A House 150 Miles Away, Designed As If I Were In the Room

When a client first called about their beach house, the conversation wasn't about paint colors or floor plans. It was about distance. Their new home sat 150 miles from where they lived, and further still from where I work. They wanted a space that felt earthy and lived-in, a little boho, a lot of wood trim, nothing that read as another coastal house pulled from a catalog. What they didn't say out loud, but what every renovation client quietly wonders, was simpler than any of that.

Would this actually work from so far away?

It did. Not because distance stopped mattering, but because the process was built to hold up under it.

Working With What Exists, Even From Afar

My process starts the same way whether a client lives around the corner or a state away: I listen first, long before a single finish gets chosen. For this home, that meant hearing a vision that leaned earthy over pastel, textured over polished, real wood over anything trend-driven, the warm, worn-in feeling of a vintage beach house rather than something built to look new.

The floors alone told the story of how disjointed the house had become over the years, four different flooring types across one single level. Part of this renovation meant simplifying all of that down to one cohesive floor throughout, so the house finally felt like one home instead of four rooms stitched together.

The GC handled what a GC handles on-site, the parts that made sense to manage locally. But the design itself, the kitchen reconfiguration, every finish selection, came from a plan built around how this family actually intended to live in the house. I pulled the flooring samples myself and we reviewed them together before anything was decided. Then I made the trip down with that plan in hand, so my clients had everything in front of them to choose from in person. Plans shift once you're standing in a room. Being bendy is part of the process, not a detour from it.

This wasn't a light refresh. We opened up an enclosed porch, relocated a fireplace that had outlived its usefulness and was frankly more in the way than it was worth, built in custom shelving, carved out a real pantry, and reconfigured the hot water heater so the kitchen could finally work the way this family needed it to. And because a rental home eventually becomes a retirement home, a few pieces simply didn't exist yet in the size or shape this space needed. So we built them.

What the Client Said, In Their Own Words

The homeowners described an eye for what a client's "vibe" is, paired with a finished home that felt every bit as intentional as it would have if I'd been on-site the entire time. Their honest note about the platform logistics of remote coordination was met, in their words, by consistent communication throughout the project.

Why Distance Doesn't Have to Mean Less Care

Renovating a second home, one meant to serve as a rental now and a future primary residence later, asks something different of a designer. Every choice has to work twice: for the life the house lives today, and for the life it will eventually hold. I don't design less carefully because I'm not standing in the room. I simply build a process sturdy enough to carry the vision the full distance.

If you're weighing a renovation on a home you can't visit every week, or you're in Charlottesville, Southern Maryland, DC, or anywhere else outside Richmond proper, I'd love to talk about what that process could look like for you.