Organic Primary Suite Addition

Let’s talk about the primary suite at Project Through The Woods. If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll remember that my parents bought the house next door to me and it needed a lot of attention. We took the entire house down to the studs and even added onto the original house to create their forever home, and today we are talking about their dream primary suite renovation.

The goal of this design was to give my parents a primary suite that felt airy and calm, with a spa-like bathroom and two walk-in closets, one for each of them. However, the original primary suite had one closet, a tiny bathroom, and a dark and dingy bedroom. In order to give them the luxurious feeling they were looking for, we decided to extend the footprint of the house by pushing the exterior wall out as far as we could to create the space we needed for a proper retreat. 

Where it started:

By opening up the walls and adding windows throughout, we were able to create a backdrop for the primary suite of my parents’ dreams that is filled with natural light. Once we expanded the space, we used the majority of the original primary bedroom and bathroom to create the new bathroom and closets, and the newly added space was devoted to the new bedroom.

The New Design

One of our favorite aspects of this room is the layered and earthy feel it has. To achieve this, we chose all of the furnishings and finishes in a very tight color palette centered around creams and earth tones. In addition to that, we used natural materials like wool, linen, and wood throughout the design. We’re obsessed with these linen curtains, they add a feeling of effortless style to the room and they are the perfect shade of neutral. We also love adding something that is more time worn when designing a new space like this bench to give the room a collected and lived in feel. Natural materials infuse a grounding feeling to a room and we try to incorporate them whenever possible.

Minimal Bed Styling

To keep with the effortlessly organic vibe we were aiming for with this room design, we went simple with the styling on the bed. Trends have been moving towards more simple bed styling, moving away from the mountains of throw pillows we were seeing a few years ago (husbands everywhere rejoice). We have been leaning that way with our bedroom projects for a while now because in reality, most people don’t want to throw all those pillows on the floor at night just to put them back on in the morning. Our trick to get a finished looking bed is to replace all of those throw pillows with one extra long lumbar pillow. We place this in front of our clients’ actual pillows and the styling is done! It’s such an easy way to upgrade your bed styling and give it that finished designer look, plus it’s way more cost effective.

The one we used in this project was custom, but we’ve linked some of our favorite long lumbar pillows for you below:

Left column: woven leather | geometric | tiger print | squares | black vintage

Right column: stripes | side tassels | marigold | velvet fringe | painted stripes | textured

Airy + Organic Bedroom Styling

As with any design, contrast is important so we made sure to incorporate a few finishes that would pop against the neutral backdrop. The light fixture helps to fill the space of the high ceiling, and the nightstands and lamps anchor the bed. We carried the dark accents throughout the metals in the room like the mirror and the curtain rods, and then left everything else light, bright and airy.

Check out the links to everything we used in the room below:

curtain rod | curtains | pendant | fiber art | lamp | nightstand | upholstered bed | rug (similar) | bench (similar) | mirror | lumbar pillow (similar) | throw blanket

Sometimes a design project requires us to think about moving walls and expanding in order to give our clients what they are asking for. In this case, we had no choice but to add on to the square footage of the home so we would have enough space to work with to create a spa-like experience for them. Now, saturated by natural light from all the windows and surrounded with organic textures and materials, this primary suite renovation gives my parents the luxurious resort feeling they were after, without having to leave the comfort of their own home to find it. See more on instagram at #projectthroughthewoods!