Completed client project. The owners came to us with their detached, single-story home on Farmhouse Lane in Four Seasons Homestead Autumn, Dixon, and wanted the connected rooms to feel warmer and the covered patio to feel like part of the house. Built in 2026, the home measured about 1,901 square feet on a 5,913-square-foot lot, with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Its modern ranch construction included a gable roof with cement tile, vertical board-and-batten siding, and brick accents at the entry and garage. The open kitchen and great room already connected to the patio, so our work focused on the whole home’s finishes, storage, light, and indoor-outdoor connection rather than changing its basic layout.
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 was what the owners wanted to experience from the great room when they looked out toward the patio. They wanted the outdoor room to feel like a natural extension of the vaulted interior, not a separate space used only to pass through. On site, we found the covered patio directly beside the great room, but the flat lot and limited mature planting left the outdoor edge exposed to sun. The single-story layout and roofline made the existing connection clear: we could improve how the rooms met without adding a new opening through the exterior wall. We also kept the project grounded in this house’s new construction rather than assuming it needed the kind of layout repair common in older homes. Among 261 single-family homes closed in Dixon in the trailing twelve months, the median build year was 1998, 6% dated from before 1960, and 23% from before 1980; the median home measured 1,808 square feet on a 7,000-square-foot lot, 33% had an HOA fee, and the most common decades of construction were the 2020s, 1990s, and 1970s (Redfin’s Dixon sold-home data). That context reinforced our choice to work with this home’s newer, already-open layout. We also reviewed a published family-friendly Dixon home project as local design context, not as work by our studio (Domino’s Jessie Dixon home tour).
The covered patio and great room
We kept the great room’s vaulted ceiling and its direct route to the covered patio. We chose to make the connection stronger through finishes and use, rather than by changing the roof or enlarging the exterior opening. The home had full low-E dual-pane windows, and we kept them; we used layered interior lighting to make the great room feel comfortable after daylight faded without cutting into the gable roof for a skylight. We installed dimmable ambient lighting and focused task light in the kitchen, then used warm, natural textures in the seating area to take the edge off the black-and-white palette.
Outside, we added built-in seating to the covered patio and introduced drought-tolerant planting to soften the yard and provide more shade. The front lot already had automatic sprinklers and low-maintenance landscaping, so we worked with those existing features instead of replacing them wholesale. The wood fence and backyard enclosure remained in place. The result gave the great room a more inviting view and made the patio feel like a usable outdoor room reached directly from inside.
The kitchen, island, and office door
The kitchen already had Midnight-painted cabinetry, black matte hardware, Arctic white quartz, a gas cooktop, a hood, a pantry closet, and a double oven. We kept the island sink and cooking equipment where they were, and warmed the stark contrast with softer-toned cabinet finishes and wood accents at the seating area. The house had public water and public sewer, but retaining the existing sink location meant we did not need to reroute plumbing across the room. Its central natural-gas heating and central cooling also stayed in place; we adjusted the lighting and finish choices around the open kitchen and great room rather than altering the mechanical system.
The separate office had a barn door that gave it privacy but closed off light. We replaced it with a frosted-glass door, which preserved the room’s retreat-like feel while letting borrowed light pass through. We added closed storage and a bench near the attached two-car garage entry, using the available arrival space for coats and shoes instead of letting those items spill into the open living area. The home’s inside laundry remained where it was, with its existing gas and electric hookups.
The work we permitted and checked
We kept the completed scope focused on finishes, lighting, storage, and the patio, and checked it against the home’s new-construction permit record before work began. The record identified a one-story home with no basement, a tile and composition roof, public water and sewer, and a central heating and cooling system; those existing conditions shaped what we retained and where we concentrated the work. The property record placed the home in Title 24 building climate zone 12, which we used when checking the lighting choices. We did not change the roof, structure, plumbing routes, or mechanical equipment.
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