Menlo Park

SEN Creative

• Interior Designer

Applied products

Margot Ottoman CR Laine

Nelson Chair CR Laine

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The homeowners were starting a family and decided it was time to leave San Francisco so bought a 5-bedroom house in Menlo Park that was built in 2009. The home has high ceilings and lots of windows. Although not that old the finishes were dark and heavy and felt very Italian from a scary Game of Thrones spin off.

photo_credit SEN Creative — SEN Creative

The homeowners are very into the outdoors and spend a lot of time in Hawaii (where the wife grew up). They were expecting their first baby when we started the project and were working remotely from there as the pandemic was just beginning. They purchased a pretty traditional home but ideally wanted a clean, modern house filled with daylight and a neutral color palette with lots of natural elements like wood tones, texture, and accents the bring the outdoors in.

Interior designer Susie Novak likes marrying modern and traditional in interiors. With her team she took a very traditional home and put a modern and clean spin on it. “In the Bay Area we are often working will older architecture and it has an influence in the design,” says Novak. “This house was not that old but we really needed to connect the homeowners style with the bones of the house by adjusting the finishes. We wanted to keep as much as possible so chose to paint the cabinets, replace tile and countertops where possible, paint the walls and switch out the lighting.”

In the mostly white kitchen, the herringbone backsplash brings in a lot of texture, which adds visual power.

The interior designer chose materials that are durable and went with a neutral color palette with pops of black to bring in contrast. She used high performance materials such as Inside Out fabrics that are stain resistant and very family friendly.