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Expansive basement makeover wins top design awards
An interior design plan for an 2,500-square-foot unfinished basement recently captured two top national honors for Burke-based Sun Design Remodeling Specialists. Converting the open footprint of a five-year-old production house into a family sports and entertainment suite won the firm both a Chrysalis Award and a Master Design Award.
Conferred by the editors of Better Homes and Gardens and other consumer magazines, the Chrysalis Award is one of the remodeling industry’s most prestigious prizes; the Master Design Award, sponsored by Qualified Remodeler Magazine, is a competition in which winners are selected by practicing professionals.
The winning design, executed for James and Kathleen White and their three children, presents a skillfully finished suite of rooms that includes an indoor soccer court, a fully equipped fitness center, a state-of-the-art media room, a crafts room and a bathing spa. The solution incorporates all existing structural supports, often re-deploying them as finely crafted columns or architecturally appropriate bulkheads that help define the boundaries of specific activity zones.
The primary challenge, said Sun Design’s lead designer Liz Lee was to “scale down” the lower level’s massive volume while enhancing both available light and visual continuum.
Glass partitions, knee walls, transom windows, low-voltage accent lights and other devices were employed to “expertly accomplish these requirements,” judges noted.
Ironically, the makeover started simply as a search by the owners for a way to keep the kids' soccer ball out of the main level family room.
“We had some exercise equipment in the basement, so it made sense to confine soccer to the downstairs also,” White recalled, adding that she and her husband had begun thinking seriously about what to do with the lower level almost two years ago but couldn’t come up with a working plan.
“Liz Lee’s floor plan was logical and disciplined,” White said. “She had great ideas for where main rooms should by located and showed us lots of sketches on how the finished interior might look. This really helped us make informed decisions.”
One of Lee’s inclinations was to pay close attention to what the existing footprint implied.
“There were certain issues in the existing area -- light sources, plumbing -- that seem to dictate obvious choices,” Lee said. “But we also wanted the finished interior compatible with the architectural style of the existing house.”
Although the new space contains eight primary activity zones, only the bathing spa and guest room are contained within four walls. The larger challenge, Lee observed, was to define separate activity areas while preserving sight lines and fully exploiting limited natural light.
On this score, the guest accommodation was located in the floor plan’s southeastern corner since converting a small door to a window would qualify the converted space as a bedroom under county code requirements. Likewise, the recessed base support to an upper-level chimney suggested a natural site for the soccer court’s main focal point: the goal.
In other ways, though, activity zones are less formally consigned. Sports and games are on the western side of a central north-to-south hallway; the media center, gym, guest quarters and wet bars are concentrated in the southern half. This modular design, Lee noted, means that rooms can acquire new uses as needs arise.
Soccer anyone?
One of the project’s most pressing technical challenges was specifying floor and wall coverings for the soccer court. The design team found little available literature on indoor soccer court design, so they found a supplier to help research materials that would give the ball an appropriate “bounce back.”
The solution: melamine sheets fused into a laminate and joined by white spline to achieve a clean, seamless finish. The surface mollifies the return speeds one might expect from exposed cinderblock, even cushioning unintended body blows. Similarly, the flooring is made of modular tiles with a rubber-covered base molding.
White says the whole family participates in soccer; the kids even receive on-site coaching instructions.
Other activity areas:
1. A media room with a recess built to support first-level bay windows provided a perfect niche to hide the electronics that power the panel television, CD/ DVD consoles and other appliances. I-beams were concealed between architecturally appropriate headers. Accent lighting below the headers adds depth and ambiance.
2. A mini-kitchen and wet bar, centrally located for easy access from all directions, fit snugly in custom-designed cabinetry below the stairs.
3. A fully equipped fitness center partitioned from the room’s primary corridor by a glass wall gets used by everyone.
4. A master bathroom/ bathing spa adjoins the gym and is also accessible from the hall. Accessories include the Kohler Purist Wading Pool wet service lavatory, an open-bottom hand basin, a custom bathroom sink and wall-mounted faucet.
5. An arts and crafts room provides a place for parents and children to interact on projects. The program called for photo storage and a gift-wrapping station complete with dowels in an easily accessible open cabinet. An island with pendulum lighting provides a working surface that’s easy to maneuver around. Shelving and cabinets were custom-designed to meet use requirements.
So how does one contain the ruckus rising from the rumpus room?
An R-30 insulated ceiling keeps noises from rising to the upper level.
“Considering how much activity is going on down there, everything’s very peaceful in the rest of the house,” White said. “And, of course, that’s just what we wanted.”
Contact Sun Design staff at 703-425-5558 or SunDesignInc.com.
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