Basement

The glossy turquoise extends across the ceiling of the pantry, which has its own festive bar ambience. As you can see, the stone veneer continues in here, adding to the illusion of an old wall. Cabinets: Crown Point Cabinetry

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Trader Vic’s and crusty sea shacks inspired these tiki-collecting homeowners to display their favorite things and go wild with color.

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Focused on family. The rec-room vibe lives on in today’s lower levels, with games, movie nights and playrooms playing important roles in the design. Here, family photos in matching frames add to the family-friendly spirit in the basement.

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office space

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Closed storage. There still needs to be space in a finished basement for a lot of stuff. Extensive cabinetry hides sports equipment, holiday decorations, out-of-season clothing and more here.

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Hiding mechanical stuff. Basements are inevitably full of unsightly things, like water heaters, furnaces and fuse boxes. In this space, the designers cleverly hid the fuse box by boxing it out and adding a cabinet door.

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Poker Table: There’s plenty of room for comfortable armchairs in this refined basement, which has a feeling of an old-school men’s club that everyone can enjoy, whether they are playing five-car stud or Candy Land.

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Brick walls

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Layout

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“It was also important to the clients to have a just-for-kids space where they could be creative,” Conroy says. When the homeowners have families over, the adults can congregate in the main living space while the kids do crafts, play Ping-Pong or use the TV for Wii. The wall to the left has a blackboard on the top, a tack board on the bottom and a whiteboard just past it for their artsy endeavors. A long row of cabinets provides plenty of room to stash craft supplies and toys, and there is a sink in here for convenient cleanup. The craft table folds up and can be rolled into a nearby closet when they want to swap it out for the Ping-Pong table, which is stored in the large storage area and is easy to roll in and out.

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To let in the natural light, the team expanded an existing entry, excavating, adding 6-foot-wide glass sliding doors and creating a small courtyard with a fountain.

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Beyond the large sliding glass door is the guest room, which will double as a study in the future.

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[layout] The kitchen has room for storing snacks, making drinks and microwaving popcorn. The open drawer on the right side is a dishwasher. The cabinets are natural beech, and the counter is synthetic quartz.

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On the plan you can see how the program fits together. The main living space is in the middle, with the craft area at the top of the plan. A mini kitchen is toward the lower-right side, with the guest bedroom and its new courtyard on the bottom left. The laundry room is in the lower-right corner. Worth taking note of on the plan are the long sliding door that divides the guest room from the living room, the entrance the family uses when entering from the garage, and the vestibule that leads to the bathroom from two sides (the bedroom and the common areas).

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bar behind couch

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built ins

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window

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