- Welcome back to "Houzz TV Live."
I'm Rick Spence, and joining me today
is Karen McAloon with x8 Property and Design
out of San Francisco and L.A.
You just did a remodel, well not even a remodel,
total gut job outside Joshua Tree.
This is one of the most amazing before and afters
I've ever seen in my life,
so I wanna walk through it with you
because it's just like,
it doesn't even look like the same place.
I mean, it's just crazy what you did to this place.
- Oh, thank you very much,
and thank you for having me today.
- Tell me about this home.
What would make you wanna buy a home like this?
- There has to be something really special
about the property, the house that makes it stand out.
This one was because Palm Avenue sits up on a little hill,
and it overlooks this valley, so the views are just amazing.
The sunset views, the sunrise views, it's just amazing.
And there was a lot of old growth on the property,
and especially out in the desert
where landscape can take decades
or centuries to grow in,
having an already established
landscape plan to work with is huge.
It was one bedroom, one bath.
It's about 650 square feet.
It had a pad, a concrete pad
that was a kind of covered patio,
but other than that, it was one bedroom, one bath.
Very small, very well loved.
- [Rick] Alright, so tell me what you did
to that main area, where the fireplace
and the little table is.
Let's walk through that first.
- That was the living room, with the fireplace,
but you had to enter the house through the kitchen
and then walk into the living room,
so it just made sense to open up that side of the house.
The fireplace was great, the room was a pretty good size,
and most importantly,
there were five or six mature palm trees
right out in front of that living room,
and you couldn't really see them,
and they weren't being showcased.
That's a natural feature of the house.
We didn't have to pay for those, they were already there.
So when I'm designing a space, I try and think
how can I take all the positives that are there
and then just enhance them?
We put in new windows, and then a front door
right in the center of that wall.
So now, as you approach the house,
'cause that's where the front door is,
you're kind of forced to look at
all of those great big palm trees.
It just frames out the entrance really nicely.
We got bigger windows, and I had the contractor
set them a little bit lower in the wall
so that as you're sitting on the couch,
that's where the sunset is.
That's the view of the sunset.
- Everything just looks so much more substantial,
and beautiful, and clean.
Just, I'm blown away, man, it's really awesome.
So was that, that's the concrete footing
that you guys just stained?
Or what'd you guys do with the floor in there?
- [Karen] Yeah, so there was
a linoleum floor covering over that,
and we just took that up, had the concrete pad.
We just polished that, shined it up.
It's kinda the style out in the desert, in Joshua Tree
because there's so much dust, and dirt,
and things like that.
It's also just the look.
Polished concrete floors are hot out there.
- One of your signature moves is the jute rug
with the rug on top.
I see you've repeated your signature move in this space.
- [Karen] It's the catch-all for all design.
They fit into any design,
they just bring an earthiness, textural quality.
They're easy to clean, they catch dirt,
they catch dust, they're just fantastic,
and then we threw in a couple of Moroccan rugs
to add a little bit of color,
but kept it pretty simple.
Again, with the concrete floors,
one of the reasons that people like them out in the desert
is when it gets hot in the summertime,
even with air conditioning,
you don't really want heavy carpeted floors.
You want some cool stone, concrete, that kind of thing.
- Absolutely, and I dig the couch.
Love that orange.
- [Karen] It's a bold couch,
and because the space is so simple,
it can handle really bold pieces of furniture.
- [Rick] Looks like you added some nice can lights in there.
Did you do anything technology-wise in the space?
- You know, the proper lighting can make any,
almost any place look amazing,
and the easiest way to do it, for me,
is those LED four-inch can lights.
I put the center of that recessed light
six inches away from the wall,
so what it really does
is it creates more of a wall wash kind of effect,
and I just put tons of them in,
and then you put 'em on a dimmer,
'cause that way, when you walk into the house,
and if the dimmer's on high, and you turn it on,
the whole room just lights up,
and because you're lighting the perimeter of a room,
it makes the room feel larger than it actually is,
and if you don't need that bright light
for task lighting, for cleaning, for whatever,
you dim those wall wash lights, and then that allows you
to have lamps, candles,
and really bring up other kinds of lighting
in the center of the room.
I am a recessed lighting fan.
- All right, let's move into the kitchen.
You took out some walls.
Tell me about the walls you took out
and how you opened this up to the main living space.
- There used to be,
between the kitchen and the old living room,
there was a pony wall.
It really blocked the flow of people
moving around that space.
It just, that pony wall made an already small space
feel even smaller, so I took it out.
The old entry door was in the kitchen.
Having that doorway there took away counter space.
I actually ended up putting the stove there,
so it just didn't make sense
to have an entry into the kitchen,
and you're in a small kitchen,
'cause then you're just taking away
your available workspace.
And then the rest, we just opened everything out,
put in some windows, bring in lots of air and light.
New cabinets, we used cement tile on the kitchen backsplash,
really fun, because they have more of a matte look to them,
so you can get really vibrant colors,
but because it's a matte finish,
they're not too shiny, and too bright.
They're eight-by-eight inch tiles.
We just rotated them around to create a pattern.
I wanted a little bit of blue in the kitchen
because I think that little bit of blue
kind of brings the sense of water to the desert
and just lightens it up a little bit.
- Yeah, I love the tile,
and I like the idea that it's not too shiny.
Works well with the wood,
and what'd you do for the sink in there?
- That is a concrete farmhouse sink.
So in every house budget-wise,
we have to go basic and simple,
and low cost on some things, like keeping the cement floors,
and the kitchen cabinets
were from a pretty straightforward, less expensive place,
but then I get extra money to splurge,
so I can do things like the Cafe stove.
I can do a cement farmhouse sink,
I can do the cement tile,
and then those are the things that pop
and stand out when you first come into the kitchen.
- [Rick] What about the open shelving?
We have cabinets below, but not really a whole lot up.
It's just open.
- [Karen] A couple of things.
Having open shelving above
keeps a small kitchen feeling more open.
It visually kind of lightens up the space,
and I think in today's day and age,
people are really getting away from this idea
that you have to have a ton of stuff.
You know, utilitarian,
kind of pots, pans, things down in the cabinets,
and then you're gonna have your pretty wine glasses,
your plates, your Heath Ceramic,
that kind of stuff you wanna put out and show it off,
and a lot of people are making their choice of dinnerware
part of their design and their decor,
so this just lets you show those off.
- Nice, like it.
All right, let's go into the master bedroom now,
'cause this place looks dramatically different,
but you didn't do that much physically to it.
You just made it look beautiful.
- [Karen] Yes, so that was another selling point
of this house.
Not every room needed
to be completely torn down and rebuilt,
and the master bedroom is a good example of that.
It had really strong bones.
It had a set of French doors, it had a good size closet,
so really all we did here
was take up the old carpet, polish the concrete floor,
we put on new closet doors,
we added all the recessed lighting.
You know, it's quality over quantity,
and so having an open, airy room just helps
make those pieces that you do choose to bring into your home
stand out even more.
- Great, let's go into
another well loved space, the bathroom.
- [Karen] We ripped everything out.
I was trying to fit a bathtub in there.
In the end, we just ended up keeping the same layout.
Where the tub was, there was a tub/shower combination.
We just made that a walk-in shower.
We put up a glass shower panel
to help keep the space feeling open, airy.
The sink stayed the same, but we changed out the vanity.
The toilet, we just replaced.
- [Rick] Tell me a little bit about the hardware.
- [Karen] So we put all new hardware in,
and over the sink, we did the in-wall faucet,
and what this does is allows more vanity top
and counter space, so as you,
you know, if you've got, if you're visiting
and you've got your little toiletry case
that you need to open,
if you've got all your bottles of lotions and potions,
not having the faucet on the deck of the vanity,
but by putting it up on the wall
really opens up for more usable space on the vanity.
- Yeah, it's great. It's practical.
That's somethin' to think about,
'cause I know I'm always
bumpin' into things with the handles.
All right, let's jump in to the little guest room you added,
where you added onto the concrete pad.
How much space is this?
It looks fairly small,
but this is like another bedroom here.
- So this was the old patio,
and we just enclosed it with walls, electricity,
insulation, and ceiling.
It's probably about seven feet wide,
I think about 14 feet long, so it's not huge.
Having the second bedroom served multiple purposes.
You know, there's two twin beds that fit into an L-shape.
You stack 'em up with pillows,
and now it's a lounge space.
You can put a TV in there, you can hang out,
you can be reading in there
separate from the rest of the house.
It's really a multipurpose room,
and by having the clerestory windows up high,
it allows the wall below it to be used for a lot of things,
like in this case, by putting all those pillows up
and being able to lean back against the wall.
If we'd had normal windows on that wall,
you couldn't really lean back against the windows.
Then, off on the main wall, we put in two huge windows,
the same windows that I put in the living room.
Those windows I placed
so that when you are walking into that second bedroom
from the dining room, you see the best view
out over the valley.
I literally had the contractor stand there
with the two-by-fours and move them around
until I found the perfect placement for these windows,
which I highly recommend if you are redoing a house,
and you're building it, remodeling it,
don't be afraid to do the weirdest, craziest things
and ask that of your contractor.
- Well congratulations, and thanks for taking the time
to walk us through it.
I can't wait to see more of your work in the future,
and come see in again, do a special,
and hopefully talk to one of your clients,
because you're doing such amazing work,
I know you've got some great stories,
and we'll stay in touch.
Thanks again, Karen.
- All right, thank you, Rick,
and thank you so much for having me.
I appreciate it.
- Absolutely, our pleasure.
See ya, 'bye-bye.