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Last week, our Story of a Home post about the Sylvan Park home we designed with our friend Shelby Brown told the tale of how this dream home came to life. This week, we're delving into the particulars--the paint colors (inside and out), lighting fixtures, tile and more. Read on. For the exterior, we selected Sherwin Williams' Gauntlet Gray. It's a perennial crowd-pleaser. 
Most of the interior walls were painted in Sherwin Williams' Mindful Gray. All of the tile is from Renaissance Tile & Bath, where our client is a design consultant. 
Didn't catch the original blog post? Find it and lots more photos here.
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 When partnering with Renaissance Tile & Bath design consultant Shelby Brown on her personal residence, we used salvaged treasures and rustic lighting to create a new house with all the warmth of a historic home. The Process: A few years ago, my friend Shelby approached me about designing a new home for her and her husband. Shelby works at Nashville's Renaissance Tile & Bath, where we have long sourced all of the tile for Bynum Design projects. I adore her and was eager to build in Sylvan Park--this would be my first house in the neighborhood--but I hadn't partnered with another designer in a long while. I primarily build spec houses, but it's different working closely with a client. Since building this house, I've discovered that when I'm the client, as I am when designing spec houses, I make myself (even) crazier. The process of working with Shelby was more relaxing and rewarding, as she gave a rustic, artisanal edge to my polished modern style. And in an age where everything from Domino to HGTV to Pinterest have given people interior design savvy, it was high time for me to collaborate with a client. I was fortunate that this particular client had a keen eye for design and a perspective that both complemented and challenged my own.  "I didn’t want any wasted space—like how people do large foyers, but then are never in that area," says Shelby. "With our lot being so small, like most of them in Nashville, I didn’t have any room to waste, so I wanted every area to be as functional as possible." The way we design--using 3D software--allowed Shelby to maneuver through the house before it was built so there weren’t any surprises. Read on to hear the story of how this 2,267-square-foot home came to life, quite literally rising to meet unique challenges (i.e., an extra-tall husband). What Stands Out:   Patina from the Past. "I didn't want it to feel like it was a brand new house," says Shelby. "I wanted it to have character and to bring in some old elements." Luckily, we were able to accomplish that by paying homage to the 800-square-foot house that once stood on this lot. Knowing that kids were in their future, the Browns needed a bigger house than that. The original house, built in the 1940s, offered no aesthetic value and contained little worthy of salvaging, but Shelby did make it a point to save the hardwood flooring. As she tells it, "The only thing that looked nice was the hardwood floors, so the week before the house was torn down my parents came up, and we pulled them up. Another weekend, they came up again, and we planed each board. Dee and I came up with the idea of using some of these old floorboards above the dining room table. It's a piece of our old house in the new house, and it ended up being my favorite detail. It brings personality to the cleanness of everything else. I love telling people the story of these boards."   Shelby's other favorite detail? The old spindles she repurposed above the doorway that leads from the living room to the dining room. "My original plan was to do transom windows there, but I couldn’t really find what I was looking for," says Shelby. "I came across these spindles, and I thought they were perfect to give a little bit of warmth." To add still more character, Shelby sketched, and then asked her father-in-law to build, the kitchen island and topped it with a stunning piece of Calcutta marble, a foil against the granite-composite sink and the rest of the countertops, which are a leathered black granite.  Splashy Paint Colors. Shelby added color to our design and our lives by spiking our neutral color palette (get all the paint color details in our next blog post!) with a turquoise front door, a kelly green Dutch door (I call it a Doris Day door) and inky navy on the guest room walls.    The Dog Room. Speaking of that green Dutch door, it leads to an ingenious space that the homeowners have dubbed "the dog room." "We have two dogs, and I don’t enjoy sweeping up their dog hair every day," says Shelby, "but I didn’t want them to be excluded from the house. The Dutch door allows us to see them, and they can see us and hear us, but I don’t have to sweep up their hair. Plus, there’s a doggie door that goes outside from that room, so they get to come and go as they please."  The 6'7" Husband. When Shelby and her husband initially selected Sylvan Park to live in, they envisioned renovating an existing house. Her husband's height soon proved to be a barrier to that. Standing tall at 6'7", he found himself having to duck through every doorway of the homes he toured--and throughout many of the upstairs rooms, too. Needless to say, it was important for us to give the Brown family 10-foot ceilings with eight-foot doorways, as we did downstairs. Upstairs we ensured they had nine-foot ceilings with eight-foot doorways. Our challenge here was to keep the house from towering so high that it overpowered the houses around it.  Luxe Tile and Plumbing Fixtures on a Budget. When you work at a tile shop, the world is your oyster, right? Not necessarily. Shelby cites the abundance of options as having been her biggest challenge (when these photos were taken, she was still weighing options for her backsplash tile, and has since installed a handmade, elongated subway-style tile). "Budget definitely comes into play because you have to decide what you’re willing to spend the money on and where you need to save it," she says.     "We love this house and our location--you can't beat Sylvan Park," says Shelby, who has now been in this Bynum Design house for nearly four years. "We've had two kids since we moved in, and they love to go outside and play."  To get the specifics on everything from paint colors to lighting to tile selection, check back in with our blog next week!
When we were asked to be one of a handful of Nashville interior design teams to stage one of the new Twelve Twelve condos in the Gulch, the builders wanted our help amping up the design drama to help these things sell.  It’s worked, as Twelve Twelve is forecasted to be sold out by year’s end. So while we’re happy that we accomplished what we were asked to do, we’re mostly happy that we have this gorgeous space to show for it. And we're grateful to have had photographers StudiObuell to capture it.  A couple of months back, we shared our inspiration boards with you. Now, here’s the real deal:  It ended up being liberating to not have much square footage to work with (we had two bedrooms, the tiniest of which we repurposed into a Music City-appropriate music room, and two bathrooms). And of course it was helpful that they didn’t just hand us the keys to the castle; they handed us the castle and let us go for it. There were a few things already done, but for the most part we got to select everything from the unit itself to the finish scheme.  We were even able to choose a Sonos music system and the TVs. We picked out the rolling window shades, paint colors, and of course all of the furniture and accessories. If you’re curious about any of the above, we sourced most of it from our shop, D. Luxe Home (and we’ve dedicated a separate blog post detailing where everything came from). This project was very much a group effort—with insights and ideas coming from those on-staff at Bynum Design as well as from the fabulous Sally Kyle.  We knew from the get-go that it was sophistication we were after. But my overall approach was, at the end of the day, to create a unit where I would want to live. (Speaking of the end of the day, it’s especially sexy up there at night.) Mission accomplished; I could move right in. Had I bought this unit, I would have probably done exactly what we did to it.  I think the biggest ah-ha! moment for us in tackling this space was to do the opposite of what most people do when designing a high-rise unit—that is, to center everything around the view. We came to understand that while the view is important—and dazzling—it’s not everything, and we don’t want to be facing it the entire time, so we placed a lot of furniture against the window wall and created several zones in the one main room. Creating a cozy, flexible space was what was most important.  We even moved the original location of the TV from the wall they had it on to an inward wall because we wanted you to be looking in, not out. We created a space to watch TV ...  We created a space to eat...  ... and then we created a separate space with these fab swivel chairs. You can be in one and talking to whoever’s cooking or looking out at THAT VIEW. It is just perfect.  Our other prevailing way of thinking about this project was to bring details from the exterior of the building and reference them in our design. For instance, we identified a detail on the building that we really liked above the freight dock; there’s a giant, three-story wall of wood slats, all different widths. At one pint, when we were feeling like the space was just so long and needed to be broken up a bit, we looked to the narrow mullion in the center of the windows and decided that was the prefect place to take that wood slat element and introduce it into the interior. We had this made by a carpenter who specializes in high-rises; who knew that was a specialty?! It turns out that the fact that everything that goes in and out of a high-rise building has to fit inside an elevator requires some extra creative thinking.  There was another room—technically a guest bedroom—that didn’t have a door on it. (Since it’s in Nashville we wanted to give the condo a music theme, so we envisioned the second bedroom as a music studio where you would write and play guitar. We’ve got little music motifs everywhere in this condo.) For the music room, we had another one of these wood-slat "thingies" made and hung it on a barn door track. You can see through it, but it gives you the feeling of privacy, and it adds texture in a space that really didn’t have any texture.  Another challenge we faced is that this unit didn’t yet have an island or a kitchen table, but it did have soffit on the ceiling that designated where the island was supposed to go, even though we didn’t want to put our island there. We ended up moving the lighting away from where it was originally supposed to be to tighten up the kitchen work area and to give us space to do the thing with the swivel chairs.  In the master bathroom all we really had to do is paint the walls super dark, and it popped.  So it all flowed, we used the same color throughout the condo, even on the trim, where we used an oil-based paint so that there’s some sheen.  The guest bath gave me one of my first opportunities to play with wallpaper, and we selected one made of recycled newspaper shreds.  We also used a gorgeous grasscloth wallpaper in the master bedroom on the bed wall. It’s a silk-looking thing that’s the same color of the walls.   Finally, in the foyer, we again introduced an element from elsewhere in the building. There’s a lot of aged mirror in the interior design of the building, and we wanted to fully invite the vibe of this building into the unit. Rather than mirroring that whole wall we found these two fabulous screens with three panels each. We mounted them to the wall in the foyer, and put this glam white piece of furniture with gold handles in the alcove opposite it. And of course the crystal chandelier deserves mention. We wanted to wow when you walk in the door, so we swapped out one of the existing can lights for this one.  That about covers it. We’re pretty sure it shows, but we had an absolute ball conceptualizing this condo and bringing it to life.  For more details on this space and the things inside it, visit our D. Luxe Home blog post or feel free to reach out to us. We are currently accepting Nashville home staging projects and would love to hear from you.
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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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