One Room Challenge- Final Reveal!

June 27, 2021

Today marks the end of the One Room Challenge and I am thrilled to share with you my completed home office renovation! It features two built in desks with custom cabinetry and a custom spalted maple desktop all designed and built by me; slat wainscoting and brick feature wall; pendant lighting over the desks instead of traditional sconces; and a seating area with a lucite console table.

First, I want to thank the One Room Challenge for organizing this event! for Twenty Featured Designers and hundreds of other Guest Participants (like me) have transformed a room over the past eight weeks. Also, special thanks to Better Homes and Gardens, the media sponsor.

Without further ado, I present my industrial modern home office! Can you believe that this is the same room? See the before picture below!

As you can see, we started with a completely blank space. Our house has surprisingly little built in storage for its size, so my goal was to create two custom built in desks with plenty of storage along the back wall. I could not find any suitable pre-made cabinetry, so I decided to build all of the cabinetry myself. I’ve never built cabinets before so this was definitely a challenge, but I am glad that I did because I was able to customize the height and depth of the cabinets. Also, custom cabinetry allowed me include a few unique design elements like the asymmetrical upper cabinetry in either corner!

The artwork on the feature wall is a photo taken by a family friend on the Bramante staircase at the Vatican Museum in Italy. It is the perfect finishing touch to the feature wall!

I included a seating areas for taking long conference calls and this corner had space for a faux plant, a real plant, a side table, and this gorgeous lucite console table. This wall was begging for piece of furniture, but I didn’t want to make this area look cluttered or cramped, so the lucite console table was the perfect design element that also adds visual interest. The arched mirror also makes the space look larger and reflects the built in desk area- a win/win!

The ceiling fan is from Matthews Fan Company. I saw this Lindsay fan on Instagram a few months ago at the beginning of my office renovation and instantly fell in love. I usually always prefer chandeliers over ceiling fans, but Matthews Fan Company makes incredibly unique fans like the Lindsay that are sculptural are pieces in their own right. When I reached out to Matthews Fan Company with my rendering of this office renovation, they embraced the concept and believed in my design. It was so heartwarming to have a company like that believe in me and this project. The Lindsay fits perfectly here in the office with its unique two blade design and I was thrilled to partner with Matthews Fan Company.

The built in bookshelf separating the desk areas was the perfect place for eclectic, modern accents. Over the past few weeks, I picked up accessories from Home Goods and Amazon that fit the overall feel of the room (sources on my Week 7 blog post!).

In the pictures below, you can see the veining in the spalted maple desktop that I built. Spalted maple is a rare type of wood that has partially decayed due to fungus before it is harvested. When the wood is dried in a kiln, it kills the fungus but leaves beautiful marble-like gray and black veins and holes in the wood. When we traveled down to Charm, Ohio to Keim Lumber to find lumber for the desktop, I had no idea that I would score this spalted maple! As soon as I saw it, I grabbed all of the boards that were left and we joined them together with a dowling jig and wood glue. I took the completed desktop to a local lumber mill and they used drum sander to mill it to a consistent 3/4″ thickness. The desktop was time consuming but completely worth it because it is an incredibly unique design element unlike any other desktop I’ve ever seen.

Thank you for following along with me on this renovation journey! I have followed the One Room Challenge closely for years, and being a guest designer this time has been a dream come true!