A home can have all the right details, from arched doorways and intricate crown molding to sculptural ceilings and custom woodwork, but still feel like it just doesn’t fit the people living there.
That was the case for a homeowner in Overland Park’s Gleneagles neighborhood, who told interior designer Maureen Lindstrom that while her home was beautiful, it no longer felt like her. “She just wanted to lighten it up, brighten it up,” Lindstrom says. “She liked having some spaces be moody and some spaces be bright, but she really just wanted it to feel fresh and current.”
In this home redesign, there were no walls removed and no major structural changes made. Lindstrom and her ML Designs team replaced carpet with hardwood floors in the entryway and living room, reworked the hearth room fireplace, swapped out lighting and hardware, added wallpaper and reimagined the furniture plan throughout, proving a space can be transformed without doing a full gut.
Working With What’s There
One of Lindstrom’s core values as a designer is to resist the urge to tear everything up. In this home, that meant identifying what was worth saving and seeing how she could reimagine it.
The staircase railing, for example, had beautiful lines but a bronzy, Tuscan finish that felt plucked out of 2007. A coat of black paint transformed it entirely—just as it did the interior doors. “It just gives it an automatic elevated look,” Lindstrom says.
In the living room, an existing blue grasscloth wallpaper was removed, but it was a decision that Lindstrom admits she didn’t take lightly. The wallpaper was cutting the room off visually, making the barrel ceiling feel low. By drenching the ceiling and walls in the same color, the eye travels upward and the architecture gets to breathe.
A built-in desk in the kitchen—”very circa 1990,” Lindstrom laughs—was removed and the space was converted to a beverage and bar center. The desk was salvaged and relocated to a bright corner of the living room, positioned behind the sofa where it now overlooks the garden.
Details That Do Heavy Lifting
Ask Lindstrom the most overlooked asset in a home refresh and she won’t hesitate: lighting.
“Lighting is like the jewelry of the home,” she says. “You can fill it with beautiful things, but if your lighting doesn’t give you those ‘wow’ moments, it just falls flat.” Her advice to anyone looking to make one update with the biggest impact is to change the light fixtures. Scale also matters; according to Lindstrom, undersized chandeliers are one of the most common design mistakes people make.
Hardware falls in the same bucket. Bold pulls on the new bar cabinetry, statement door hardware throughout and brass accents in the kitchen (including a new range hood and swapped-out drawer pulls) add impact without a major overhaul.
What was once a plain storage space got a facelift with French doors, mirrored panels to open up the tight footprint, custom cabinet doors and a lively leopard-print wallpaper. “She wasn’t afraid of color or doing a print,” Lindstrom says. “It just gives a fun little bit of whimsy.”
Trusting the Process
The primary bedroom is where Lindstrom and the homeowner took the biggest leap of faith. Lindstrom wanted to drench the room in a rich chocolate brown and paint the ceiling the same color.
“So many people are afraid of brown because they’ve had to take it out before,” Lindstrom says. The homeowner was hesitant, especially about the ceiling. But Lindstrom held firm. “I think we needed to paint the ceiling to really see the effect of the tray and to make it feel updated.” The room’s beautiful trim and molding were kept cream, and the vast wall of windows keeps it from ever feeling cave-like.
The carpet, a splurge, was a textural, warm-toned pattern that the homeowner fell in love with on the spot. An oversized bird print graces the wall above a custom bench, and it’s one of her favorite pieces in the house.
Pretty and Practical
Lindstrom returns to the same belief in each of her projects: A home has to work as hard as it looks. “Our motto is always to make it beautiful but also functional,” Lindstrom says. “Some people make it beautiful, but then it doesn’t function. It’s really important to us that it be both—that it helps make their day-to-day life easier but also brings them joy because it’s so pretty.”
In the hearth room, a set of built-ins the homeowner never loved were removed. Instead of slapping on some drywall in the empty space, Lindstrom had a custom bench built to fit the nook exactly, finished with artwork behind it. “She’s like, ‘that’s one of my favorite little spots now,’” says Lindstrom. “And it’s extra seating when the whole family’s over.” A potential eyesore became one of the most charming corners in the house.
