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Room of the Day: Light-Toned Wood Connects a Bright New Great Room
A smart solution opens up a compartmentalized home and creates a user-friendly great room with a strong link to the outdoors
Location is important, but it’s not everything. This empty-nest couple from Minnesota experienced that firsthand. They loved the access their home had to the park across the street, but they hated the dark 1990s tract home’s interior and its compartmentalized floor plan. So architect Eric Odor came up with a solution. Instead of adding square footage, he suggested opening up the floor plan so the house feels bigger with a bright, airy great room at the center of everything.
Moving the kitchen to where the living room once stood was a key change. A combination of fixed and operable windows over the sink offer cross ventilation and views of the park across the street. A long window seen on the upper right side of this photo allows morning light inside, but at a height that provides privacy from neighbors.
Cabinets provide storage but also delineate spaces and create privacy in place of walls. The large center island helps define the kitchen from adjoining spaces and includes lots of well-organized drawers with dividers and racks on the back side. The built-in bench seen at the right side of this photo includes a handy shelf below for storage of cookbooks.
The frosted glass front door with transom window above it is at the left side of the photo. An alcove by the door has a built-in bench and cabinets for storage of keys, mail and other daily living essentials.
Cabinets provide storage but also delineate spaces and create privacy in place of walls. The large center island helps define the kitchen from adjoining spaces and includes lots of well-organized drawers with dividers and racks on the back side. The built-in bench seen at the right side of this photo includes a handy shelf below for storage of cookbooks.
The frosted glass front door with transom window above it is at the left side of the photo. An alcove by the door has a built-in bench and cabinets for storage of keys, mail and other daily living essentials.
BEFORE: This photo of the original kitchen and its one small window over the sink gives a sense of how dark and confined the rooms were.
AFTER: The open living room took the spot of the old kitchen. An 8-by-8-foot window flanked by glass-pane doors provides views of the backyard and floods the space with light, which is amplified by the maple ceiling panels and hickory floors.
An inviting seating area with sectional sofa includes a fireplace with a black oxidized steel surround. A flat-screen TV and thick floating maple wood shelf sit above. Maple cabinets provide storage for entertaining supplies and media components.
An inviting seating area with sectional sofa includes a fireplace with a black oxidized steel surround. A flat-screen TV and thick floating maple wood shelf sit above. Maple cabinets provide storage for entertaining supplies and media components.
This view into the living room is from the master bedroom located a few steps up the new open staircase, which features steel handrails and cables. Recycled fir beams from an old warehouse in Duluth, Minnesota, were used for the stair treads.
Taken from the backyard, this photo shows the strong connection the great room (on the right side of photo) enjoys with the outdoors, thanks to the new windows, creative design and open floor plan that transformed the home.
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Great Room at a Glance
Location: Northeast Minneapolis, Minnesota
Who lives here: An empty-nest couple
Size: About 550 square feet (51.1 square meters)
Architect: Eric Odor
Odor removed interior walls, reconfigured the layout and added windows to create the new light and airy great room, which has better connection to the backyard. Hickory hardwood floors and a run of maple wood ceiling panels visually connect the kitchen, dining and living areas.
An artist friend of the homeowners’ painted the artwork in the dining room; the piece helped inspire the color palette in the new great room.