The Gridley Greenhouse 🌱

The Gridley family was gracious enough to let us help them tackle a design problem in their home. Their front door opened up to a large great room that lacked thoughtful space differentiation. The family felt that the large space made it difficult to designate spaces for certain types of gathering. Their family likes to watch sports together and they also love hosting, but felt that their current layout wasn’t providing the ideal set up for either. After understanding their pain points, we worked to pin down their goals for the space:

Create a more welcoming, cozy feeling in the home (hygge)
Design a better flow
Create designated space for a tv room and dining room
Create a space conducive to entertaining

We worked with the family to understand their design styles. Lisa is the plant lady! She has a fiddle leaf fig that is 10 feet tall and 45 live plants in her home! Lisa is from Southern California and gravitates towards a coastal style, but also likes to infuse modern elements. Chris is from Louisiana and favors pieces and themes that remind him of home. Keeping this in mind, we presented the idea of a double sided fireplace to split the room and give purpose for two spaces instead of one. The fireplace would have a light stone surrounding the firebox and a plaster overmantel with a wood beam mantle, combining the modern and country styles. The fireplace would also have a deep hearth to allow for seating around the fireplace to provide an added element of hygge.

Adding the fireplace properly divided the room and organized it into two spaces for different types of connection.

The Hygge House method is about design centered around connection. Our homes are the vessels for family relationships and in intentionally preparing these spaces for specific connections, we will spend more time with the people we love and be prepared to make lasting ties with them. The question we ask when designing spaces in a home is “How will you create an environment meant to further develop family relationships?” For the Gridley family, the tv room is now where they spend time cheering on the LSU Tigers and the Arizona Cardinals together. Their new dining space hosts their large extended family for Sunday Dinners and their breakfast nook provides an intimate niche for smaller family meals, game nights, and a morning coffee. They love to entertain and needed a space that reflected that value. Their renovated great room tackled all their initial goals and resulted in a beautiful, cozy room that all family members, including their 4 dogs, want to spend time in.