Completed client project. The owners came to us with their 1944 house on Burke Lane in Los Altos Hills, a wood-framed home with a stucco exterior and a single-story main level above a lower-level walkout. The house has six bathrooms and was extensively remodeled and expanded in 2018. The owners wanted the primary bathroom to feel calmer and more connected to the primary bedroom, with finishes and storage suited to the scale of the suite. The work focused on the bathroom within its existing footprint; the bedroom and the rest of the house remained outside the renovation scope.
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.
The house’s primary suite includes a bedroom with a fireplace, large walk-in closets, and a spa-inspired bath with views to the grounds. My first question was where the primary bath’s water and waste lines met the house’s different foundation sections, because that answer shaped what we could change without disturbing more of the floor than necessary. The record describes concrete-perimeter, slab, and crawl-space foundation construction in different parts of the house. We mapped the bath’s existing plumbing and kept the fixture locations, rather than turning a finish project into a drain relocation. The house has public water and public sewer, but those facts did not make every route through its varied foundation equally simple.
The primary bath and its foundation
The bath already had the generous feel of a spa-inspired room, but its surfaces and storage did not give the owners the quiet, ordered experience they wanted. We kept the bath within its existing outline and refreshed the finishes around the existing plumbing. That decision preserved the relationship between the bedroom, walk-in closets, and bath, and avoided cutting a new route through a floor whose foundation conditions change across the house.
We chose a restrained tile finish and warm, simple cabinetry so the bathroom felt connected to the wide-plank hardwood in the main living areas without trying to imitate it. We kept the existing views to the grounds as a feature of the bath, rather than filling that sightline with storage. The primary bedroom’s fireplace stayed in place, and the walk-in closets remained the transition between sleeping and bathing. Instead of making the bath larger, we made the storage more deliberate and kept the surfaces visually quiet.
The primary suite sits within a one-story main level, with flat and low-pitched roof sections above the house. We kept the ceiling and roofline intact and did not add a roof opening to bring light into the bath. That kept the work focused on the existing suite and avoided a new penetration through roof sections made from composition and metal roofing. The house’s three gas-burning fireplaces also stayed as they were; the bedroom fireplace continued to anchor the sleeping area without adding another competing feature to the bath.
Light and comfort in the suite
We treated lighting as part of the bathroom’s finish, not as a row of bright ceiling fixtures. We installed layered bathroom lighting for the mirror and general use, with controls that let the owners use the room at a softer level. The house’s central forced-air heating and multi-zone cooling served the suite, so we kept it within the existing heating and cooling arrangement rather than creating a separate system. We coordinated the new lighting with the existing ceiling conditions and kept the bedroom fireplace as its own source of warmth and atmosphere.
The primary bathroom’s design also respected the larger layout. The formal living and dining rooms remain apart from the open kitchen, informal dining area, and family room, while the lower level remains the entertainment and recreation space, with its media lounge, wet bar, exercise room, and pool access. The bathroom did not need to borrow space from those areas to work better. The owners now have a more composed bath, clearer storage, and a direct visual connection from the room to the grounds, while the home’s established circulation and plumbing remain in place.
The suite work and local review
The Town of Los Altos Hills classifies plumbing and electrical work as permit work. We set this scope against that classification by keeping the bathroom plumbing at its existing fixture locations and limiting the electrical work to layered bathroom lighting within the existing ceiling conditions. The work stayed inside the existing primary-suite footprint, without a drain relocation or a roof opening.
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