Isle Be Back is a six-bedroom, two-story home on the Martinique floor plan, with two living areas and two outdoor spaces. The owners wanted it to feel modern, cozy and classic, with a connection to Southern Utah. We gave them options for each room, and they picked their favorites. There was no theme and no murals here, so we made the house stand out with scale: very large art and textiles on the walls, in rich, deep tones with neutrals.
Upstairs, a six-by-six-foot landscape fills most of the wall beside the game table. One large piece makes more of an impression than a cluster of small ones, and it keeps the wall from looking busy. It works even in rooms that aren’t especially big. We use art at this scale in a lot of our projects.
In the living room, we wanted the same scale with texture. We hung a five-by-eight-foot woven rug from rings strung between two curtain rods. A textile gives a wall more interest than another framed picture. When we can, we repeat a color, texture or style around a room, which makes it feel purposeful and cohesive.
We plan every rental so everyone it sleeps has a seat at mealtime. Nobody should feel they can’t eat with the group, and in a house this size it takes some thought. On the main level, the built-in banquette was one dining area, so we added a second table beside it. With the banquette, the new table and the counter stools, the whole group can eat together.
When a room needs two tables, we usually match the tables and vary the chairs. Here the banquette was built in, so we chose a wood table with different chairs and paid close attention to placement. Artwork above the banquette pulls in the colors of both sets of chairs, and we repeated those colors toward the living room so they’re balanced across the space.
For the bunk rooms, the owners wanted Southern Utah. Lots of rentals here use national-park themes, so we chose animals people actually see when they camp and hike in the area. One room has foxes and the other coyotes, in the artwork, the bedding and the stuffed animals on the beds. Parents planning a family trip want their kids to remember it, and kids remember a room that feels like it was made for them. A later client pointed to these rooms as what they wanted in their own rental, and it helped us win that job.