It’s hard to put a personal stamp on a house when every house in the development looks exactly the same — same facade, same builder-white paint, same kitchen cabinets, same room layout.
But Heidi Johnston, co-owner of the Secret Garden Salon in Warrenton, Va., embraced the features of her new home in the Whites Mill development and expertly added her own touches to lift it out of builder grade and into designer territory.
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The first thing she did was replace the “plainest, ugliest” interior door hardware with oil-rubbed bronze knobs. “Just changing those over made a huge difference,” she said. “It wasn’t expensive, but it makes a big impact.”
The builder-white paint on the dining room wainscoting, on the other hand, is still there. But she painted Benjamin Moore’s Hazy Skies on the upper walls and had the room wired for sconces so she could hang her antique lighting.
In the kitchen, she kept the cabinets as is, but added a tumbled marble backsplash as her design statement. She also replaced the solid pantry door with a glass-paned door.
“It gives the room a whole other dimension, because it feels like an extra room — and it forced me to organize my pantry, which is not a bad thing.”
The adjoining great room is a vaulted two-story space with lots of light, which was appealing to her, but as is typical with these rooms, it left her with a gigantic wall to fill. Built-ins were the answer, but she couldn’t afford the customized work of master cabinetmakers.
Instead, she ordered a semicustom unfinished unit from Bare Woods in Warrenton that she had painted and glazed, and the custom-looking result cost less than a third of the real-custom price.
The large space above the mantel was easier to tackle: A huge antique mirror that has followed her through all of her homes in the past decade just happened to be the perfect size.
She brought the scale of the room down by creating a “ceiling” of sorts: The drapes, mirror and built-ins rise up to the same point. “It cozies it up a little bit,” she said.
Johnston’s current house is the latest of her design efforts. She had already gained a large online following when she posted images of her previous house in the same development on HGTV’s “Rate My Space” site. She had never liked that house, with its small, dark rooms.
“Almost immediately when I got in that house, I didn’t like it,” she said. She approached that old house like a decorator, spending thousands of dollars to repaint kitchen cabinets, install plantation shutters, add built-ins and have walls custom painted.
“I did all this work because I thought it would make me like the house more, but I always hated it,” she said. The hard work paid off, however, in the form of a contract after just five days on the market last spring, when the real estate market was at rock bottom.
Her current house came on the market soon thereafter, and she got a bigger, lighter, more open house for less money than she sold her previous one for. Not only that, she notes, but it already had elements such as plantation shutters and custom blinds throughout, so it needed little improvement once she moved in.
“I didn’t feel like I was downgrading just to get in a bigger home,” she said. “Now, I’m in here and I’m decorating and having fun, which is what I’ve always wanted to do.”
