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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A roof-raising and room reconfiguration--coupled with the addition of a courtyard with a saltwater reflecting pool--revived this 1935 bungalow in 12South. See how Bynum Design made it happen. The Process: More often than not we do new construction homes (which we've profiled in detail on the blog here and here), but we get a huge kick out of tackling remodels, too. This 3,623-square-foot home that we finished up and sold last month is great example of a thoughtful response to a classic bungalow, but we still managed to pack it full of Bynum Design hallmarks--custom details that make it feel one-of-kind, inspiring, roomy and cozy all at once. Though we made some pretty massive alterations to the structure, the front exterior retained every bit of its original charm, so that the rhythm of this sweet street goes uninterrupted. Are you in for a surprise? Check out the photos of this home when we acquired it. What Stands Out: The courtyard and pool. We created a courtyard on the sunny side of the backyard—on the west side of the property—and built a wall around it to close it in. On the east side we did a master suite. And in the back, to enclose the courtyard, we added a two-car garage with a bonus room upstairs; the bonus room opens up to a balcony overlooking the pool. This is the first pool Bynum Design has had the opportunity to install. Our options were pretty limited by the courtyard's small size, but we decided on a rectangular saltwater pool that we wanted to read as a reflecting pool so that it wasn't about swimming as much as it was about atmosphere and vibe. Enclosing the courtyard with a garage/bonus room had the added benefit of giving the backyard the feeling of a cozy compound. The master suite. This master suite has an especially fabulous layout--the way the spaces come together and function, and the his and hers closets. We also love the big shower filled with natural light, thanks to the frosted window we installed. The center of the house. A super sweet spot in this home is the dining room, located at the base of the stairs and just opposite the bar. When you look up from the dining table, you see the stairs wrapping on around and a cutout in the ceiling, so that people upstairs can look right in on whatever social activity is happening downstairs. This space ended up defining the whole vibe of this house. We've decided that if this house had a personality, it would be extroverted. The lighting. If you know anything about us, you probably know that we'll always say the lighting package in our homes stand out. We just can't stress enough the importance of the right fixtures. We did a custom light fixture over the island, done by a local guy, David Phillips, who creates a lot of repurposed fixtures for our Marathon Village neighbors Antique Archaeology. David really helped us make the lighting package special, particularly in that vaulted space. Challenges Faced: Raising the roof. To get the ceiling height and to reconfigure the layout the way we wanted, we had to raise the ceilings, reconfigure the roof, and add on. To do this, we took the dormers and the roof off, took the second floor off, and raised the ceilings so that they were 10 feet high. In the meantime, we kept the brick that was on the front of the home and on the two sides, later choosing to paint it. When rebuilding the roof, we returned its original roof pitch and built back the little dormer that was on the front of it. Neighbor. This property is directly across the street from a church, which is kind of a hoot. We debated whether or not the proximity to a busy church was a good or bad thing, but we ultimately decided it was a good thing because if you have a party you have a big, built-in parking lot for friends to park, unless it's on a Wednesday night, when they host their bible study, in which case they will ask you to move your car. The other great thing about it is when church is in session it’s very entertaining because there are lots of big hats, especially on Easter Sunday. So you can sit out on your front porch on Sunday mornings and have bloody marys and be entertained. Vaulting the ceiling. One of the things that’s a Bynum Design hallmark is to do two-story spaces with huge windows, which in turn creates the vaulted ceilings that we're also known for. We were able to accomplish that at the rear of this house, which is only a single story, by following the roofline, making a center line down the kitchen, and mirroring the roof on the other side so we created a tall, vaulted space there without actually making a two-story space. The Happily Ever After: Funnily enough, this home was sold via a FaceTime session with someone who was out of state at the time. The new owner's realtor came through on the morning that D. Luxe Home was finalizing the staging prior to the party we hosted to celebrate the completion of this home. While we haven't spoken with or met the owner, we have always envisioned this being a social space, filled with friends and conversation. In Nashville's temperate months, we see the master suite's doors flung open to the courtyard. There will be lots of bare feet and the sounds of splashing water and laughter. This is our hope. P.S. Check out our post on the D. Luxe Home blog about staging this house and throwing a big party to celebrate its completion. You'll also find several before photos of this home here.
This happy home in 12South at 925B Kirkwood Ave. is inspired by both the function and charm of a farmhouse and the elegance and composure of an old country church. Read about how it came to be. The Process: This house belongs to Pat and Ann Williams, a ridiculously awesome pair who we liked immediately and who we were certifiably in love with once we realized Ann's Pinterest board mirrored our own. Ann is from Northern California and founded Smart Sprouts (the extremely popular drop-in daycare in Green Hills that she's since shuttered), and Pat, a Nashville native, is in sales for a healthcare technology company. The two met at The Tin Roof while both were in grad school at Vandy; how "Nashville" is that?! Ann and Pat were some of the easiest, breeziest people we've ever worked with. After deciding they wanted one of our homes, they signed the contract for this place before we'd even leveled the ground. What Stands Out: Mixed metals. "Dee and I talked about doing mixed metals—brass mixed with stainless," says Ann, "and he loved that idea." We mixed metals in both the downstairs master bath and a guest bath, but they're perhaps most prominent in the kitchen, where a gorgeous brass accordion-style chandelier is suspended over the island. Meanwhile, the cabinets are outfitted with stainless steel hardware. The red front door. If dark reds have too much blue in them they almost look purple. When picking out a red paint, I always go for the color of a red BMW. This one is Sherwin Williams's “Cherry Tomato.” The windows: We tend to pay a lot of attention to the architectural impact of windows. There are a lot of good examples of that here, most dramatically in that vertical window in the family room. We also installed a casement window on an inside wall just above the bridge walkway, looking into the nursery. I love putting windows inside a house. We’ve done it several times. One thing we hadn't done before is to put windows in the kitchen right between the wall cabinet and the countertop. The big wood wall. It was important to the Williams' to incorporate natural elements like wood beams and wood walls, but we did so with a chic twist that won't soon be dated. "A lot of people are doing rustic reclaimed wood walls, but they're a little more shabby chic or beaten up than ours," says Ann. "I felt like that trend might be out after a certain amount of years, but Dee took that idea and image, streamlined it, and made it modern." Two masters: This house is unique in that there’s both an upstairs master bedroom and a downstairs master. "Many older homes in Nashville are redone so that there’s an upstairs master, and the kids are downstairs," says Ann. "We weren't really comfortable with that concept so right now we’re downstairs, but in the future we can always change that around." Ann loves having two masters, too, because when her family comes to visit from California they have a beautiful guest space with their own bathroom. "They feel really comfortable, which is important to me," she says.
Challenges Faced: A due date. The Williams' put a contract on their house before they knew that they were pregnant with their first child, a daughter. "We thought maybe we’d move in and then have a baby," says Ann, "but we had no idea we’d be moving in with a two-week-old." To accommodate their impending new addition, we sped up the construction process as much as we possibly could. And even though it was stressful for the Williams to move into their new home with a newborn, Ann says it's the perfect place to wait out the winter doldrums with a babe in arms. "There's so much natural light. It’s sort of an indoor/outdoor vibe so you don’t feel like you’re cooped up, which is great with a newborn because I am cooped up, but it doesn’t feel like it." The garage door. We've done garage doors well in living spaces many times before, but we'll admit the Williams' garage door, which opens from their family room to their back deck, didn't go over quite how we envisioned. We thought that, when opened, the door would just go straight up and stay flush with the wall, but it ended up being sort of cocked out. And because the hardware is really rough, they worried it would end up injuring their daughter. Says Ann, “We love the concept of the garage door, and once we open it up we’re like, 'How can we not have this?!,' but the motor and hardware is just really obvious and it kind of takes away from the lighting and the windows." We’ve worked out a new design that involves a pair of French doors surrounded by windows. We'll have them installed in time for the 12South Home Tour. The Happily Ever After: This house shares the same ingredients that most all of our homes do—exposed rafter tails, a steep roof pitch, wraparound porch, ceiling beams, and clipped ceilings upstairs—but this one came out of the oven especially delicious. In fact, this is probably my favorite home we’ve finished. It’s striking. The scale of it fits the street, and it looks so happy with that red front door. Plus, the flow of it is great, revealing things to you as you go along. Our floor plans are pretty much open; we don’t have a lot of wasted space with hallways. But that means there’s a danger that you open the front door and immediately see the whole thing. The way we configure our homes we try to make it an experience. As you walk through this home it goes from a two-story space to a compressed space in the kitchen and then back up into a two-story space in the family room. It feels natural. "Everything is out of the ordinary,” says Ann. “I like to have something different than other people, and I really wanted that to be shown in our house—for our personalities to come through. … This isn't a home we'll be in for just a few years. We are planning a long stay here." --Dee Bynum |
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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