Tellico Village Lake House
Powder Room
All complete home renovations have to start somewhere. In the case of one of our recent clients, that first step was the powder room. To call it an eyesore would be an understatement, but by the time we were finished with it, we had helped turn a 20-year-old design nightmare into a brand-new dream space.
The home’s new owners were looking to relocate from California to Tennessee, and they hired us to do an overall facelift of the house, which was built in Tellico Village in 2000. I’m sure it was quite a looker back in its day, but the home had not aged well.
But our clients, a couple of empty-nesters who planned to continue working remotely as they approached retirement, recognized the home’s potential and practically bought it sight unseen. They were part of a recent mass migration of West Coasters who were attracted to the Volunteer State for its lack of state income tax and purchasing power. Here, a family can buy a waterfront lot on Tellico Lake and a McMansion for less than the cost of a tiny California bungalow. And in this particular case, that included a boat dock!
It’s fair to say, however, that they didn’t buy this place for its previous aesthetics. I’m sure they wouldn’t have walked into the powder room with the scary wallpaper and said, “This is the one for us!” But in their case, the appeal of escaping California and moving to gorgeous East Tennessee won out in the end. And in Tellico Village, they benefited from an instant community of friends (many of whom were also either retirees or remote workers) as well as immediate access to golf courses and a beautiful TV lake.
All that being said, there would be no entertaining in this house until it got a makeover. We actually did a lot of work before the family even moved in, beginning in the summer of 2021. Because we were still in a pandemic, and because we started work before the family moved out from California, we did a lot of planning from afar, including Facetime videos, FedEx packages, etc. Never before had we made such improvements without first meeting the client in person. But that’s all part of what you get when dealing with our full-service Knoxville interior design firm.
As many strikes as the powder room had against it, we did get lucky in some respects. The square footage was more than ample; no cramped powder room here. It also had a window, plenty of ceiling height and even a closet. We assembled our team, which included a general contractor and a painting crew, and got to work on phase one of this home’s gigantic face lift.
The first thing we did was perform an exorcism on that wallpaper, which required a lot of stripping (of the wallpaper, not the work crew). Don’t get me wrong; I love wallpaper, and I would have even been in favor re-papering the powder room. But our clients were too traumatized by the old paper to go down that road again (believe it or not, the wallpaper in one of the basement bathrooms was even scarier).
Since they couldn’t be convinced otherwise, we picked out a paint called Monorail Silver (SW 7663) from Sherwin Williams. Our friends at McLain’s Painting in Knoxville came in and worked their magic. The color wound up being perfect. It had that ethereal vibe that can actually change shades, depending on the light.
We did wait until we met our clients in person before we selected custom furnishings, window treatments and rugs for the powder room as well as the rest of the home.
At that point, we replaced the powder room’s old, sad window swag (stripes are back this year, but not those stripes) with a custom-tailored valance. We realize that privacy is a virtue in a powder room, but the natural light through the window flowed nicely into the hall; it was too pretty not to leave the door open. However, we did keep the cellular shades to ensure privacy when needed.
Honestly, pretty much everything else in that powder room had to go too — the toilet, vanity, floor and even the door hardware, hinges and all. We updated the lighting, installing sconces instead of a bath bar. For the floors, we chose engineered hardwoods that flowed into the rest of the house. Ordinarily, hardwoods could be a risky choice in a powder room, but this house had so many other bathrooms that we decided the existing shower would rarely be used, so it was not a problem.
The new quartz-top vanity, the mirror with Lucite framing and the aforementioned sconces, along with our selection of art and other accessories, went a long way toward rounding out the powder room and making it a welcoming interior space.
As I mentioned, this was the first step in a complete makeover that would carry over into early 2022. It’s just a sneak peek at what our Knoxville interior designers would do in the months to come. Look for more of this same project in future blog posts.
