What do you do when the city zoning commission gets in the way of building the office of your dreams? If you’re AD100 designer Sarah Sherman Samuel, you follow through with your signature flair anyways. She and her husband Rupert bought this 1920s Tudor-style home in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, with the intention of converting it into the SSS design offices, but they found out shortly after starting renovations that their plans butted up against zoning restrictions. “We wanted to keep this place forever because of all the character,” Sarah says, but the pair ultimately decided to finish the remodel and sell the home instead (which just hit the market at $895,000).
The project was the couple’s first soup-to-nuts renovation under SSS Builds—the new restoration and renovation arm of Sarah’s interior design business—and came as Rupert, an advertising veteran for over 27 years, felt a calling to leave his desk job behind and get his hands dirty on construction projects instead. With a builder’s license now under his belt, Rupert manages SSS Builds and acts as general contractor on projects. But the pair also got an assist from a third family member, Sarah’s dad, for the finishing touches on this build. “Pop pop,” as the interior designer affectionately calls her father Lee, is an avid woodworker who executed some of the finer details—from the cabinet containing the refrigerator to the walnut island top in the kitchen.
With the goal of infusing character into the home while restoring its handsome original features (like the windows and plaster moldings), the renovation required peeling back layers of flooring and tiling in the kitchen and bathroom (accrued over several successive renovations), knocking down a wall between the dining room and kitchen to enhance flow, adding splashes of color and warm patterns on the walls, plus contending with a rogue raccoon trespassing via the chimney. Below, Sarah Sherman Samuel shares a highlight reel of seven of her most clever design moves worth taking notes on for your own home.
Anti-wallflower wallpaper
Not one to shy away from a romantic print or color scheme, Sarah mixed and matched two playful wallpaper prints on the walls and ceiling to envelop this bedroom in cheerful patterns, then doubled down with matching window treatments and yellow trim. “I wanted to go for layers on layers and pattern on pattern, which I think is fun and also indicative of a Tudor, but doing it in more modern versions of something you’d see back in the day,” she says. Even the vent cover is painted yellow so the eye can rest instead on the soothing neutrals of the armchair and rug after roving the room.
