Photos courtesy of Marshall Evan Photography
“We used barn doors with modern touches of raw steel and polished chrome hardware,” Kern says. “This allows the two spaces to be separated in the event the guys wanted to watch different shows or if they had separate groups of friends over."
Each room in a home serves a different purpose, yet those purposes can drastically change as your children grow older. For the Carpenters, an Upper Arlington family of four, this notion became a reality when their now 16- and 20-year-old sons no longer used the basement as a play area.
“The basement was super old and dated,” Elizabeth Carpenter says. “It served its purpose for our kids growing up with all their toys and I didn’t care what they did to it. My husband and I figured it was time.”
“The main goal was to transform an old, outdated basement with an awkward floor plan into a masculine oasis with a feminine touch,” says Olivia Kern, project manager and designer at The Cleary Company.
Breaking the Man Cave Mold
As tempting as it may have seemed, the Carpenters did not want to just make their basement the stereotypical man cave.
“We didn’t want to do the trendy man cave thing and have a Buckeye room or another sports-themed type room,” Carpenter says. “We just wanted to have a space where we could relax and watch movies or sports.”
The room is connected through a structural block wall. The Cleary Company included barn doors to allow the two spaces to be separated in the event that multiple groups of people want to simultaneously enjoy the basement.
“A lot of this was built on my husband wanting to have a lot of TVs down here; we have three of them,” Carpenter says laughing. “My sons can be on one side of the room playing video games and my husband and I can be on the other watching a game or movie at the same time. … It happens all the time.”
Finally, a Basement Bathroom
“The bathroom utilizes warm grays with cool blues to help transform the dark, damp basement into a spa-like experience,” Kern says. “Low maintenance was still important in this space, so using easy-to-clean surfaces were a must.”
Another unique feature of the Carpenter’s new basement is the presence of a full bathroom. A room that Carpenter’s husband insisted on from the very beginning.
“My husband always wanted to have a full bath in the basement,” Carpenter says. “I don’t know why, but from the moment we bought the house he told me, ‘one day we are going to do a full bath.’ It has actually really come in handy.”
The Carpenters ended up remodeling two other bathrooms in their home shortly after the first project, making the full basement bathroom vital to the family during the other projects.
Now that their kids have grown up, the Carpenters finally saw their vision come to life.
“We’ve had 14 years to think about it and dream,” Carpenter says. “We had a pretty good idea of what we wanted coming into it and it turned out to be such a great project.”
Rocco Falleti is an assistant editor. Feedback welcomed at rfalleti@cityscenecolumbus.com
