Suburban Take on Modern Luxury

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Featured Homes

THE PROJECT: A three-story home in a highly desirable Anne Arundel County suburb. Built in the 1980s, this approximately 4,000-square-foot house required nearly every aspect of a modern renovation, including infrastructure concerns such as the mitigation of a prior ill-conceived addition and smart accommodations for the new HVAC system the project would require. 

THE PLACE: This professional couple with a young son found a great location for their family in Millersville. The neighborhood offered pockets of green spaces, and the property afforded the advantage of a private backyard that became more easily accessible through the optimization of a thoughtful floorplan that emphasized flow.

EXECUTING THE PLAN: The homeowners chose Taylor Hart Designs, an Annapolis- and Baltimore-based design/build firm that offers a full-service, concierge-model approach to whole-home interior remodeling projects. 

Sometimes it takes a fair amount of imagination and certainly just the right resources to totally reimagine what a home would look like with less walls, a more intentional floorplan, and the interior creature comforts that convert a mere house to a place that you can’t wait to come home to. 

Fortunately, our feature homeowners found that resource in a growing design/build enterprise that handles all aspects of the quintessential interior gut job.

Hart, who has a background in engineering and interior design, says her company sources all the required contractors, from home builders, to woodworkers, and associated trades, and then manages the entire project.

“We’ve been in business for 10 years and do mostly full-home renovations.”

In this particular case, Hart was looking to address three complete floors, and a fourth-level loft that would become a bedroom for the couple’s 4-year-old.

The Main Level

Hart describes this home as somewhat of a split level, but not in the traditional sense where the split occurs at the entry where you have a landing that goes either up or down.

“The house was a 1980s special,” says Hart, who explains upon first entering the house she could tell from its dated, small, patterned wallpaper and ceramic wall switch plates, that very little had been done to the home since it was built with the exception of the ill-conceived addition that only accentuated its series of small, dark rooms. 

Happily, the home’s entry provided the space to create a proper, welcoming foyer that leads to the residence’s formal living room. From there, she says, the original floorplan was anything but welcoming with a series of walled-in spaces that included a small, dark kitchen, and a dining room and home office area located in the addition to the home. 

The interior of the new entry was designed to showcase the homeowner’s Italian roots where items from her homeland could be displayed within the context of a more modern home with nods to little luxuries throughout. A subtle paper with a delicate, fresh design was used to highlight the ceiling and the couple chose to go with an engineered wood plank floor of white oak in a natural stain throughout.

Earth tones on the walls in the foyer and living room provide the opportunity for furnishings to make a statement with a clear injection of the homeowner’s personality shining through in the supple choice of lush velvet for the couch and chair, and the addition of a stylish Commerce and Market Frame Cocktail Table by Hooker Furniture to the grouping.

This area now has visual connections to the home’s kitchen and dining areas that it didn’t have prior to the renovation. 

“It was really a weird design that was not at all useful with nothing really connected to the main living space,” Hart says. In addition to the kitchen being painfully small and outdated, the newer add-on to the home further contributed to what turned out to be a series of disjointed small rooms.

“So, we just blew it all up,” Hart explains. “We put the kitchen into the dining room and office space, and then I ended up taking out an entire wall and adding a sliding glass door for outdoor access.” 

The result created the kitchen of the homeowner’s dreams with a huge center island, commercial grade appliances, custom cabinetry, and lots of natural light from the new windows that were designed into the plan.

“Whenever we design, the primary focus is always about getting light into the kitchen.”

Hart designed the cabinets herself and then had them fabricated at Woodworking by Design of Owings. And while the homeowner did request a solid marble for the countertops and island, Hart says, she felt she needed to recommend the more functional quartz for the homeowner, who is an accomplished chef in her own right. The stone was then run up the wall to create a seamless backsplash, with the exception of the area over the range where they then chose a painted 8x8 ceramic tile from Compass Tile in Annapolis to safeguard that part of the wall from the substantial heat of the range. 

Hart credits their in-house interiors expert, Deanna Gurri, for helping create the home’s showstopper of a dining room with its glamourous finishes, fixtures, and wallpaper.

The homeowner’s love of style and flair for color also played a prominent role in the form and function of this room. Hart says the homeowners wanted to do something different with the space and Hart knew she had some extra square footage to work with.

“The dining room was really fun because we used a William & Morris Strawberry Thief wallpaper in there that [the homeowner] loves, and then we were able to do the arched blue butler’s bar. 

This signature element was not part of the original room design, says Hart, but was built out from the wall to create a purposeful space for storage and be the highlight of any cocktail hour. 

The gorgeous Xavier chandelier by Crystorama, was a fortuitous find sourced by Gurri, which happened to have a blue shade option that exactly matched the pretty pale blue paint by Farrow & Ball that was chosen for the room.

Upstairs, Downstairs

This four-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath home would also realize improvements to its lower and upper floors. Downstairs, a cozy and comfortable family room with an attractive black brick fireplace wall replaced what Hart says was a totally underutilized and uninspired space that just had furniture sitting in it. Nearly the entire footprint would be reconfigured on this level taking storage and extra laundry room space and re-imagining it into a private office, an attractive mudroom where the family could transition in from the garage, and an amazing powder room clad in a bright, large-format floral paper with an exceptionally gorgeous vanity accented with luxe brass fixtures.

Upstairs, a quiet haven in tranquil tones was created for the couple’s primary bed and bath, and the youngest member of the family literally received the bedroom of his dreams. 

Hart says the homeowners expressed their concern that their son was consistently having trouble sleeping in his own bed in their prior home and they were hoping to address that issue with the new one.

So, Hart’s team set out to create an experience that would comfort and interest the boy by adding warmth with a cozy night-sky wallpaper on the ceiling and a bed where he could imagine himself camping out under the stars. “We had to make it magical, so he would sleep there,” says Hart, who adds she has since spoken to the homeowner about whether the endeavor was a success or not.

“And she replied, ‘Mission accomplished.’”