Tellico Village Lake House
Great Room Part I
You’ve seen the powder room, the kitchen, and the dining room. Next up, we’re sharing part one of the great room renovation. This was a remodeling and decorating project for some Californian clients who were relocating to Tellico Village. They bought a 20-year-old lakefront home with so much hidden potential underneath its dated appearance. In this next phase of the project, we were challenged with making the great room as beautiful as the lake views these homeowners moved across the country to enjoy. Aside from some much needed upgrades, the room was nice and open and had gorgeous windows.
Fireplace Fail
We started with the existing fireplace (pictured above), which was pretty darned awful. It was a whole lot of unattractiveness with moldings and other gobbledygook that made no sense, and the color of the marble was dated. One of my favorite things about this room (I use the term “favorite” sarcastically here) was the horrible, dated sconces that looked like flying saucers had crashed into the wall. Even worse, someone had decided at some point to paint over them with the same pea-green shade they had used in the rest of the room.
A Stone Solution
Our crew immediately tore down all of that old fireplace molding to start giving the grand fireplace a new look. We wanted to bring the outdoors in with stacked stone, so the homeowners and I took a trip to Stonehouse Solutions and selected that particular blend. We chose the exact colors we wanted to see in their house and had lots of great choices. We selected the shape and thickness of the stone, as well as the amount of grout we wanted. The owners got to personalize the whole thing, which was awesome.
Sometimes choosing a natural stone is an amazing investment, but in this case, we decided to go with a man made product. One benefit here was its lightweight nature, which meant we didn’t have to worry about pouring additional footers. Since there was a basement below the great room, the excessive weight of natural stone would have required a new footer, which would have been a nightmare to pour. In this case, the man made stone was a fairly inexpensive way to update the entire room, giving us a lot of bang for our buck.
Expert Updates
We replaced that dated-looking mantel with a new hand-hewn mantel stained to coordinate with the colors of the new flooring. And since we were redoing the entire fireplace, we decided to go ahead and install concealed wiring behind the stone for cable and electricity as well. The average homeowner may not think of those details, but that’s just one of the many advantages of working with our East Tennessee interior design team. We were able to make the fireplace much more functional. Lowering the mantel as much as possible without making it look stumpy and mounting a television gave this great room a whole new life.
Next, we had an electrician come in and get rid of those horrible lights, and our friends at McLain’s Painting gave this room a fresh coat of gray. In order to achieve our nice, quiet color palette, we used Mindful Gray by Sherwin Williams in a matte finish. This shade has the same ethereal vibes as some of our other favorite grays, although it doesn’t have as much of a green tint.
Beyond the fireplace, nothing about this room was doing anyone any favors, including the hideously dated ceiling fan. We bought a new, more modern fixture, and we replaced the existing carpeting with the same engineered hardwood flooring we were using in some of the other rooms, tying the great room in with the rest of the house.
When it was all done, we had wiped all the ugly — and the years — off of this great room, making it even greater. In our next post, we’ll tell you more about the work that went into this room’s transformation, including how we furnished such a grand space and made it as pretty as the Tellico Lake views it overlooks. Follow along on Instagram to be the first to know when Part 2 goes live.
