked a little something like this.
Design Process
As we considered how to make better use of the space and fix the cosmetic issues - we went through many iterations. I created a mood board of spaces that inspired me to begin to narrow in on what we were trying to accomplish. During this period, I was lucky enough to visit the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. They have moved a Frank Lloyd Wright house - The Bachman-Wilson house onto the property to preserve it. Being inside was very serene and almost magical - the experience will definitely had an influence on my thinking for this project.
Additionally, there were some constraints that we had to take into consideration. First and foremost was the amount of preexisting wood in the room. The stairwell, windows, doors, door-frames, and cabinets were all made out of a light stained oak wood.
Existing windows in light oak
Prototypes
I am an experienced woodworker and often use Sketchup (a 3d modeling program) to design furniture and test ideas. I began making Sketchup models of possible new arrangements.
Ultimately - we gravitated toward the “long bench” seen in so many mid-century houses as a central design feature that we wanted to incorporate.
We also designed a faux-wall/divider around the idea of using some IKEA cube units as both storage and a way to separate the bed from the “home theater” area.
Construction
The first thing we had to do was to get rid of the carpet. We chose a wide plank, dark grey tinged wood floor.
Along the way I replace the ugly gold ceiling fans and gold lighting surrounds.
Next I began a month’s long process of building all of the custom benches and wall. The bench design I came up with includes a piano hinge across the seat allowing them to be used for storage.
After building the wooden benches and wall, I tackled the ugly gold fireplace surround and bizarre overbuilt mantle.
As I finished out the fireplace and surround with the same wood I used for the bench wall - I was able to then install the rail system and custom shelves I had made.
Next I installed some very slick motorized blinds (more on this later) across the wall of windows.
Then, I moved on to building a custom desk for my wife to use as her home office. She has some special networking and telepresence equipment that needed to be accommodated. I built the top with a removable back and an interior space to hide wires and equipment. It sits on a motorized base we purchased allow her to alter the height of the work surface between sitting and standing.
At this point we took delivery of the custom-matched wooden shutters we had made for the two palladian windows. Once those were installed - I could begin fabricating and installing the custom rail-based shelving we had decided to put along that wall. Given that we almost never opened one of these windows (because of the sun) we decided to sacrifice one of the windows and install shelves in front of it to make better use of the space. This is also the same wall where we put our pull-down home theater screen which comes down in front of the shelves. I built a custom console with sliding doors to house/hide my center channel speaker for the home theater.
Now I used some box rail and sliding hardware normally used for barn doors to build a sliding track to which I could fit a custom matched plywood door. This creates a nearly seamless look with the bench wall when closed.
Along the way I installed Philips Hue bulbs in all of the overhead lights and used a Hue strip under the center channel console. This allows all of the lighting on this floor to be controlled by app for brightness and color as well as by Amazon Alexa.