The Home of Your Dreams: A Personal and Intimate Space

As an interior designer, I've had the privilege of working on countless projects, but none as personal as my own home. The house, which we refer to as our family room, is a mid-century modern masterpiece that combines functionality with elegance. This space was designed specifically for my child's nursery, and I must say, it's truly one of my proudest creations.

The moment you step into the family room, you're struck by the incredible Hardware on the doors. Those Starbursts from the 1960s add a touch of nostalgia to the space, making it feel like a time capsule from a bygone era. The ceiling is adorned with a unique mixed material design that blends seamlessly into the rest of the space. It's clear that I was determined to incorporate mid-century modern elements throughout the room, and it pays off in spades.

One of my favorite features of this room is the seating arrangement. The three low modular seating pieces create a cozy nook on either side of the room, perfect for snuggling up with a good book or watching TV with family. I must admit, I was thrilled to be able to add these seats without sacrificing too much floor space, given the steel windows and doors that dominate the façade.

The steel windows and doors were a major challenge to incorporate into the design, but I saw an opportunity to create a unique and striking feature in the home. The frame TV is cleverly placed against one wall, allowing for maximum viewing area while also showcasing my favorite piece of art when it's not being used. It's this kind of attention to detail that makes this space feel truly special.

Moving into the kitchen, which I'll admit was not originally designed with this level of flair in mind, we've managed to create a space that feels more like a Treehouse than a traditional cooking area. The skylight and steel windows bring in an abundance of natural light, making it feel airy and open. The seamless cabinet fronts are minimalist in design, adding to the overall sense of calm and serenity.

As I often find myself juggling multiple projects at once, including those for my clients, it's easy to get caught up in trying to create a perfect space that will be admired by all. But when it comes to my own home, I'm not afraid to take risks and try new things. The breakfast nook, with its mid-century furniture and lighting, is the most used spot in the kitchen – aside from, of course, where the high chair currently resides.

Designing a space that feels truly personal can be a delicate balance between functionality and aesthetics. As an interior designer, I've learned to trust my instincts and let my passion shine through. It's not always easy, but it's worth it in the end. And as I look around this beautiful family room, filled with touches that are uniquely mine, I'm reminded of why I fell in love with design in the first place – it's a space where I can express myself and create something truly special.

When I think about interior architecture, there's one aspect that I tend to get particularly fixated on: staying true to the overall vibe of the house. It's easy to get caught up in trendy designs or the latest styles, but as a designer who's been fortunate enough to work on countless projects, I've learned that it's essential to honor the core essence of the space. This is where my own personal style comes into play – and I'm not afraid to take risks and push boundaries.

For me, design is about creating spaces that feel alive, that tell a story, or simply make you feel good. It's about finding that perfect balance between form and function, and leaving no stone unturned in pursuit of perfection. And when it comes to my own home, I'm not just designing for others – I'm designing for myself and my family. The result is a space that feels truly one-of-a-kind, a true reflection of who we are as a family.

As I step back and take in the beauty of this family room, surrounded by mid-century modern touches and personal flourishes, I'm filled with pride and gratitude. It's clear that this space has been shaped by countless hours of love, laughter, and hard work – and it's exactly what I needed to create a sense of home and belonging.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI don't think there's anything at an estate sale that I wouldn't buy recently I bought a toilet seat at an estate sale and I think that speaks to my limitations in terms of what I'm willing to recover secondhand I think everything you know with a good cleaning and a new context has potential including toilet seats hi I'm Megan and this is my handmade home in Austin Texas so when we first bought this home it was definitely a blank slate basically everything that someone does when they renovate a house to quickly sell it so it had new carpet that was fairly cheap and freshly put in it had gone through a series of very kind of light Renovations I would say so the house was a originally built in the' 70s we were kind of starting with something where you had to squint to see the base of the the home and and really see those 70s bones that could be brought to life if you start kind of backtracking some of those Renovations and put some Boulder spin on things my favorite DIY project that I've done so far has really been one that had the biggest impact on the space and that was a DIY frame wall where I was trying to solve for you know in our guest bedroom I wanted to do something like molding that added a little bit more texture to the space but I didn't really want to install permanent molding cuz I wasn't sure that that was the look and feel I wanted for forever in that room and having to take it back down again would definitely be a little bit of a a time and cost suck it was the first room that I really designed end to end with a clear vision in mind I wanted to bring in those kind of Texas Tiki jungle elements that we have throughout the rest of the house but bring them up a little bit more prominently so it really like a vacation space for people who came to stay with us and then I really knew that I wanted to display one piece of art in this room and anchor everything on that really anchoring the color palette and playing up a specific piece of art that I had commissioned by a local Austin artist Whitney AA she's amazing she does mixed media art on top of photographs so we selected the photograph together and then she brought in different fun kind of design elements into this to make it really pop having a home that's authentically from the 70s it's really more more about getting back to what was originally there versus having to think about how I can preserve it I think what we've lost over the years of Renovations is folks kind of layering on top of those original' 70s elements and now what I'm doing is trying to figure out not just how to get back down to the 70s bones but also how to highlight and illuminate those features in the home my office space was the first space that I renovated in our house just because I was spending so much time in it uh working from home so before it was you know four White Walls we had carpet in here that we had ripped out and it was just painted concrete at that point so there really wasn't much character of the space I had done with it what I could just to to get by you know using it as an office space but it really didn't have any elements of myself in it yet which was really important to me as this being uniquely my office in a very personal space versus the rest of the house being integrated you know with both my husband and I living in those spaces this is really kind of my home base for both my work life as well as mid-century Millennial every single room in our house really just felt like a blank slate and this one in particular being that I'd spend so much time here I really wanted it to feel inspiring and more creative one of our favorite Parts about living in Austin and somewhere form is being able to have a little bit more of an outside life as well as an inside life so when we saw that there was a large screened in porch area that was also covered we knew that we wanted to make that actually really feel part of our living space and more integrated than something that feels like a uniquely outdoor space so when I designed that Tiki Bar space it was really meant to feel like an extra living room or an extra entertaining area you know we're not huge drinkers but we do like to entertain folks folks and have somewhat of a bar Vibe without that being in our main living space because it's not something we would use every day so right now we are in an extension of the outdoor living space I've always really wanted a pool but knew that I needed to do it on sort of a DIY budget so we got a stock tank pool which is the Texas version up and above ground pool so once I had that it was probably at least a couple weeks after I was surfing Facebook Marketplace which I do a lot and came across one of probably my wackiest Facebook Marketplace purchases which was this 12T avocado um I have no clue how it was marketed towards me but I found it 50 bucks we ended up strapping it onto a rental truck and getting it back here and ever since it's been one of my favorite features of this outdoor space uh it's definitely a conversation piece and a really fun lawn ornament that I would have never found otherwise so when folks visit our home the first thing that they typically say when they walk into our space is that I've changed a lot of things about the space and that's that speaks a lot to what my design style really is and that's iterative it's always evolving it's you know finding something that I love out in estate sale integrating it in and then either you know going further down that path or um you know taking the room in a slightly different direction when you first walk into our house you're in this very open floor plan living room dining room area we really wanted this living room area to feel sort of like a mid-century 60s sunken living room Vibe very loungy and comfortable for watching TV and just really have it be a relaxing space so our living room and our dining room do share a big open space and as much as I wanted a relaxed kind of comfortable vibe in the living room I did want to have a more formal dining room space so I ended up putting this big retan wall unit here and I swap out vintage glass wear right now I have a big display of Amber glassware something I love to go look for at estate sales is any kind of vintage glassware I feel like it's kind of one of those like least picked over items even if you go to an estate sale the second or third day another element that I am obsessed with in this dining room is this painting I found it at a local Austin antique mall it's one of those things that just completely stopped me in my tracks for me designing my spaces I always knew I was going to make very bold choices that were super representative of who I am personally so if I'm not getting a lot of strong response or um you know criticism positive or negative then I I'm not really taking the risks that I intended to take when I first started out on the project thanks for stopping by and we'll see you next time I'm Michael and I'm Liz and this is our renovation story there were a lot of points in the renovation where I want to throw up my hands and say I'm done I'm leaving I'm going to a hotel I cannot stress enough how much I do not recommend living through your own renovation was he positive during the whole renovation annoyingly positive through the whole renovation it's true I've enjoyed the process a lot you enjoy everything a lot it's like being married married to a golden retriever that's the best way I could say it the house had sort of some mid-century bones and we wanted to bring to life we wanted to do it in our own way so keeping a really Airy clean California aesthetic and then you can see throughout the house it's not so minimal like a mid-century there's kind of these funky 7s elements with the plants with the textures with some of the carpets and the materials that we brought in we wanted to bring in a little bit more color and a little bit more intentional clutter we did not work with a designer for this so I was doing a lot of the design it's a lot of work it was like making 75,000 decisions on top of like your already demanding job I love that you can just see everything from the front door you immediately not only see all of the house but you see outside of the house and the pool it's a light outside and the open interior it makes it feel a lot bigger than it actually is this is our living room the space was much smaller the Wall came all the way in next to the fireplace was kind of wedged into the corner you can't like sit around the fireplace unusable for sure so we wanted to do a little work there and preserve it but we wanted to make it more usable so we actually moved that wall back so now there's this nice seating area around the fireplace which is one of my favorite spots and we converted it to gas because now I can just click a button and it's on instead of having to build a fire we call it like a conversation pit low-lying furniture and different textures inspired by those like sunken down circles in the living rooms in the 70s we wanted to really kind of force everyone around a circle to be looking at each other and create a space that has like a sense of intimacy and I love love love coming in and seeing this it's a really inviting area it kind of brings back that mid-century modern feel to it as well as just keeping sort of a modern clean California light aesthetic we really like the fact that the house isn't open space but each space has its own purpose so this is creates a really great spot sit together and watch TV or watch a movie dim the lights pull up the popcorn I'm really happy that Liz put some plants to just create kind of a faux experience that you're entering a new area I really love that it also has like these big beautiful windows out into the backyard so you kind of have this like beautiful light headed out back we spend more time here than I like to admit one of the things that I absolutely loved about the house was the pool it's bright it's vibrant so that's something that we definitely knew we wanted to leave alone except that I'm dying to change the way the pool looks because we ran out of money in time Tada where I'm standing actually was the very edge of a very small dining room there's actually a wall right about here I would say and not a lot of space to like sit down and have dinner so took this wall out now we can see into the kitchen if you're in the kitchen getting dinner ready you can also like see the TV or see the game that's on or connect with people in any of the spaces in the house we wanted first and foremost a kitchen that felt more open to the rest of the house we have people over a lot we're kind of like the house where everyone gathers so having a kitchen where our friends could come we could cook and drink wine together I didn't love waiting 2 and 1/2 years to get a kitchen that I felt really like comfortable and excited to cook in but this wor with I remember one particular day coming home after a long and challenging day at work coming into my cold dark Dusty drafty house with tarps where the windows and doors should be and it was probably all of 45° outside and inside my house kitchen was in the garage by kitchen I mean we had a microwave a hot plate and a toaster I microwaved a burrito I walked back into the bedroom where I sat on the dog's bed and the burrito was still frozen in the middle and I started cry crying because all I had to look forward to was finishing my frozen burrito do the dish on the floor of the bathroom in the tub go to bed in my cold house wake up the next day and do this entire thing again that was the moment where I just started to lose hope that we were ever going to have a real house with Windows and Doors again which brings us to the kitchen this is my favorite room in the whole house absolutely the kitchen was small and walled off so it was like in the middle of the house and the house is kind of a u around it a little door on one side so if you wanted to get in the kitchen you had to go through the whole house in back everything florid to ceiling were these like blue tiles with grout in them grout and no offense to all the tile lovers out there I love me some tile but not where I'm going to cook my food it just felt gross it was gross and I really love to cook so kitchen has a lot of features I always wanted I wanted a big kitchen island that people could stand around drink wine at prep food at cook together that was like build the renovation around that for sure we put in Custom Cabinets we also put in quartz countertops because we felt like they were easy to clean and they're also hard to stain we put in a solid backsplash by the stove our contractor was really pushing us toward tile and grout something you like more traditional and we kind of had this Vision to do a big solid piece and it's probably the thing we get complimented on the most and people come in everyone immediately also recognizes what we did which is you can clean it really easily and then we had a little fun like with the appliances the pink fridge plus the Walnut absolutely brings a mid-century modern plus kind of a hip Bohemian style to the kitchen the house embodies who we are entertainment hospitality and I hope people feel the love that is in these walls conveniently enough our open concept kitchen leads into our dining room for obvious reasons food to table this makes it really really nice but even though it's open concept the dining room still feels intimate so we can sit around with our friends at dinner and have a moment around a table which is like one of my favorite things to do it's just nice it's nice that you can just pop back in the kitchen of course if you need something it's nice that if you're in there cooking you're not separated again from everybody out here we wanted to do a lot of finishings that would make it feel like a very distinct space even though it's sitting in an open plan so we're very bold with the wallpaper it matches the green of all of my plants it brings a little nature into the room and makes it feel intimate but the plants actually helped to find the space too originally the house was kind of quadrant off one of the things we had to do in order to make sure that this all connected and lost all the walls is to put in a new structural beam the structural beam was a whole process in itself it was like 20 men who had to come in lift the beam put it on the ceiling and that's what allowed us to lose entire walls here with just one single beam to really give us the maximum look between the rooms but the flow above needs to feel like you're not having to duck or emotionally duck to enter another room emotionally duck wow all right over here we put in a bar when we wanted to open up the house and do all that structural work with the beam and creating this open living space we had to leave up a six foot section of wall to make it structurally sound so right in the middle we had this challenge of this six foot section of wall and thinking about how can we make it look intentional instead of like something we had to do and we thought why not make it like a showpiece like a bar so picked up this kind of tile pattern then we actually laid it all out on the floor and figured out how it would fit onto this wall and be a really really stunning backsplash something kind of unique different this is the primary bedroom and it's a really big space and this is actually the wall that we pulled in 3T so just behind this wall is the fireplace brought the wall in and still this place feels very large another space where took a wild swing with the wallpaper we actually went with peacocks for some reason but it was kind of fun it's a bedroom it's not out in your main house so we thought we could go a little while with the wallpaper in there I don't remember how we settled on Blue peacocks but I actually I really love it how does anyone and more plants because Liz loves plants and I do think it actually brightens up the room quite a bit it feels like a very relaxing escape and it's just like a bedroom you just want to like curl up in your pajamas and read a book and fall asleep with yes more plants it makes me happy yeah out in the garage we had to do a lot with a little bit of space out here my wish list was long a storage room cuz it is a garage and we have to put our crap out there we work out a lot so had to be a gym had to have an office space it's where we do our laundry we needed an extra guest bedroom so it's a mury bed that we actually installed for most of the time it's a work from home space for someone who has a loud voice on calls early in the morning that we can just shut him out in the garage you can just flip it to a Murphy bed and it's a really comfortable spot for guests and a nice little spot to hang out am I forgetting anything more plant area more space for my plants and you know probably a place just to hang out and um and be a part from everyone else when you needed to be so however many things that is that's what we wanted to turn that one's Bas into no problem and a beer fridge is always appropriate also another fridge I call this place basement Chic basement Chic it's kind of our little hangout and the thing I'm probably most proud of is this is the room I built with my bare hands everything from the wood walls to learning how to put the laundry in which thank you YouTube for teaching me to putting in skylights everything from the drywall to installing the TV is something that I actually made so over the course of 7 weeks and really with the leadership of Liz I kind of took the experiences that I learned from the house and actually did the garage kind of by myself so that was really really quite fun to be able to take the lessons of what was happening inside my house and apply them to the garage and make something that fit all her boxes a lot of cuts some tears definitely some blood but uh it was definitely worth it because I really take pride in it this basement chic area that is kind of just original Beyond original and allowed us to put our own personality to this garage I know there's a saying that you should never renovate together if you value your marriage or something to that effect but Mike and I actually line up mostly on design aesthetic and the important renovation choices so like approaching it as a team makes all the difference I would say this renovation actually brought us closer together I'm just so happy that we were able to build this home together and that's really special for me yeah and seeing it that come to life over time this house really like allows us to live the life we want I'm Sarah and I'm Sean and this is our renovation story I just love the whole experience of living here and how it caters so well to our lifestyle I never want to leave this is my vacation now before we bought this house we were living in a little area in Atlanta called Virginia Highlands and it was 500 ft and that was where we moved in together so originally it was Sarah who had the condo downtown while I was working all along the east coast um in various factories I was working my way back down uh to Atlanta to be close to Sarah mid pandemic I left my manufacturing job um came down to Atlanta moved into the 500 foot condo with Sarah and her two cats um and joined my family small business in residential home construction up in the Milton area he was commuting an hour and a half each way getting out of the city and then coming back after work I like to think that I'm a good driver but ultimately the nerves are going to overwhelm anybody at some point yeah he was pretty fried at the end of the day we ended up trying to find a place that was both a little bit more spacious to stretch out and not be stepping all over each other's toes but also wouldn't be bumper-to-bumper traffic for 3 hours to my day every single day we started looking for a house in 2020 so mid pandemic here we are in the middle of both um the global pandemic but also one of the craziest housing bubbles that we've experienced at least in the last decade or so we actually took a map of where her where she was working where I was working and then found the exact midpoint and that's where we started on Roswell where we are now it was really important to find a house that was surrounded by Nature because I love to run we love to go on walks together we love kaying which we can do in the lake out back now and especially when looking during the pandemic we were craving that proximity to the outdoors and this checked all of the boxes for us this home in particular came on the market on a Thursday afternoon and by Friday they were planning on having an open house so come open house time uh we see 16 to 25 cars lining the street with people clamoring to get a look inside I'm sure we weren't the only ones to recognize the charm that this home had we're looking at each other like there's no chance there's no way we're going to be the lucky ones to end up with it but let's put in our offer you cannot find a spot like this so close to the city on the lake um even in this neighborhood there aren't that many houses like this and so we immediately knew we needed to jump on it there were 16 offers on the home over the course of a weekend even though the bidding was super intense the inside could definitely use some love green shag carpets original 1970s fixtures floral wallpaper everywhere it was a time capsule we were thankful that Sean happens to work in the industry and so we knew that we could make it our dream home we've heard it not once but a couple of times that this looks a lot like The Brady Bunch house and so we really wanted to keep the charm in the uh mid-century modern aesthetic we just wanted to give it a facelift so a lot of the home and exterior is original we painted The Brick we painted the board and batten and that was actually a really intense process trying to figure out what would look nice I did a lot of mockups oh yeah to make sure that the colors were going to complement and have the right amount of contrast cuz once you paint a house it's painted in the back we used the framing of the original deck to build a brand new deck we had my dad again being a homebuilder was able to come over on his weekends and spend time with us and actually walk us through or work with us as we rebuilt the deck over the course of several weekends needless to say we really did put some Sweat Equity into the renovation of our home which really helped both with the cost but helps us appreciate the home so much more that we now live it this is our backyard we painted the exterior both the brick and The Bard and Baton and then we totally redid the Landscaping the exterior Renovations back here are the windows we actually raised the pitch of the roof so that we could fit uh these 7t windows we wanted them to be as big as possible the biggest advantage to this particular home is that Lake View and at the time we only had a split fogged up window in the corner of the living room and the rest of this back wall was brick solid couldn't see out it so that was number one on our list number two was to really take out some of the interior walls that were chopping the space up and making the home feel smaller than it really is in the inspection we knew that there was lead paint and there was asbestos in the ceiling and because we wanted to tear out walls and we wanted to cover up the tiled ceiling we were going to have to encounter both of those things it cost quite a bit of money and time because we had to hire a professional crew that essentially looked like they were dressed in hazmat suit suits that had the right PPE in order to come in and remove the entirety of the sheetrock from the home before we had a wall separating the living and dining space from the kitchen and so we did take out that wall and put in a beam to support the roof and we wrapped it in hardwood that matches the hardwood that we have on the floor usually Hardwoods are rather expensive part of a home but we were able to find a supplier that had a bunch of extras left over from other projects and essentially I we told them hey give us all your scraps give us all your remnants and and make a collage installing that all together sanding it and then staining it all the same and so even though there are different widths and different sizes and lengths you really wouldn't notice it because it's got the consistent stain throughout so I think it gives the floor a lot more character um it feels a little bit eclectic and especially when wrapping the beam having the different widths of board makes it visually a lot more interesting behind us we created a dining space that is very integrated into the living space in the kitchen and so it feels very very open and we can see our backyard from anywhere on this floor best part is that all of the spaces are connected I can be in the kitchen Sean can be in the family room and it still feels like we're spending time together in the original home we had a shot gun window u-shaped Kitchen on one side of the room and we had a small breakfast area on the other and now we removed that shotgun window opened up the space and transformed it into one kitchen that was functional for um aou group or gathering of people in the kitchen at the same time everything in the kitchen is new except for the windows we did design the layout so that we could keep the original windows I loved picking out the fixtures in here it's kind of where I started and I expanded from what I picked in the kitchen uh the hood was something that I was particularly excited about it is custom and I wanted it to be as neutral and as subtle as possible but still it has a really nice finish to it I wanted to pick out a neutral tile that still had some texture to it and would play really nicely with the marble and so that's how we landed on this backsplash here we have this massive Island that we really enjoy both cooking on and entertaining with and we have this waterfall countertop which is something I was super excited about this is a leathered marble that we found as a Remnant so it had been precut and we were able to repurpose it for our kitchen and so all of the marble that you see in here was found that way the kitchen before did not have a pantry and so we have this pocket Pantry here with some storage that is easily accessible but easy to hide away when we have guests over so it's not an accident actually that all the paint colors and all of the decorative elements of the home are so neutral because really what we want to do is draw the eye and draw all of your attention out to the magic that's happening in the back of the house and all of the colors that we have used are very intentional so we have a splash of green on the island inspired by all the green that you see out the window but there are a lot of neutrals to highlight those pops of color and everything happening in our backyard the next challenge that we wanted to undertake was the primary suite and this is our primary bedroom before we renovated it was one large open room and it contained both the primary bed but also the primary bath in the same room they were one and the same and so while one person may be laying in the bed they could see into the primary bath and even wave as someone was on the toilet we totally reimagined the space this is the original fireplace we took off the mantle to make it a little bit more modern and painted it the same color as the exterior of the home in the original home there were some flimsy shelves on either side of the fireplace so we ended up putting in these built-ins for some extra storage and then some really beautiful floating shelves for decoration so there's another beam in the master bed that's very similar to The Beam downstairs and we wrapped it exactly the same way to create a nice consistency throughout the home we had to sacrifice a bedroom in order to create the space for our primary bath yes so with the addition of our new interior wall we were able to create the separation of both the primary bed and now we can go into the primary bath everything in here is brand new it did not exist before it's one of my favorite places in the house it's so relaxing it feels very spacious totally different than how it felt when we bought the place at my condo downtown we only had a vanity yay big for both of us so this this was huge the extra space means less fighting from start to finish it took us about 7 months which is surprisingly fast for the scope of work that we did but it really helps to have someone working in the industry to uh push things along it was passionate about getting out of a 500 foot downtown condo and commuting 3 hours both ways so that'll really speed up a process renovating the whole house at the same time was super intense especially for me trying to figure out pink colors light fixtures hardware for so many different rooms all at the same time I learned a lot about how to streamline that process and how to reuse the same Hardware in different spaces and still make it feel like a unique Space by maybe switching up the paint color switching up the light fixtures but reusing things wherever you can I think we more than exceeded our original expectations I think that um this home came together um and and better than we could have initially imagined I mean it went from doodles to reality and in in the process we had a lot of fun and we're extremely excited on how it turned out even though parts of it were very stressful I think we would both do it all over again in a heartbeat oh I do it over again a 100 times but I'm thankful that I don't have to and it's only once hi I'm Gina and this is Minnie and I'm JP and this is Mikey and this is our handmade home in Atlanta Georgia so when I was looking at houses um one of the things that was really important to me was that it was near the East Atlanta Village I really wanted to stay in this neighborhood but when I saw this one I knew it had good bones it had brick hardwood floors a full basement a big yard it it was the least scary option that I saw when people walk into our house I really want them to have a wow factor and I I want them to look around and just be in amazement for a minute and have to gaze upon all of the things here because we've curated so many pieces so I'm an interior designer for Home Depot I work on the catalog um so my job is pulling products together that we're going to then shoot in the catalog photography I get accused all the time of making it too busy but in my house I can put patterns wherever I want my side also is Antiques and vintage collectibles so since both of us work in the creative field it's just natural for us to want to have like an experimental fun creative home our house is very unassuming from the outside and then when you come in and you're not expecting to see all this pattern and color and people really have that explosion you know like whoa I wasn't expecting okay this is our kitchen where we love to entertain this is like where all of our patterns kind of come together um we have green cabinets we also have curtains that um I made to go with the cabinets that have like a mod print to bring in the green and then this is our collection of vintage glassware so uh I started collecting barware at least in the last 15 to 20 years and I mean it's really an easy thing to find at of estate sales can find some pretty unique ones at times I mean this one for example I do love this is this is a Georgia own these are peanut quartet there's so many interesting things you could find through glasswar honestly so when we were designing the kitchen uh we had like a makeshift kitchen here for a while and anytime we would entertain people would just kind of congregate in this area so we knew that we wanted to make this like the bar area we knew we wanted to do the black and white floor and I thought it would be a nice compliment to do a white and black tile backsplash so we actually got these two tiles from two different companies because this one didn't make white with black and this one didn't make black with white but we decided to do the tile all the way to the ceiling to create kind of a focal point behind all of the glass wear we really wanted that view from the front door looking into the kitchen to have that wow so that's why we went with this really really busy pattern on the island just as that little bit of icing on the cake so the green cabinets I actually recovered from a demolition of a home they told me that they were just going to throw them away I kind of freaked out so the dumpster showed up to the house coincidentally I was driving around looking for yard sales and I saw the dumpster back into the driveway and I pulled right in and asked what's going on with the kitchen and they were like it's going in the dumpster so I immediately was like nope let me please take this out and they were they said okay so we were able to pull it all out and we stored it for a minute and waited for the right time to get it into the house my reaction to the cabinets at first was no not green he really had to kind of talk me into it um but when we started laying out the space for the kitchen they fit perfectly I think we ended up using every single piece that you brought home that day when we got to do the lights for this room we were looking at all different kinds of chandeliers and I knew I wanted something really big but we decided that it would be nice to do a collection of chandeliers since we have a collection of everything else and all three of these were made by the same person in Palm Springs and we had them do three totally different ones for us so that we could closer them together to create one big piece so the tattoo on my arm is a George Nelson clock I've always been a fan of the story of The George Nelson clock all the designers got together and drank a bunch of tequila and the next day no one really knew who designed the clock we actually have the George Nelson clock over here along with lots of other clocks what are these 50s to 7s this clock is all about the Zodiac so it's got like all the different zodiac signs some of the little ones are more from the 50s this one came out of my dad's house is this collection complete there's a little room here yeah I might have a a message out on Marketplace for one right now so our favorite place to entertain in our house is our backyard because we have the best patio let me show you come on out we wanted a space with a hot tub JP always wanted a sunken hot tub and we wanted to create a space that had a little bit of privacy but didn't completely block The View because we get lots of deer in the backyard here and the trees are really beautiful so we decided to go with this like triangular shape which partially blocks the neighbors and then we added a bar I mean we are living our best Palm Spring life here normally when we entertain we keep that door open and this whole patio will be full of people and people just go in and out so we have a nice vintage sign back here that actually is a bit of Atlanta History this is from the stories 85 Twin Drive-In and this actually was the sign that stood above the highway all of the furniture out here um we have several pieces of fiberglass when he got this one the fiberglass was actually like poking out and he had to actually like finish it the tiki torches are also vintage um JP had those in the attic for years and we finally pulled them out for a party and then forgot to light them we're in the radio room now so we call it because obviously we've got a wall of radios here I've been collecting radios for well over 20 years now it's kind of my first thing I ever collected they're just so unique and individual I think it you know it's it's beyond what we do today as far as entertainment they're all a piece of art so yeah this is probably one of the greatest even though this is just a little a 70s little uh am Panasonic but just I mean look look at where we've come from you know even I mean the comparison of any of this to this is so crazy I mean we just went everywhere with the design of radio I've had to give him space requirements like you get this wall of radios if you want to keep something you have to let something go we call it upgrading here he's always trying to sneak in a new shelf what if I put a shelf above the window he's even started adding tiny ones to the cabinets oh here's here's one of the best actually I bought this for Gina when we first started dating even though it was really for me who who who are we kidding I know right it was like my first birthday gift from him I'm like but look it's like a miniature version a retro but still look it has like a little little record and everything why don't we design things like this anymore and we also have to talk about your bar oh yeah so this was a a roadside find here literally just in someone's trash and I saw the purpose that it could do in another life this is also uh another cheap find we I didn't even know if it worked but I just thought I had such a classic look to it did a little touchup on it and powered it up and it worked just fine now it's our main source of entertainment uh I've actually got it powered up throughout the house and it it's actually generating other antique speakers such as the one behind Gina it's been really just a focal point of our house so this is our living room obviously one of our favorite pieces is the sofa JP had the sofa when I met him the cushions on it were disintegrating the foam had diminished so much that they were like an inch thin and they were wrapped in plastic bags to keep them from like shedding so I tried to get a quote to have cushions made and it was astronomical so I just decided to do it myself and I watched some YouTube tutorials and I picked up a book on Upholstery and I remade all of the cushions um and the pillows for this couch along with the curtains um that you see here MH I think every home needs original artwork be it made by yourself made by your kids friends bought at local fairs I work in the world of mass-produced artwork and I I love going into a home and seeing something super original So my aunt painted this in 1975 uh which is the year I was born and then when I turned 18 after having every Christmas photo of me taken in front of this painting my whole life um my uncle gave it to me these two sconces were actually part of my collection from really early on I just was so excited to find these anytime I can find any sort of adjustable lamps I will buy them up I do have a little bit of an obsession with mid-century lighting so yeah so it actually will slide up and they have weights on them I love these chairs I might have drove two hours for them just because I think she only wanted $60 for the pair yeah you can see the Alexander Calder mobils in the in the pattern which is kind of awesome and then these Joan Meo sort of suns in the background and we have the black and white exactly throughout our favorite paint color combo is definitely black and white definitely black and white um we have black and white parade crew called the crew of optical delusions where we all dress in black and white stripes and we try to use black and white as often as possible in our house or white and black white with black black with white it comes in so many forms even your dog even the dog we're all on brand here well one of the boldest ways we've used black and white in in our house is definitely the hallway hallway was kind of an uninviting Place really we were you know trying to figure out what we could do and we just wanted to be some do something that made it a little little more eye-catching so this is all hand done we spend about a weekend really a lot of fun we knew that we didn't want it to be full pattern everywhere we definitely wanted some breaks so you see the pattern kind of jump up and go over the attic door and then you don't see any paint for a little while my favorite part of this room is that we decided to continue the mural into the doorway so when you walk in our front door and you kind of look this direction you really catch this edge of the painted wall and it it's sort of like what's happening back there we really like to maximize on the creativity in our house so we even swapped out all of the light switch plates I think every room has a different light switch plate yeah I went ahead and decided I wanted a very 50 Starburst look in uh our bathroom and wallpaper really doesn't go well in bathrooms due to moisture so I decided I could hand paint something like that so I came up with this simple little Starburst idea and uh went from one and to four into 400 he did all of those little Starburst with a ruler and a paint pen took about a weekend and then another 2 and a half years to actually complete it so I think our favorite piece in the home or mine is the Jean Pierre renal that's hanging over our toilet we went to Scott's Antique Market one Saturday we were looking for something that we could use as a countertop temporarily and we found this piece and it's like ceramic tile and grouted and it was exactly the right size we asked the guy how much it was and he says $25 we're like perfect we'll take it and as we're um putting it in the car we realized that there's soue stickers on the back of it uh so we reached out to sees and they said it's an original artwork from 1974 and that it they would guarantee us $5,000 or more if we would sell it with them ironically it is above our toilet now which is funny because it is the most expensive piece of art we have in our home so this is our primary bedroom JP had these amazing baroth curtains our bedside table lamps are just the coolest lamps I've ever seen I've never seen anything else like these this is a piece I framed myself and you can see there's a double mat on it of pink and orange I really like the set of matte that I did here with the narrow sides and the wide top and wider bottom it's a very mid-century style well I've been picture framing for almost 27 years now so framing has become part of the house because we collect art I love so much what we've done with this home it's so beautiful and people love this house so much it's very special house we'll probably never sell it hey there I'm Brian Patrick Flynn I'm the interior designer of HGTV dream home and this is my own 1965 midcentury modern Dream Home in Atlanta Georgia and I want to give you a look at some of my favorite spaces and everything I've done since I bought this house about 10 years ago so come on in and we will start with my entryway but a lot of people refer to it as my art gallery cuz it it technically is one so when you first walk in the house you immediately get a taste of my own personality and my particular taste in art I don't like one medium I like photography I like abstract I like representation I like graphic art I like sculpture I like found objects and all of those can be found on any wall in my entryway this is my first trip 10 years ago to Iceland and I loved everything about the mood of this photo so it's one of the first things you see from three different spaces within the house also I spent a lot of times in my earlier years going to flea markets and garage sales and estate sales and I found this it was actually free at a friend's estate sale and I loved everything about it so much it's referred to as a brutalist sculpture it's from like the mid1 1970s and I even have sentimental things that weren't necessar neily be art like my little nephew who's about to turn five he calls me Uncle BB and I loved it cuz it was like just this moment in time when he was about 2 years old so we framed it and added it to the wall so any direction you look in my entryway there's just all these stories of places I've been and experiences I've had and I think that kind of gives people a little bit of a like a movie trailer as to the person who lives in this house before they make their way around let me take you into what we call the great room which is the most recently remodeled part of the house which kind of didn't even exist before but now it's like a multi-purpose space that we use all the time professionally I'm an interior designer but I am also a production designer which means I don't just design houses for people residential spaces I also design spaces that are meant for entertainment like sets or vignettes that really affects how I design my own home because I'm always thinking of how things look through the lens so how do the colors play what do the patterns look like can I tell by looking at this room what kind of person lives here and that's the same way that I decorate and design houses for myself and for real people when we remodeled this in 2020 the plan was we've been home for a good five or 6 months and we wanted the feeling this is very specific of what it would be like to live in a modern Tree House what we did was opened everything up did everything bright white not only the walls and the ceilings but the floors as well and I say that apprehensively because white floors are maybe not the most practical thing in the world but for somebody who is totally inspired by natural light they are the perfect choice because they balance the light around the whole entire house and everything seems very bright and happy all the time one of the things that I try to do in almost every space I designed is have a conversation starter my artist friend who lives in Charleston South Carolina Sam she creates original pieces of art out of felt and she cuts them freehanded into all different shapes and sizes and people and because like I'm so a music person I love the idea of having this kind of like mly crew of different iconic musicians from all these different decades right off my studio space is the cocktail lounge my favorite things as far as interior design are concerned are interior architecture I love Custom Upholstery and I also love lighting so this is the perfect example of a room that does all three of those things I always wanted the feeling of having kind of like a 1960s or early 1970s nightclub in my own house the best way to use the space was to create a built-in banket that's u-shaped and although it's white people see it and they're like that is so impractical this is performance fabric so this is indoor outdoor and everything wipes right off of it it will never be perfectly pristine white the way it was when I first had it made but it holds up pretty well the other thing that I love about this is the gigantic disco ball it's not that easy to find something this big but I found my 42-in disco ball at a party rental company in New Jersey you never know where you're going to find the things you're looking for just above my head is one of the coolest pieces of art you're can find in my house this is a neon sign when it lights up it's bright aqua and it's lyrics from this song that a friend of M wrote that kind of Compares life to what it's like remodeling a house or restoring an old beautiful architectural Gem and so I took some of the lyrics and turn them into the sign because I love the idea that people know music is always going to be out in my house and there's a disco ball right above there's usually cocktails going and this truly does feel like you've been transported to a nightclub even though you're in the center of my house I was planning on doing a custom coffee table in here cuz there's so much space to fill inside of the u-shaped banket I was at a flea market and they had this I could not believe the price it wasn't very expensive and it was 50 in by 50 in which fills this pace perfectly and I kept thinking I want clear because I love my rug so much my friend Meredith who lives in Toronto made this from scratch and the idea was it was supposed to look like fragmented icebergs because I love the polar regions so it was just it was a match made in heaven because it's big it holds everything I needed to hold I can see right through it to the rug so this came home with me that same day even though I did not have a car that could accommodate it we found one by the end of the day similar to the way that I've delineated the cocktail lounge from the workspace I've done the same thing over here with my TV room and the thing that I love about using these divider screens is they allow the light to totally pass through without making a Space darker but at the same time they add just a little bit of privacy and this is the perfect example of why I liked privacy one of my Hang-Ups as an interior designer is I love a TV in almost every room in the house but I don't like TVs in rooms where I want people to come over and talk and have conversations I think TV should not necessarily be super visible so this is my TV R it has a 22t long L-shaped banket and it took me about 8 months to have this made because the company that I worked with wanted to make sure the pitch was exactly what I wanted from my height which is 65 it's very hard to find a sofa for somebody who's 65 like me after months and months of going back and forth to have this custom made everything about it was selected and the thing that really stood out to me about the actual fabric is this is a wool Bou clay it is so classically mid-century modern because it has this very rough nubby texture to it when I first saw this Fabric and I knew that it came in force screen I was like that's perfect we've Incorporated all these USB and Outlets into the base of the bank at was absolutely the most expensive thing in the entire house but it's worth it because there's plenty of room to just kick back and watch TV and nobody else ever sees a TV except for us we have a gigantic industrial oversized fan above us and another thing you'll see in almost every room in the house here is the use of skylights luckily we have skylights that open and close so we can ventilate so during the harsh Summers here in Georgia we don't have to worry about being too hot this room is also a lot less colorful mostly because we're up here in the trees we feel like we're nestled into the woods and everything outside the window is either brown gray or green so everything inside inside the room is the same as well when people come over and they're like why are there so many Iceberg oriented things in your house I got married in 2017 in Antarctica I'm not kidding I legitimately made it all the way to the bottom of the planet where like nobody ever goes was the most magical experience ever and when I got married I have an artist friend who lives in Nashville and she uses mixed media and she made this gigantic 7 and 1/2t by 4ot mixed media piece of one of our favorite icebergs we saw in this area called the La Mer Channel and on our almost anywhere you look in a house there's some type of Nod back to our experience in Antarctica whether it's color whether it's art or Texture so the most recently completed space the entire house is the opposite of an adult space watch TV it is a nursery because I'm expecting my first baby a daughter in about a week so we just completed it and uh you will be the first people to ever see this face it took me long time to get my head around what direction I wanted to go I never realized how hard it is to narrow down your selections as an interior designer when you're doing your own house I wanted the nod to a little Nordic Explorer I didn't want anything that had been done a million times before so a friend of mine designed this wallpaper with me from scratch so the whole idea is we have a little Nordic Explorer and she's out with her backpack and her teddy bear and she is exploring all the Nordic country so we have a little baby in the crib she can see herself and all her little animal friends I would say the hardest thing about designing my own home as an interior designer is there's too many options I get hired by people to narrow down choices to three or four for every single aspect of the design process I don't have anybody filtering that for me plus I see every single thing that's out there at all the design centers so it's like sensory overload there's just too many options and when you're doing every single room in your house and you're in charge and you're in charge of the budget and the timeline thegu the limit which sounds fun but in reality I just need somebody else to help reel me in and a lot of times it has to be me which is not the easiest task I had to get really clever with the budget and when I was looking at gliders I immediately went towards the gliders that are impractical from a a price standpoint and you're only going to use it for two years so investing thousands of dollars on a glider is not really the best use of your money I was consistently going back to this particular glider but I did not like the fabric it came in so I kept skipping over it and then I had an idea wait that glider is the most affordable one online so I just bought it then I went and found this performance fabric that's in my favorite shade of green which is pine needle or forest green had it recovered and then also brought a little bit of a custom touch in with this wel cord which is bubble gum Pink So for a fraction of what it would have cost to have something made custom I bought something affordably and just had it rolster the one part of the room where I splurged and I knew it was always going to was going to be the crib I fell in love with the overall look of this about 2 or 3 years ago before we even know we were expending our first baby what I love the most about it is the unique architecture of the crib it has this beautiful X detail on each side and then the crib itself is pure white and because we're naming our daughter Clover and I love the idea of it being very Irish and Irish stuff being green we could do any color we want it cuz it was custom made and it's just a little nod to her name so this was where uh the majority of the decorating budget went aside from the room just being super playful being customed to our own daughter I wanted to make sure it fit the vernacular and also the architecture so there are a few nods to mid-century modernism here we have a chrome mushroom lamp which is super 60s and 7s and also we have this really modern slatted ceiling this is something my Carpenter Michael did a few years ago and I knew I wanted to add some architecture to a room that was otherwise just a rectangle with absolutely no character and I think the lamp mixed with the ceiling and the incredible Hardware that you see on the doors those are Starbursts from the 1960s so I think those three little hints of mid-century really make this room appropriate for this house uh there are so many touches in there that are so personal I'm really proud of it I it's kind of my dream Nursery but it's definitely not something that would have been requested by one of my clients it's actually true and original specifically for my child and that that's what makes me love it even more this is the space that we refer to is our family room and it is towards the front of the house and it's what connects the entryway to the kitchen and and it was kind of hard to design because it is kind of a pass through space so I had to get really clever with the way that we added the seating so these are remarkably low modular seating pieces we added three on each side they create about 13 ft of seating space and they're super low which was amazingly helpful because one of the most expensive things in the entire remodel was investing in the steel windows and the steel doors because these are such a feature from the outdoors if I had tall Furniture you'd be looking at the back of furniture from outside a lot of times people fall asleep in this room which is a huge compliment as an interior designer because a lot of times when you live in a very mid-century modern home people can find them so modern that they're cold or impersonal but this house is so personalized that I think people feel really warm when they walk in and the family room is always going to be the the place that gets the most traffic this is the space that we as a family unit will spend the most time so I wanted to create a really beautiful focal point with one of my least favorite things in the interior is world and that is a corner fireplace Corner fireplaces make it really hard as a designer or a decorator to create a space plan for furniture around because it's awkward there's a door on this side there's a window over here but what I wanted to do is give it some personality so if you look this is very mid-century modern these are matte and they all have different colors and they were placed randomly with no grout so it just has this really nice imperfectly perfect look and we went with a frame TV because when we don't have cartoons playing or children's programming we can put up our favorite piece of art here and it just looks like a framed piece of art it's directly in the corner of where the kitchen meets the family room now this actually is not my dream kitchen this is a kitchen that has been more practical than anything else because when we bought the house it was very dark and very low the ceilings only came to about 8 ft I had all this space to play with and we added a skylight we added all these steel Windows because I wanted the kitchen to also feel kind of Treehouse like these are seamless cabinet fronts because I wanted this to be super minimal uh we are open to totally changing this again but right now it's working for us it's just so minimal that when people come over they're like excuse me sir how do I open these cabinets so this may look a lot different in about 2 or 3 years I'm a very flexible designer I like things to kind of move as I grow and change and my tastes evolve but I would say when it comes to Interior architecture that's where I set things in stone to stay to honor the overall Vibe of the house so there are some things in the house that are permanent that are not moving but they're more architectural and structural rather than decorative the most used spot in the kitchen is the breakfast nook which is towards the back of the house all mid-century furniture mid-century lighting this is a space that is sure going to see probably the most family time aside from the actual family room I think we're pretty set up here in the in the breakfast nook too we've already got our high chair in fact the high chair has been here longer than these chairs have because we we've been so excited about this new new change in life that we're getting a little ahead of ourselves as the designer of the httv dream home I often feel a lot of pressure to get everything perfect because I've got hundreds of millions of eyes looking at the projects that I do for work so I assume people will think anything that I'm doing for my own private clients or myself is going to obviously be Dream Home caliber and there's a lot of pressure to do that but it's also my own home you know I'm not designing it for somebody to enter for a chance to win I'm designing it for me and my family so there's a lot of pride in that thanks for stopping by I'll see you next time\n"