The Sumner Update, Apartment Living Elevated
A Sumner apartment updated room by room — from bedroom to dining to home office — with a consistent modern voice throughout.
The Sumner Update was a full apartment refresh: every room, every surface, every piece reconsidered. The client wanted modern without cold, curated without precious, and functional without sacrificing the look. The apartment had good proportions; the design job was to fill them correctly.
The result moves through registers — a bedroom designed for rest, a dining area designed for gathering, a home office designed for actual work, and a living room that ties the whole together through a consistent material and color language.
Designed Room by Room, Read as One
Each room in the Sumner Update has its own brief — the bedroom is calm, the dining area is social, the home office is focused, the living room is welcoming. But they share a palette: warm neutrals, organic textures, abstract art that carries the same tonal range. The apartment reads as coherent because the underlying design logic is consistent, even when the program shifts.
Decorative objects were treated as part of the design, not afterthoughts. The oyster shell lamp, the decorative vase, the abstract artwork — each was selected for its contribution to the room’s material conversation. A well-selected object in the right position does more for a room than another piece of furniture.
The Work Begins With One Conversation
We hold a limited number of consultations each month and are selective about the projects we take on. If you’re ready to discuss yours, we’d like to hear about it.
The bedroom: gray bedding, natural light, and a quiet that was designed for.
The Challenge: Coherence Across Every Room
Apartment renovations that address multiple rooms often end up feeling like several separate projects. Each room gets its own treatment, and the apartment reads as inconsistent — the bedroom is one thing, the living room is another, the dining area is something else entirely. The challenge here was to design the whole apartment as a single project with a unified voice.
The solution was a palette-first approach: establish the color and material language before touching any individual room. Warm neutrals as the base, organic textures for warmth, abstract artwork with a consistent tonal range. Once that framework was set, each room’s individual character — calm, social, focused, welcoming — could be expressed within it.
“An apartment that reads as designed — not just furnished — is the result of decisions that start before any piece is selected.”
How We Updated the Whole Apartment
We started with a palette document — color, material, and object language applied to the entire apartment before any room was addressed individually. This gave us a framework that every individual selection could be tested against. Does this piece belong in this apartment? That question has a clear answer when the palette is established.
The bedroom was the starting point for execution — it’s the most personal room and the one where the client’s preferences are most specific. Getting the bedroom right set the tone for every subsequent room. The gray bedding, the natural light priority, the absence of visual noise — those principles carried through the rest of the apartment in different registers.
Object curation was the final layer. Once the furniture and surfaces were in place, we sourced the decorative objects that complete each room: the oyster shell lamp that adds organic texture to the living room, the vase with gold accents that ties the dining area to the abstract art, the shelving objects in the home office that keep the workspace from reading as purely utilitarian.
Frequently Asked
The work in this portfolio is the standard we hold ourselves to on every project — not just the celebrated ones.Your home should stop you. Every time you walk in.
