When designing a space, it’s normal to focus on what you don’t like and what you really want to change. But changes aren’t always as simple as a new carpet or a new coat of paint, and there may be features you basically don’t mind. For Joanna Gaines, it helps to think of such features as friends rather than enemies. During one of her mini renovations, she found an older built-in cabinet in the dining room, which she incorporated seamlessly into the new design by making it a central part of the room and replicating its shape in other places. “I was drawn to an original built-in cabinet that was tucked away in the corner of the dining room. It had a simple, scalloped detail that I found really interesting, so we made it the focal point of the project and mirrored that shape in other places in the house. I wanted to make it a focal point in the dining room, too,” she explained on the Magnolia blog.
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Sometimes the concern about keeping certain built-in features is that they waste space or make the home look dated, but a clever trick that will increase your home’s value is a little refresh. An outdated feature such as a sunken living room can be updated by using just two or three colors to make the whole room blend together. From a “wasted space” such as a random corner in the wall, floating shelves turn it into an additional storage area, giving it instant relevance.
Make it the focal point of the room
Dealing with an unwanted built-in usually involves covering it up. Some bizarre features you might find in an old home include telephone shelves and food elevators, for example, and it’s easy to just block them out or fill them in to modernize the home. However, Joanna Gaines takes the room’s interesting feature and makes it a focal point. “We painted the same dusty blue shade as the ceiling and trim to draw the eye to it,” she explains (via Magnolia).
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What makes this design so successful is that the colors are not as bold as the old design where the built-in was painted pure white and stood out more. Your design feels much more integrated. The wallpaper adds a pop while the built-in flows seamlessly along the wall. Even the vintage pieces in it help maintain that muted but charming look. The unit already had the potential to be the focal point so it didn’t need a bright color and blended well with the ceiling and trim.
Mirror the shape elsewhere in the house
“I’m a firm believer that every home has that special something – and good design doesn’t necessarily mean starting from scratch, but finding ways to tell more of that unique story,” explains Joanna Gaines on the Magnolia blog. One tip that’s helpful when decorating a new home from scratch, and that you can also use when redecorating, is to use the existing features as inspiration for the rest of the space.
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In this project, she does this by incorporating curves into the other rooms, as a nod to the wavy detail of the built-in appliance. In the breakfast nook, the table and shelving have rounded edges, and in the living room and dining room, curved mirrors, lightbulbs and chairs continue the shape. This way, the built-in appliance doesn’t look out of place and all the rooms retain the playfulness of the wavy detail. All of this goes to show that integrating existing built-in features seamlessly into a design is all about making the most of them, rather than hiding them or trying to squeeze them into something else.
