A renovation inspired by Italian travels. Welcome to 3107 Beech.

Covid is a bitch and this house was even bitchier.

This home had a story that I couldn’t get out of my head. When I saw the house I immediately loved its design. Then a met the owners son and realized his mother, the actual owner of the property, had passed away unexpectedly while she was at a grocery store. Can you imagine? This had to be an awful thing to deal with. The home sat vacant for a number of months going through different potential investor buyers all trying to make the property work, but no one wanted to take the risk. With the design that I couldn’t get out of my head combined with knowing the son was struggling a bit with the home – I just had to make this project come to life. As I mentioned in my post about 1869 Ridgeland, I am a number and design fanatic. I honestly let my numbers slide on this home a bit – that combined with purchasing the home right before covid put me in a very tight spot… but my design was not compromised.

The inspiration for this design was influenced heavily by a trip to Portofino, Italy. I first saw the property coming back from a vacation. The homes in Portofino dotted along the coast were just magical. Not that I was able to go in these properties or see if they had modern or classic designs but the pure vision looking up to the homes from the ocean sent my imagination into overdrive. Something about their style and charm enamoured me. On the way home, while in the airport, I picked up the italian version of Architectural Digest. That magazine gave me more glimpses of modern italian design. The inspiration in these articles combined with my imagination of the beautiful portofino homes and the story of 3107 Beech – was all I needed to know. This project had to be completed.

After I purchased the home – demolition immediately began. It was January 2019. I have renovated a few homes at this point and one of my joys of renovating older homes is finding old photos, letters, clothes, or even and in this case, old newspaper articles from March 2nd, 1949 in The Atlanta Journal (link only available in the USA) with its slogan “covers dixie like the dew” indicating in bold letters a B-52 had circled the globe in 94 hours. Sadly the news paper was so old it crumbled to the touch and we (the builders and myself) couldn’t read many of the articles.

After demolition started, it very quickly came to a halt. We were in the middle of requesting permits from the local planning and permitting office in Decatur, Georgia when covid shut everything down. (In Italy, specifically Puglia, my planning and permitting office would be similar to our Communè, from my current understanding). As everywhere in the world, when covid was announced, everything closed and workers were dispersed… trying their best to work from home. Though a construction crew cannot do much while staying at home. A normal process of requesting a permit, that would have taken at most an hour of my time, ended up taking us almost 5 months. It was sometime around May or June before this construction permit was ever approved. The delay caused a major budget crunch that was not anticipated but it did put me in the middle of summer. The positive of this is that I actually got to see the previous owners landscaping. My idea when we purchased the home was to take out everything and start from scratch. After seeing the blue Hydrangeas bloom and the massive holly bushes and magnolia trees that covered the grounds – I immediately went into ‘save’ mode and did our best to renew the landscape and save as much as we could.

Finally, we are near June 2019 and the permits were approved and demolition started again. This home was taken to the studs and even the sub floor in the bathroom was taken out.

Putting the guts of a home back together is the least fun experience in the entire remodel process in my opinion but it is also the most important. Regardless of how beautiful a home is – if the electrical, plumbing, or mechanicals of a home do not function properly I do not care how nice it looks as I am going to have to rip everything out to fix those issues. This blog is about beauty, design, art and creativity so we will not be describing any of the internal details here… Finally we are putting the home back together and this is where my vision comes to life!

I took this classical and otherwise boring dated home with a western vibe and transformed the space into the perfect balance of modern american ranch with a touch of european design. One of the things I loved about my travels in Italy was the use of lots of micro-cement. I honestly could not tell you the difference between micro-cement and regular cement other than the end product look. Regular cement appears rough and unfinished. Micro-cement appears more smooth. It can have a variety of finishes and colors (as I assume regular cement can as well) and for lack of a better term, microcement just appears more … ‘finished’.

In this home I decided I wanted a micro-cement shower. My contractor at the time had never completed a shower like this. We had to bring in a ‘cement specialist’ to guide him on how the process should be completed. That was the easy part. To get the micro-cement I ordered four, 70 lbs bags that ‘had’ to be shipped from europe. Maybe the cement did not have to be shipped from Europe but neither of us knew how to find it in the US. After a few hundred US dollars to simply ship the product… My cement was delivered about a week after I placed the order.

This is the end product and despite all the hassle and technical issues of getting a cement shower built on top of a wood framed house (another palm to face moment) I think my end product turned out absolutely perfect.

After the shower was complete, the finishing touches came together quickly. I chose a Avanity HARPER- 60-inch Double Basin Bathroom Vanity made of solid teak wood that I found at HomeDepot in the US. I removed the black handles that came with the vanity and placed brass cabinet pulls on them to match the wall sconces I chose for lights. The black and brass sconces I purchased from Amazon. Check out the link to the right on Amazon.it for a similar product.

The vanity required a customized counter-top. I chose to continue the same countertop I had in the kitchen which is a white marbleized quartz countertop. It appears similar to calcutta marble but much less expensive for my renovation. Over all my bathroom design is one of my favorite features in this home.

While in Italy one of the best things to do when I am at an airbnb or eating out at a local restaurant is to “Dine alfresco”. When I was looking at the floor plan of the home and all the outdoor decks, I wanted to make the deck space more apart of the home. One of the ways I did this was by taking the black stain I used on the interior wood and used the same color on the deck. I also added a ‘pass-through’ window in the kitchen to the outside bar. This allows for easy serving when entertaining outdoors.

Another key features in this home we saved was the vintage wood burning oven. Originally this room was a garage and when it was first renovated and opened up to the house, the previous owner created a step down from the dining room to the living space (formerly the garage area). It created separation and limited functionality. We decided to raise the floor and make it level to the fireplace. Luckily for us the fireplace was level to the remaining home. Once we had the new solid oak floors woven into the old floors, visually this created a seamless transition and a grand feeling in what was otherwise a small space.

Below are the final listing photos. I hope you love this design as much as I do. If there are other details of the home you would like to know or that I may have left out – please feel free to comment below or DM me on Instagram.