Luxury Basement Design in Westlake Ohio

Some people use a basement for storage.
For our clients, the lower level is part of the home.

Is your basement filled with boxes, holiday decor, a treadmill nobody uses, and the stuff you said you’d get to someday?

That is not a criticism. It is just what happens when a floor gets left out of the plan. The house gets designed, the budget gets allocated, and the lowest level quietly becomes the place where everything else goes.

For our clients, the lower level is part of the home.

Not an extra. Not a bonus. Not a someday project to be handled later by someone else. One of the floors of the house, designed at the same time, to the same standard, with the same care as the rooms you walk into first.

What “part of the home” really means

It is easy to say a basement should be beautiful. The harder question is what makes a lower level feel like it belongs to the house above it rather than like a separate project that happened later.

The same materials carry down the stairs. Marble appears here the way it appears on a main floor, on a fireplace surround, on a waterfall island, wrapped around the structural columns. Brass shows up in the lighting, the hardware, the fixtures, the same brass you would find in the kitchen. Velvet, custom drapery, real art, considered plaster and paneling. Nothing gets a budget version of itself because it happens to be downstairs.

When you get that right, you stop noticing you went down a flight of stairs. That is the whole goal.

This basement is not for storage.

It is for hosting, at a curved marble waterfall bar with velvet stools and a brass and stone backsplash that reads more like artwork than a surface.

It is for working out, in a real gym with real equipment and enough light to make it somewhere you will actually go on a Tuesday morning.

It is for playing, in a game room wrapped floor to ceiling in graphic black and white, with a pool table, ping pong and an arcade cabinet set into a warm wood slat nook.

It is for movie nights in deep green velvet under gold sconces.

It is for long dinners in a paneled room with a banquette and a wine bar beside it, so this floor can host on its own..

It is for time away or time with friends.

It is for living… just like the rest of the home.

Ready to rethink a space in your home?

If your basement has been sitting on the someday list, consider this your sign to move it up. We take on a limited number of full-home projects each year, and we design the entire home, every floor, as one connected experience.

xo, Summer + Serena

P.S. Planning a renovation for next year? Now is the right time to start the conversation. Design development, sourcing and lead times all run months ahead of construction, so beginning early is what protects your timeline and your budget.