Garden-Level Apartment

Garden-Level Apartment Gets a Colorful Upgrade

Garden-level apartments don’t always get a lot of natural light and this apartment is no exception. This one-bedroom space is used as a city-version of a guest house—it has a full kitchen and it’s own entrance. And with a constant flow of guests, the very social owners felt it was time to treat their guests to an upgrade.

There was really only one major requirement and that was to keep the vintage dinette set (handed down from one of the owner’s grandmother).

Take a look at these before photos from the original house listing before you take a look at how we modernized the space and used a cohesive color story to add some cheery brightness throughout the apartment.

Original Listing Photos

Owner’s Existing Furnishings to Keep

Heirloom dinette set that we were asked to keep in space

Close up of dinette chair before

Cohesive Color Story

In such a small space, it made sense to carry a cohesive color story throughout the entire apartment. And given the garden-level apartment is almost subterranean, we wanted to keep a vivid and cheerful color scheme to give an illusion of brightness.

Nod to Vintage

Though we were modernizing the furnishings, we were asked to keep the vintage dinette set. In doing so, it had the potential of feeling out of place. So, we did two things: added a modern fabric to the chairs and added vintage style art work. In doing this we cross reference modern with vintage and kept the overall space feeling fun and contemporary.

It is hard to see in these photos, but the artwork over the sofa are vintage Hawaiian travel posters. Hawai’i holds a special place in the heart of the owners so it was a nice way to tie in the owner’s interests.

AFTER

Now let’s see what adding a bit of color and a cohesive color story can do!

Give us a call if you want to modernize any spaces within your home.