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Steamboat Magazine

AMAZING SPACES: The Family Hangout

07/10/2024 07:00AM ● By Sophie Dingle
(Photo: Kellie and Michael Klein's recently renovated "amazing space.")

Steamboat Springs, CO -
Kellie Klein has spent Christmas in the mountains since she was 12 years old. She and her husband, Michael, live in Chicago but the Colorado-native says, “It’s important to me to keep my Colorado identity for better or for worse!” Their Steamboat Springs house, purchased in 2019, was their vision for keeping the Christmas tradition alive. “At first we were considering remodeling the whole house but the downstairs was where the work needed to be done the most,” Kellie says. The biggest challenge was hiring a firm, especially since the couple wouldn’t be on-site the whole time. But they settled on Soda Mountain Construction + Design to help them renovate the 3,000 square foot space and Kathleen Rosencrantz of Roy Seven Designs to help with the interior. “We wanted something very family-friendly, mountain cozy but not screaming mountain lodge,” Kellie explains. “The exterior is very 1990s and we met with some designers who wanted to make the space incredibly sleek and modern but that didn’t hold true to the exterior. The color scheme and layers of fabric that we ended up with make it super cozy and welcoming.” The renovation included the downstairs living room, bathrooms (which Kellie points out “had gone through their useful life”), and a new laundry room.

Bathrooms
“The impetus for the lower level re-do was not a space issue,” Kellie notes. “The bathrooms really needed a freshening up and an update.” The current situation when they purchased the house was a Jack and Jill bathroom, connecting two downstairs bedrooms, but with two adult children, Kellie knew that everyone would appreciate their own space. Chris Imbler, president of Soda Mountain, came up with the idea to reuse the space in a different way: in one of the bedrooms was a walk-in cedar closet (which was rarely used) so they took space from that, plus the existing Jack and Jill, combined the two and built two bathrooms, one for each bedroom. “It was a brilliant, creative use of space that allows guests to have their own bathrooms now,” Kellie says. 

The downstairs powder room was also re-done. “The Cervinia poster has been in my ski houses since I was 12,” Kellie says. “So I needed it in my house now! Kat [Kathleen] really understands the need to have things function very well and also be interested and have an interesting design to them – something that captures your eye when you walk in.”


 Laundry Room
At first, the laundry room was upstairs, off the garage. But by taking space from a large mechanical room and a storage area downstairs, Soda Mountain was able to design a separate laundry room, out of the mudroom. The double entry doors off the hallway, clean finishes and bright tiles create what Kellie calls “a delight.”


 Living Room
“This is where the family hangs out,” Kellie says. “We spend a ton of time downstairs, watching TV on the big sectional. Over the holidays, there’s always a movie on, and someone is always at the game table. We love to do jigsaw puzzles.” The room is the heart of the home but prior to the renovation, it was almost all brick - a bright red that encompassed the whole back wall, wrapped around the fireplace and continued on past the game table. “It was massive and screamed 1990s,” Kellie says. Chris and Kat envisioned getting rid of the red brick and making the fireplace the focal point of the room. “They used this really cool metal – it’s a red metal – and it’s distressed, but not too distressed; red, but not fire engine red,” Kellie explains. They beamed out the ceiling and refronted the fireplace. And with a big group of family over the holidays, chairs are in high demand. Kat arranged chairs in front of the fireplace as a cozy reading nook and added wood cabinets under the TV, end tables, a new game table and, of course, more chairs. “There’s a beautiful living room upstairs,” Kellie says, “but this is where we really hang out.”

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