Completed client project. The owners came to us with a two-story farmhouse-style house on Allen Lane in Penryn, built in 1991, about 4,190 square feet, with a wood frame, horizontal siding, a shingle roof, five bedrooms and three and a half baths. They wanted the whole home to feel easier to use, starting with the laundry and mudroom, where washing, drying and the dirt brought in from outside all met. The ground-floor laundry room already had hookups, cabinets, a sink and a chute, so we began with the way those features connected to the rest of the house, not with a new room or a moved drain.
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 where the laundry arrived from upstairs and which entrance brought the most outdoor traffic into the house. Because this was a two-story wood-frame home, the chute passed through the upper floor framing. On site, we traced its route to the laundry room and mapped the existing hookups and sink before deciding what could change around them. I also reviewed the 29 recorded single-family closings in Penryn as local context, but used the recorded sales data to remind us not to substitute neighborhood averages for the particulars of this house.
The laundry chute and the ground-floor room
The owners wanted a laundry setup that handled clothes straight from the bedrooms without turning the room into a pile-up point. We kept the chute landing in the laundry room and kept the washer, dryer and sink at their existing service locations. That choice made the existing plumbing useful rather than making a drain move the center of the project. We reorganized the cabinets around the actual sequence of sorting, washing, drying and folding, and added designated space for baskets and supplies so the sink and work surface stayed available.
The chute made the two-story layout an advantage: laundry could travel down to the ground-floor room instead of through the kitchen or living areas. We treated the room as a working threshold, not just a place for appliances. We added a bench and closed storage for the items that needed to be put away, with hooks for the things used on the way out. The existing cabinetry and sink stayed part of the arrangement, and the new storage gave them clearer jobs.
The porch entrances and the path through the house
This house had a U-shaped footprint, multiple entrances, a wraparound covered porch and a back porch. We mapped those paths before locating the mudroom storage, so the bench and hooks supported coming in and going out without narrowing the route through the ground floor. The large, gently sloping lot included mature shade trees, extensive landscaping, a year-round pond and a detached barn. We kept the everyday inside route legible from the house entrances, rather than treating the barn or the porch as if either had a direct connection that the house did not provide.
We also considered the different floors already present in the house: carpet, concrete and wood. At the laundry and mudroom, we measured the transition to the adjoining flooring and chose an easy-clean finish that met the existing floor cleanly. We kept the work within the laundry and entry sequence, rather than spreading a new surface through rooms that did not need it. That made the path easier to maintain while leaving the rest of the house's established flooring character intact.
The kitchen had an island with a sink, stone and wood counters, and the house also had separate family and living spaces. We kept that arrangement intact while the laundry and mudroom work clarified circulation at the back of the house. The separate living room remained a quieter room, and the kitchen and family spaces kept their existing relationship. Central heating and cooling, multiple zones and a whole-house fan were part of the home's systems, so we kept the laundry changes from blocking existing air paths or turning storage into a barrier between rooms.
Storage that supported the rest of the house
The finished room worked because each part had a place: the chute delivered laundry, the appliances stayed on their existing hookups, the sink remained available for cleanup, and the cabinets and new storage held supplies and outdoor gear. The bench gave someone a place to pause at the entry, while the hooks kept frequently used items off the floor. The route between the laundry, the kitchen and the porch entrances stayed open. We did not need to relocate plumbing or convert the whole ground floor into one undifferentiated space to make daily movement easier.
We checked the permit scope for the work before construction and kept the changes within the existing laundry and mudroom footprint, retaining the established plumbing locations. The Penryn recorded-sales data provided local housing context, but did not determine the permit requirements or the design decisions for this house.
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