Completed client project. The owners in Burlingame Park came to us with a 2026-built, two-story house of about 3,500 square feet on a 7,577-square-foot lot. It had five bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms, a primary suite, a family room with a fireplace, and a kitchen with an island, pantry, and exhaust fan. The house combined stucco, stone veneer, and horizontal siding beneath a composition roof, with dark-framed windows and a modest covered front porch. They wanted a whole-home remodel that made the primary bedroom, bath, and walk-in closet feel connected and easier to use, while respecting the house’s new construction and distinct exterior. The initial house information came from the sale record and exterior observations; on site, we checked the conditions that affected our decisions.
The photographs on this page are from the Designed & Curated portfolio and show finishes we have used on other projects. They are not photographs of this house.
My first question to the owners was which part of moving between the bedroom, bath, and closet felt least settled. They described the suite as a group of separate rooms rather than a private retreat. On site, we found a concrete perimeter foundation, and the two-story construction made the suite’s place within the larger house clear. We measured the bedroom, bath, and walk-in closet together, then traced the bathroom plumbing before settling the layout. The foundation did not tell us where the drains ran, so we treated the drain route as a separate site finding. Once we traced it, we kept the main plumbing connections in their established area and shaped the bathroom around them, rather than relocating fixtures without a functional reason.
The primary suite’s bath and closet connection
We reorganized the suite around a more direct route from the sleeping area to the bath and closet. We kept the work within the existing suite footprint, clarified the transition between bedroom and bathroom, and improved the usable clearances around the bathroom fixtures. The walk-in closet stayed part of the suite, but its storage was arranged to make access feel less like an interruption to the route through the rooms. The result gave the owners a more legible sequence: sleeping, dressing, and bathing each had a place, without turning the bedroom into a corridor.
In the bedroom, we used a quiet, warm finish palette and layered the lighting so the room did not depend on one overhead source. We positioned reading light at the bed and kept the visual field calm against the dark window trim. In the bath, we paired a restrained tile treatment with a more tactile floor finish, giving the room definition while keeping it visually related to the bedroom. We reviewed the finish samples in the rooms, where the large black-framed windows brought in daylight, rather than selecting colors from a board alone. Those choices made the suite feel softer without asking the exterior materials to carry the same mood.
Central air and the family-room fireplace
The house had central forced-air heating and cooling, so we coordinated the suite’s revised storage and door arrangement with the existing supply and return locations. We kept the air path in mind as we adjusted the room edges, and the system continued serving the suite without a change to the heating or cooling equipment. We also kept the family-room fireplace in its shared-room role. That left the primary suite quieter and less visually busy, while the family room retained its own focal point.
The home had public water, and we coordinated the bathroom work with the existing water and drain connections. We left the composition roof outside the interior scope, and the detached two-car garage and its electric-car hookup remained undisturbed. In the kitchen, we retained the island, pantry, and exhaust fan rather than changing those features simply to make the whole-home remodel feel larger. We also left the house’s accessory dwelling unit and guest-house function separate from the primary suite work, so the private rooms had a clear purpose within the larger property.
We checked Burlingame’s Reach Code before making decisions about mechanical work. The city had suspended and later revoked enforcement of its natural-gas ban provision, and it encouraged eliminating methane gas in new construction; that provision did not require a fuel-system change in this remodel. Because the owners kept the existing central forced-air equipment, we left it in place. We also checked the exterior scope against the City of Burlingame Residential Design Guidebook, which evaluated exterior design in relation to the home’s style and the surrounding neighborhood. We kept the stone, stucco, siding, dark trim, and porch unchanged, so the work stayed focused on the interior rooms the owners wanted to improve. The city’s Reach Codes information informed that mechanical decision.
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