Think about a resort, or how it feels to be in a really nice swimming pool in a really nice hotel. Why shouldn’t you live that way at home? Even though it’s hot and buggy here, people in Nashville entertain outdoors a lot. It seems everyone wants an outdoor living space now. That could look like one of many things—a front porch or a rooftop, a courtyard or a back patio, or all of the above. Architecturally these spaces can be very significant to the house, but they also contribute to resale value. Pretty recently Bynum Residential Design created a dramatic formal garden for a client with a fountain and a fireplace and a mirror and a chandelier and a swing bed; we’re excited to share those on our blog soon. In the meantime, I’m sharing some of my favorite ideas and thoughts for creating a haven around your own home. 1. Express yourself outdoors as well as in. Communicate your tastes with landscaping, just as you do with your interiors; an outdoor space can feel lonely and haunting, minimalist and chic, or hidden away but bursting with activity, like a secret garden. 2. Think dimensionally. A few years ago, I had an epiphany about outdoor living spaces that has since made creating them so much more fun. I realized that a backyard didn’t have to be just about walking out onto a flat terrace. It could be on levels and incorporate different materials. Not only are these spaces more wonderful while you’re walking around them, but they’re wonderful to view from above. 3. When and when not to err on the side of practicality. In Tennessee, the outdoors take a beating, and the sun is relentless, which means you have to use the right materials and know how to treat them so that they’ll last. For instance, if you use pressure-treated lumber on a deck surface or an arbor, it’s going to look like crap in no time. Instead, use cedar or something that will hold up over a longer period of time, and apply that same thinking to everything. And of course, when it comes to plantings, you can get yourself into a maintenance nightmare if you overdo it, so you have to just really love gardening—or you have to find a gardener. While there are some things that absolutely have to be taken seriously with regards to outdoor living—for instance, you have to be careful about where you place electrical, and fire pits and grills can’t be too close to a house or near an overhang—I also think the outdoor space is the perfect place to play. I’m one who likes lawn grass all the way up to the edge of the pool, and I don’t mind allowing vines to crawl across the entire side of a house. Sure, it may cause damage to siding or brick over time, but in my mind, the charm is worth it. It’s all about the vibe you want to create and how important that is to you. 4. Take inspiration from enormous spaces. In Paris all the trees along the Champs Elysees are pruned into squares. There are hundreds and thousands of them, and they look like big ice cubes. They're stunning. I’m also a huge fan of elaborate hedge mazes. What fun is a maze! It’s elegant and formal. Just because you have a tiny urban backyard does not mean you can’t incorporate grandiose elements from your favorite parks and public spaces. One of my favorite things to do is to cloud prune boxwoods to create big, round, poufy shrubs that add a sculptural touch. And even if you just create a short boxwood maze for kids that you can look down on from an upstairs space, you’ve added so much whimsy and grace. 5. Add shape and texture. Another thing I’m crazy about: topiaries and shapes of all kind in a yard. Beyond plants, I like using concrete balls or squares of concrete to create a Flintstones-inspired floor. For pathways, I prefer a really fine crushed gravel because it’s such a pretty juxtaposition to a manicured lawn or a concrete walk. Plus it adds texture, and it’s always more fun to have different textures and materials and make them relate to one another. 6. Beyond plants, add favorite objects. I love to add old, old elements to a landscape—concrete urns and finials, for instance. A rusty bench. I also love curtains in outdoor spaces. It's just amazing how you can define a space with objects like these. 7. My favorite plants. I’m funny about plants. I love boxwoods and arborvitaes and hydrangeas, and that’s just about it. Those are my go-tos. A lot of people here use ornamental grasses, but I feel like those don’t really belong in our part of the country. The coolest thing to me about planting is using a combination of deciduous (lose their leaves) and non-deciduous (don’t lose their leaves) shrubs. I like to use them all because some have a wild appearance and some you can shape, as I like to do with those perfectly round boxwood balls in the wintertime. It’s amazing to see the juxtaposition of those formal elements covered in snow next to something that’s twiggy and missing all of its foliage.
8. Embrace Mother Nature’s hand in the design. When choosing what to plant, think about shadows and mist and fallen snow and how the feel and function of your outdoor oasis will change through the seasons. In all seasons the yards with both deciduous and non-deciduous shrubs are the prettiest, as there’s nothing like a snowfall or a hard frost on all those plants. Oh, it’s just magic. For more outdoor living inspiration, see Bynum Design's Outdoor Living Pinterest board.
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When, a few years ago, we kept coming across garage doors inside hotels during our travels--and, locally, inside restaurants, we got to dreaming about installing a garage door in an unconventional way—in a residential interior space. We were very excited to have a client who shared our enthusiasm for the idea, and have since found many, many more clients in Nashville who specify a roll-up, glass-paned garage door be used in their home, serving as a bridge between the indoors and out. In fact, using garage doors in this way has become one of Bynum Design’s trademarks. We most often install them to open from living spaces onto patios, decks, or pools. As for the pros and cons of an interior garage door, we sometimes find they are one and the same; that's why, when determining whether or not a garage door is a good fit for you, it’s worthwhile to consider how it fits with your taste, your lifestyle, and your priorities. Here are some of our thoughts on interior garage doors, with the pros and cons all mixed in together: You’ll let gobs of light in. Hello, beautiful sunlight every single day. Even when your garage door is closed, you can enjoy all the light that it allows to pour in. And a garage door can prove to be the perfect vantage point from which to watch a sunrise, sunset, thunderstorm, or snow shower. Window coverings are a challenge. When it comes to window coverings, you're certain to run into all kinds of problems accommodating a garage door. You can’t hang draperies in front of them; instead you have to rig something else—a roller shade could work. Nevertheless, protecting privacy can prove to be challenging. The power button isn’t pretty. Most of these garage doors come with a gigantic power button and some other bulky metal mechanisms that can’t really be prettied-up. Homeowners have to live with—and preferably dig—the industrial vibe this contributes to. Many of our spaces are a cross between industrial and farmhouse and modern, so it works fine. A wooden garage door would probably be better suited for a traditional home. Your utility bill may not be pretty either. Obviously, having a garage door open to the outside doesn’t exactly promote energy efficiency. So if you’re going to roll your door up when you have company over, you pretty much have to make up your mind to just enjoy the juxtaposition between hot outside and cool inside; I like to think it’s kind of like being at the ocean, when you get both hot and cold currents. You may choose to install blower fans to keep hot air out of the home—I’ve seen that done at restaurants—but they’re loud. We recommend installing insulated doors to eliminate drafts during colder months when your door is kept shut. You can temporarily "take a wall down." There’s no other way I’ve found to visually—and literally—open up a space so quickly and so dramatically. Safety may be a concern with children. For homeowners with children, we’ve had some concern about how safe these doors may be. They come with backstops, but that doesn’t always assuage the worry satisfactorily. One of our clients ultimately decided to remove the garage door from her home and install French doors instead so she wouldn’t have to worry about her young son being near it. Expense and construction concerns: Creating a nontraditional opening can mean added expense, especially in an existing home. Writing this into the plans for a new home, right from the get-go, may mitigate this. We’ve also run into some engineering/constructional concerns, as extra space is required for clearance where the door needs to align with the ceiling when opened. In other words, expect that your request for an interior garage door may present your contractor with some problems that may require creative thinking to solve. Add value to your home: A garage door is such a chic and desirable feature inside modern homes that adding one to your house is almost certain to boost your home’s value and increase its curb appeal. Do you see any other pros or cons inherent to this trend? Tell us in the comments.
Technically, this is the story of two homes. Two very important homes, in that they signified the beginning of Bynum Residential Design and introduced the tone and template for so many of our future designs throughout Nashville. *All photos shown are of "Gretel" only. The Process: When we acquired a dilapidated house not fit for human habitation on a parcel of land in 12South, we did so with great excitement and not a little trepidation; this was to be our first official project as “Bynum Residential Design,” would be executed according to our specifications, and would be financed by—you guessed it—us. It was 2010. To maximize the space most efficiently, we drew up plans for two tall and narrow houses, side by side, to be joined by an inconspicuous connector (per Nashville code) but with two distinctly different facades and feels. Hence, the Hansel and Gretel name, which was given to these homes by my friend Bo Boaz, a Franklin designer who proclaimed the houses “Hansel and Gretel” as soon as he laid eyes on them. What Stands Out: Meant to be? This corner in 12South—situated at the intersection of Vaulx Lane and Montrose Avenue—is a block from my own house. Every day for 15 years I drove by this crummy old house and thought, “If that house ever sells, I’m buying it.” And I drove down the hill one day, and there was a realtor putting a sign in the yard. I called him, and I was just sitting there and he answered his phone, and I said, “I see you putting the sign in the yard, and I want this house.” Differentiating Hansel and Gretel. When we do multiple houses on a lot I don’t want the houses to feel the same, like an apartment complex. If you become friends with your neighbor I want you to be able to go to their house and have a unique experience—not know where all their hidey-holes are, you know? We carefully planned ways to distinguish Hansel and Gretel from one another. The white one is very farmhousey—very clean and bright. They both have an open floorplan, but the back house with the shake on it had a darker, manlier vibe about it. The exterior was dark, the interior was dark, it had a bridge that went overhead. Everything I did was really intentional—even the landscape. The white house had a Beetlejuice sort of landscape; all we used were columnar arborvitae and round boxwoods. The back one—Hansel—has more of a suburban looking landscape, with beds hugging the house. They’re just completely different in every way. Getting our first farmhouse fix. Building Gretel in particular made me realize just how much I love the farmhouse style. I had never had a client who would let me do that in the past so when I sat down with a blank piece of paper that’s just what happened, and it was so magical. This farmhouse has now inspired several others that I’ve built for clients who asked me to replicate it. Challenges Faced: Working up the nerve. Probably the biggest challenge faced with these homes, being the first we’d done on our own, was the one we waged against our own confidence—just in having faith in our vision. In the end it taught us a huge and important lesson, which is that Bynum Residential Design really does have what it takes to build exactly the home we imagined in our minds and on our computer screens. Getting above the (very recently flooded) floodplain. Right after we tore down the house on this lot, it flooded. It was the Nashville Flood of 2010, and everything as far as the eye could see was drenched. Houses nearby had water up to their windows. Needless to say, we quickly realized we would need to elevate the houses we built considerably. This proved problematic for a couple of reasons—first, I was trying to keep these houses in scale with the neighborhood, and I didn’t want them to be gigantically tall. We had to immediately do some site work and start laying block. For the record, my biggest pet peeve is when a builder doesn’t excavate a crawlspace and just starts laying block. I didn’t want to do that here. We did build our houses far above the ground, though, which made us have to come back with a lot of extra soil at the end and grade everything up to the house. Throughout the build, I was so overwhelmed with this height thing that I was doing everything I could—even though it was a two-story house with a steep roof pitch—to keep it low, so that was a huge obstacle in my mind. Now if you drive by there and look at these houses, they feel completely normal—the right distance off the ground. They just feel smart and right. Uneasy neighbors. Some people in the neighborhood were kind of opposed to what we were doing because we were changing the architecture there. I had to stay true to my vision anyway, even though I definitely had a fear of the unknown—will people like this? Will somebody buy this? Believe it or not, people weren’t yet busting down the doors to move into 12South. There had been some other development on Vaulx Lane but nothing like what’s going on over there now. Not long after, we built four houses across the street from these; that opportunity came about because of this, too. The Happily Ever After: Thinking back about these houses, I’m still blown away by how intimidated I was and by how pretty they turned out and how well they were received. When it came to getting started on this property, I ran into a mental block. I wanted the lot and I wanted to develop it, but I was afraid to bare my soul with these houses. In the end, we had people fighting over who was going to buy them. There were back-to-back showings, and both sold in a heartbeat. The guy who bought Gretel, the white farmhouse, says people still stop and ask him about it. And we’ve gotten numerous leads from people asking us to recreate Gretel for them. I’m so grateful that we were finally able to just get really nervy and do these houses exactly the way we wanted to. They were a huge hit.
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Dee BynumDee Bynum has his finger on the pulse. Whether it’s following trends, scouting emerging neighborhoods and infill opportunities, or overseeing the development of a design, Dee’s dedication to—or obsession with—his projects is renowned. Categories
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