the petit project: our PERSONAL baton rouge renovation

We bought our house in August 2022 in an old area of Baton Rouge near the LSU lakes. We absolutely love the neighborhood, the neighbors are really close knit and wonderful and its walking distance to restaurants, bars and even ice cream for the kids which I adore. Being a true city girl at heart I’d prefer to walk everywhere and love the sense of community it creates. So if I can’t be in NYC or Chicago this is as close as I’m going to get in Baton Rouge.

It’s a great 2500 sq ft house with four bedrooms and 3 full baths and the perfect amount of space for us with a great yard. However, it’s outdated. So we bought it knowing almost every space would have to be touched and it would be a true labor of love. We decided to start with the kitchen because it has the most impact downstairs and the plans for it really changed the layout of the downstairs dramatically.

We originally had a very small galley kitchen with not nearly enough cabinetry or work space and on the other side of the stove wall was a large wasted space with our backdoor and staircase to upstairs. We never could quite figure out what to do with it. It was like an oversized hallway, but had multiple traffic paths coming through at the center of the house so it couldnt have much furniture. It was what was originally the dining room we believe, but now that the house has had two additions since it was built we already have a breakfast area and formal dining room so another eating space didnt make sense. We jokingly called it our back foyer, because it sounded fancy.

Sooo, we decided to take out the wall between the two spaces and expand the kitchen into it to more than double the size and create a far better flow. My original plan was to expand the galley into the breakfast area, but theres mechanical duct work for the upstairs that runs across and it couldn’t be moved so it would have always had that eye sore. Jacob suggested what were doing now and honestly at first I didn’t take to it. But now, as usual, I realize he was totally right. His background is in architecure and he’s great with scale and layout in particular.

So we got to work taking out the flooring and wall over the course of January as you can see in the video below.

I’ve had ideas for this house since the second I saw it. We both could immediately see the potential. So i’ve been saving images of ideas and spaces I love that fit the style of what I’m trying to create in this house since September. I approach it the same way I approach any project, as a whole house that needs to be a complimentary cohesive collection of spaces. That doesn’t mean they look the same but they make sense near each other and compliment one another. I pulled the images together and narrowed them down to make a mood board for myself of the aesthetic which is at the top of the page. I also pulled my color palette for the house from those images.

Essentially I want the house to look both current and classic. Which is the essence of my entire brand. My goal is always to create spaces that look modern and updated but also timeless. Our house is particularly important though because of its age. I want it to feel updated but also restored to it’s full potential, as though the items could have always been there.