Driegen Designs

Functional Interiors That Tell Your Story

We renovated the entire main floor of this 1920's four square. We removed a structural wall between the kitchen and dining room in order to expand the foot print of our kitchen, installed new flooring throughout the entire area to make the space feel bigger and more cohesive.

We added back in some features that would have existed when the home was built, like the arched opening between the living room and dining room and a fireplace in the living room. We embraced a timeless aesthetic with shaker style cabinetry in the kitchen and entry way and used oak throughout the space as that is what the original floors would have been made out of, but added in modern details to make the entire space more functional.

The result is this light and easy space, that feels lived in and not too fussy, filled with colour and pattern and life.

See the before images and read more about the details that went into this project here! (back link to blog)

What we achieved

This project was extra special as I was my own client! I bought this house with my partner over ten years ago, so suffice it to say I had A LOT of time to consider what needed to change to make it more functional. We had always wanted to do a main floor renovation to make the kitchen bigger and the flow of the space better.

The biggest hurdle that we constantly ran into in this century home was that there was zero storage. There was nowhere for coats and shoes in our entry, and a kitchen with two tiny drawers and a couple of very inefficient cupboards accounted for all the storage on the main floor.

A previous owner had also done some extensive renovations to our home sometime in the late 80s, removing a lot of the historical features, so on top of making the space more functional, we also wanted to bring back as many nods to it's 1920's build date as possible and preserve the few features that were still left.