Before & After: A Tropical Meets Mid-Century Living Room Redo
Andrew Deming and Rachel Gant of YIELD Design Co. transform a drab 1950s living room into a bright and fresh sanctuary, incorporating their mix of modern and vintage design. The difference is astounding, and truly brings this midcentury home to its fullest potential.
“When we bought our house last year, the living room was one of the worst spaces. There were a few major selling points that made us take the plunge: the ceilings were high, not dropped like most 1950’s homes, and the windows were large and framed beautiful greenery outside. Aside from that, it was dismal.”
“Redoing the flooring was the most difficult part of renovating the space. We knew from the beginning that we wanted to remove the tile and expose the concrete, but when we demolished the ceramic tile we found another layer of asbestos tile as well as linoleum underneath. Once we finished removing the old flooring, the concrete wasn’t in good shape to simply reseal, so we skim coated another layer of concrete on top. Even with the complications, exposing the concrete floor transformed the space and fits our lifestyle. We’re at the beach or the park with our dog, so having a low maintenance floor that’s easy to clean was really important to us.”
“The fireplace was real brick, but at some point had simply been painted “brick red” and closed haphazardly with foam. To top it off, they kindly placed an amateur painting of burning logs in front. The vents were “sealed” with foil that was painted over and the previous mantle entombed countless dead critters. We painted over the faux brick red color, added custom wood screens over the vents, and generally cleaned up the inside of the fireplace.”
“We also decided to demolish the soffit covering the HVAC ducting that ran the length of the living area. The ac wasn’t sufficiently cooling the other side of the house, so we were able to uncover collapsed soft ducting once we removed the casing. Instead of rebuilding it, we had exposed metal ducting installed so the ceiling height was accentuated. In general, we don’t like the out of sight, out of mind approach, so we’d rather see what’s going on.”
Thank you Andrew and Rachel!