With soaring 14-foot ceilings and a generous floor plan of 9,179 square feet, this spec home in the Plantation Acres neighborhood of Plantation called for rich architectural detail and bespoke features to define its open-concept living areas.
The builder partnered with interior designer Fran Brady of Clive Daniel Home in Boca Raton in late 2017 to provide the design concept and furnishings.
“We had come on to the project when the home was almost finished construction,” Brady says. “We worked with the builder to add details and built-ins. We discussed with him a design approach in keeping with the style of the house. It’s a fine line that you work through accommodating what the builder’s taste is and what we think it should be from a design point of view. We complete the house with wallpaper, paint colors, built-in features and plan the layout for furniture.”
The project took about eight months from start to finish, and the new homeowners, relocating from Dallas, moved in last fall.
On a one-and-a-half-acre lot, the two-story home features a six-car garage; seven bedrooms, all on the main floor; nine bathrooms; and a home theater and a game room on the second floor. The challenge for Brady was creating a separate identity for each room in the home, which has a style she describes as “rural, relaxed California.”
The neutral color palette of gray-beige tones – warmed up with hues of caramel, cream, gold and copper – is carried throughout. For a consistent look in most of the rooms, the builder used Sherwin Williams Repose Gray paint, lightened up 25 percent.
“It’s a very easy color to work with,” says Brady. “It works with tones of beige or gray. It becomes a very neutral background.”
The floors are covered in 4-foot-square cement-gray porcelain tile, except on the stairs to the second floor and the office, where wood was used. Brady infused the neutral backdrop with visual interest by incorporating accessories, pillows, rugs, and art with texture and color.
Thanks to the open-concept layout, one sees both the living room and the dining room upon entering the home. The sight lines continue to the back of the house to the kitchen and its adjacent family room. So, the builder wanted to create a visual break between the front and back spaces. Brady accomplished this by installing rift-cut oak columns as a divider, stained to complement the home’s other finishes.
“The architectural element was suited to the style of the house,” Brady says. “It served the purpose of closing that opening.”
A dramatic feature that “turned out really pretty,” Brady says, is the wine room off the dining room. The space was intended to hold a wet bar, but the designer eliminated some of the cabinetry in the niched area and added a large piece of quartz, backlighting, glass doors and floor-to-ceiling wine racks.
“The really beautiful feature is the large slab of quartz that really stands out in the back of the room,” she says.
Taking cues from the wine room, in the living room opposite, Brady designed an eye-catching surround for the electric fireplace in dark-charcoal porcelain tile that “almost looks like basalt stone,” she says.
In the home office, she created a statement wall of lit niches to hold books and objets d’art. With the wall painted brown and cork wallpaper lining the niches – as well as a patchwork cowhide rug on the floor – the effect is dramatic, warm and earthy.
The family room behind the kitchen also features an eye-catching wall with textured wallpaper, built-in shelves, a recessed TV and a floating bench with fur-covered cushions.
Lighting plays a major role in a home of this scale. The high ceilings made substantial lighting fixtures necessary, Brady says. Three bold black-and-gold pendants hang over one of the kitchen’s two islands. The color combination – which also serves to introduce warmer tones into the kitchen, with its stainless steel appliances and dark lacquered cabinetry – is carried into the chandeliers over the nearby acrylic-and-glass dining table with banquette seating that overlooks the patio and pool.
Two linear chandeliers above the walnut dining-room table are not too bold, Brady says, and were placed close to the ceiling so as not to break the line of vision to the wine room. In addition to recessed lighting in the living room and hallways, soft light emanates from the floating ceilings.
In the master bedroom, a chandelier of natural onyx slices adds drama and an organic element. A large starburst chandelier in the master bath creates a striking focal point when looking down the hallway from the bedroom, in symmetry with a standalone tub between two walk-in showers.
Creating a distinct vibe for each of the seven bedrooms meant incorporating different types of bedding, accessories and artwork. Two of the seven bedrooms with attached baths were furnished as guest suites with king-size beds. In one, with a luxurious tufted-velvet bedding ensemble, a piece of modern art depicts a woman’s face divided into four acrylic panels, which appear to be floating.
“We wanted the art to make a statement,” Brady says, “but nothing that was too bold.”
The upstairs media room with a projection-screen TV and theater-style seating presented a challenge. With natural light coming in from four windows, Brady needed to darken the room enough for movie viewing and add acoustic elements to absorb sound. Her solution was creating acoustic panels, mounted on wood frames that slide on hardware like a barn door, to cover the windows when needed. The panels also add color and pattern to the walls.
The rich architecture, quality craftsmanship and top-of-the-line materials make the home exceptional, Brady says. It was designed “to be comfortable, sophisticated-looking, more of a timeless design with cleaner lines – nothing too fussy,” she says.
We’d say she accomplished her goal – and then some. O
