A couple came to me a few years ago with a request I didn’t see coming. They wanted to turn their drive-in garage — damp, and packed to the gills — into a rec room, laundry room, kitchenette, and living space. They were empty nesters in Chapel Hill who wanted a place to host large gatherings and extended family, and they had all this square footage sitting right there, completely wasted.
I told them, lovingly, that I thought the idea sounded a little bit crazy. And then I designed it anyway. Because I am not the garage police, and who am I to tell someone what their home can’t be?
Once we got through the waterproofing, the trenching, and the HVAC runs, it was absolutely perfect. Happy clients. Great space. One of my favorite projects to date.
That project taught me something: some of the most interesting work often happens in the spaces nobody’s paying attention to.
Unused square footage, transformed. This bonus room conversion — with built-in shelving, vaulted ceiling, and a proper media setup — is exactly the kind of space that gets overlooked until a designer shows you what it could be.
Custom paint color, glass-front uppers, and inset construction — all delivered through a factory custom line. The “settling” narrative doesn’t hold up when you see the finished product.
The Spaces Nobody’s Talking About
Kitchens and baths get all the attention. And yes, I spent years specializing in exactly that. I know those spaces well. But here’s what I’ve learned since expanding into full-service residential design: the spaces that get overlooked are often the most interesting ones to work on.
The unfinished basement. The loft you use for storage. The attic currently housing three suitcases, a broken treadmill, and furniture from a previous life. These aren’t dead zones. They’re diamonds in the rough. And when you show a client what they could actually be —, a proper guest suite, a home bar, a movie room, a quiet retreat with a kitchenette and a bathroom, the response is almost always immediate excitement.
Case in point: A large family with an au pair was relocating from Texas to Durham, and they came to me with a house that had the bones but not the infrastructure for how they actually lived. More storage. More seating. Redefined spaces. And critically, additional bathrooms. When you’ve got that much going on under one roof, square footage isn’t just an aesthetic decision, it’s a logistics problem.
We took on the full house — kitchen, bathrooms, laundry, loft, foyer, living room, bar, fireplace — and one of the most satisfying parts of the project was working a bathroom into the third-floor game room. Not obvious. Not simple. But absolutely necessary, and once it’s there you can’t imagine the space without it. Square footage is square footage. The question is just whether you’re using it.
A powder room is the perfect place to go all in. Bold wallpaper that might feel overwhelming across an entire room lands exactly right in a small, focused space like this.
Small Space, Big Swing
One thing I love about specialty spaces — bars, rec rooms, game rooms — is that clients are almost always willing to take more creative risks in them. And that’s genuinely fun to work with.
A bold color that might feel overwhelming across an entire kitchen? In a home bar, it’s a statement. A pattern wallpaper that feels like too much commitment in a full bathroom? In a compact, focused powder room, it lands exactly right. These rooms give people a chance to scratch an itch, to try something they’ve always been curious about in a dose that actually makes sense.
You don’t always need a full-scale conversion to change how a space feels. But when a total transformation is what the project calls for, these overlooked spaces are often where the most exciting work happens. And pulling them off takes more than a good eye for finishes.
What People Don’t Think About (But Should)
Designing a wet bar or a below-grade living space isn’t just about picking finishes. Anyone who tells you otherwise is going to get you into trouble.
There’s the gravity drain at the bar. The studor vent that needs to go somewhere (and if you don’t figure out where before the walls close up, you’ll find out later in the least convenient way possible). The moisture situation in a basement that determines which materials are even on the table. The HVAC runs that need to be planned before anyone picks a tile.
This is where having a genuine understanding of construction makes a real difference. My years as a project manager with Grau Building Company, overseeing projects from the ground up, coordinating trades, learning the rhythm of how a build actually sequences, inform every design decision I make in spaces like these. It’s not just about aesthetics. It’s about understanding how the whole thing fits together and designing in a way that respects that reality from day one. It also means being able to design in any direction.
Four rooms, four completely different design languages — all under one roof at the Grau Design Studio showroom in Durham. The studio was intentionally designed to showcase Jennifer’s range: traditional, organic, modern, and dramatic. Because your home should look like you, not your designer.
On Having a Style (Or Not)
I don’t have a signature aesthetic, and I think that’s a feature, not a bug.
My studio in Durham is probably the clearest way I can show what I mean — and it’s also one of the most unexpected spaces I’ve ever designed. What used to be a dated, choppy, cold doctor’s office is now a live, functional space that walks you through four completely different design languages in a single building. You walk in through a bubbly, pink, traditional foyer. Move into a neutral, organic kitchen. Step into a sleek, modern bathroom. End up in a moody, dramatic lounge that’s honestly more my personal taste than anything else in the building. All intentional. Navigating commercial codes and HOA limitations to get there was a ride, but that’s exactly the kind of problem I find interesting.
When I work with clients across Durham, Raleigh, and the Triangle, and yes, out of state too, I design to their taste, not mine. (I do have my own taste — my house is proof of that — but that’s not what you’re hiring me for.) That means asking a lot of questions, looking at inspiration images, and figuring out what words they keep reaching for. If they want dark and moody, great. If they want light and traditional, I can do that too. My job is making it theirs.
That flexibility didn’t happen overnight. It took a relocation, a reinvention, and a deliberate decision to expand beyond what I already knew how to do well.
The Relocation I Didn’t Know I Needed
When my husband and I moved from Buffalo to Durham, I was good at what I did. Kitchen and bath, hard finishes, appliances, I’d been doing it for years. But 90% of my work was kitchens and bathrooms, and there was a ceiling on it I hadn’t fully noticed until I hit it.
Moving here meant starting over in a new market and rebuilding from scratch. It also meant expanding into full-service residential design, new projects, and the kind of work I didn’t know I was missing. Being a designer is equal parts technical and creative, and the challenge that comes with each project is what keeps me here. No two homes are the same. No two clients are the same.
I haven’t been bored once.
If you’ve got a space in your home that’s been sitting there waiting for a reason to exist, let’s talk. It might be exactly the kind of project that’s the most fun to design.
