Builder: Monarch Custom Homes
The customer is always right. Even local home builders follow this golden rule when creating their clients’ dream home. So it’s not often a custom-home designer gets the creative leeway to design a home exactly the way she likes.
For Shawn Anderson, co-owner and designer at Coeur d’Alene’s Monarch Homes, it’s only once or twice a year she is given the artistic freedom to design her very own spec home.
A combination of centuries of design, this rural Hayden home features modern design trends like quartz accents, statement lighting fixtures and abstract-art-inspired wallpaper. While the home’s more classic elements like wooden beams, stone fireplaces and mahogany barn doors are a homage to design traditions.
“With this home, I really focused on a mix of styles and eras of design,” Anderson says. “The brick represents a retro feel, the granite is contemporary and the stainless steel is a mixture of both.
“I wanted to seamlessly marry the traditional to the modern, the fresh, to the old world.”
Putting a modern twist on the typical craftsman home, the exterior boasts beautiful wood paneling and an oversized wood-slat entry door. The lines created by the wood exterior are carried into the home, accentuating doors, walls and decor throughout the 3,407-square-foot house.
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The home’s three bedrooms and 3.5 baths allow homeowners the ability to entertain without being overwhelmed by mansion-like space.
“This home is not too big to maintain and very flexible for every style of homeowner,” Shawn says.
The ground floor’s fireplaces give the home an extra dash of cozy, from the living room’s hewn stone fireplace to the outdoor patio’s fire table. The most unique is the modern double-sided fireplace that sits both in the master bedroom and the master bath — a panel of glass separating the two rooms. Transparency softens a space, Anderson says, which is why she loves to design with glass, see-through materials and massive windows.
The latest home technology also makes an appearance in this urban woodland home. The kitchen island contains a pop-up phone charging station for budding chefs to ensure their virtual recipe books never die.
Every room of the house, including the patio, is equipped with ceiling speakers so music can fl ow through the home. Individual rooms can be playing a different song, podcast or audiobook.
“Music is very important to me,” Anderson says. “I wanted to make sure this home had the sound of music everywhere.” N
By Rosemary Anderson
Photography By Joel Riner