Before & After: A relatively simple — but significant — refresh of a Homestead condo

Refreshing a home doesn’t always mean tearing out walls or even replacing kitchen cabinetry. A two-bedroom, two-bath Homestead condo greatly benefited from a few kitchen modifications, a resurfaced fireplace, new furnishings and a bathroom remodel.

The kitchen exemplifies how homeowners can maintain existing wood cabinetry, without even painting it, and make it look and feel much more contemporary by updating the materials surrounding it.

Addie Pecord, owner of LA Studio & Co. in Edwards, and her team changed the area’s entire look and feel with a handful of relatively simple fixes. They replaced busy granite with white quartz. For the backsplash, they employed clean, white porcelain subway tile to replace a mix of tile that was set both diagonally as well as in rows.

“I chose white because we were working with the existing cabinets, and I felt like that would be a clean, crisp contrast and just make everything feel a little bit brighter and lighter,” she says.

They updated the knobby hardware with handles and opted for a straight molding, as opposed to the former, decorative crown molding.

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“We cleaned it up, and, then, once we swapped out the cabinet hardware, it looked like a brand-new kitchen,” she says.

To complete the updates to the kitchen, they removed a decorative corner shelf, also set diagonally as homeowners entered the kitchen, opting for an end panel to support a cleaner look overall. They also squared off the previously rounded peninsula.

After painting the golden walls white and adding two bar stools without backs so they neatly tuck into the relatively smaller space, the kitchen now looks completely contemporary, prior cabinetry and all.

“It changed the entire look of the kitchen, and it actually accentuated the cabinets and the beauty of the wood just by adding the contrast and cleaning up the overall look of it,” she said.

In the living room, the fireplace radiated a more traditional look, with its dark wood mantle surround, featuring curvature within both sides of the wood, along with yellow paint on the drywall below the mantle, highlighting the bronze door trim. Pecord resurfaced the fireplace with light, contemporary stone, frameless glass and a simple wood mantle. She placed a large television above it all to replace a small television, which previously stood perched upon an awkwardly placed console.

“Now have more of a lounging area,” she said. “We just reconfigured it to better utilize the floorplan. The homeowners wanted to maximize the seating because it’s a smaller space, and we wanted the space to feel lighter and brighter, so we went with lighter colors and mixed in a little bit of leather and metal and brought in some of that wood tone to tie into the rest of the home. I like to bring in metal just because it ties into the fireplace, and then I liked adding the wood in with all of the lighter colors because it adds that contrast and warmth.”

She also points out that it’s often more comfortable to offer two separate chairs to guests, particularly if they’re not a couple, as opposed to a loveseat.

“So, for entertaining, it’s better, and I also think just having smaller blocks of furniture makes the space feel more open. And then we were able to add that additional part to the sofa because we gained that extra space from moving the TV from that entertainment console in the corner,” she says.

The bathroom was originally a Jack and Jill, which she closed off to create a closet. The team swapped out all of the dated, Formica countertops and wood-trimmed cabinetry, and increased the height of old-style, shorter vanities. Additionally, the bathrooms benefited from large-scale, 12×24-inch porcelain-tile flooring, as opposed to 4×4 tiles, as well as new porcelain tile and glass doors in the shower, rather than a curtain.

“Working with some of the existing elements of the home and just adding and updating where we could made it feel like it was in our current times,” she says.

The project underscores how relatively small changes in a kitchen, bathrooms and furnishings can significantly update a condo, or even a larger, single-family home.