The opening moment
The lot is why this project exists. It sits above Champions Run, and on a clear morning the sunrise comes up across the course and straight into the back of the house. They're members of the club. No new address in Omaha was going to improve on that. So the question was never whether to move. It was whether the 1996 house already standing there could become the house they actually wanted.
What they wanted, and what they couldn't yet say
The brief was plain. The house was a set of smaller, compartmentalized rooms — it had served them well, and they said so — but what they wanted now was open, connected, welcoming. Real flow between the kitchen, the dining room and the living space. More daylight. A plan that finally made something of the sunrise and the view they'd stayed for.
They host. Family gatherings run to twelve and are still growing. They cook, they watch sports, they open good wine. So they asked for gathering spaces that each did a different job: a small warm room for conversation and appetizers, a large one for a game, a casual table for eight, and a dining room that seats twelve at a holiday. They asked that the same house work for two people on a Tuesday without feeling oversized. And they asked, quietly, that it be able to hold one of their children's families someday.
The harder version of that list was the part nobody said out loud. If the lot was the reason to stay, the footprint was the reason it would be difficult. None of it could come from adding on.
The partnership
Demolition made the real problem visible. Traditional columns defined nearly every room, and nobody could say which of them were holding the house up. It's a two-story, so every wall on the wish list was a bearing-wall question before it was a design question. The original framing had been done creatively — odd things supporting other odd things — which made tracing a load back to its source detective work on site rather than a line on a drawing.
It got solved in the room. Ron, Jeff, and Klassen, the framer, met on site again and again. Their project manager's read on why it worked: constant communication and site meetings, and years of experience between them producing solutions that were actually possible. That's a different standard than solutions that are drawable. We've been building in Omaha since 1977, and most of what that teaches is the difference.
The turn came on a walkthrough. Everyone was still working the columns problem — how to open the space up — when Kris Patton saw the back staircase and stopped to ask a question instead of proposing an answer. How often do you actually use the staircase in the front entry? What would you think if we took it out? Your entry focal doesn't need to be this staircase.
It was the right question for two reasons at once. The circular stair sat close enough to the front door to choke the entry, and it was thoroughly of 1996 — keeping it would have meant tearing it out and rebuilding it modern anyway, to pull off the look the rest of the house was heading toward. That is a large cost for a staircase they walked past more than they walked on. Removing it was the cheaper move and the better one, which is a rarer combination than it sounds.
They said yes, and made the back stair the primary route up. That single yes freed the main level for a bar, a walk-in wine cellar, and a walk-in pantry, none of which existed before, on a footprint that never grew.
The lounge is where they pushed back. That space had been a sitting room, and a sitting room was what they expected to get again. But they already had a lot of sitting rooms — several spaces doing the same job — and adding one more would have repeated the problem in a new location. So the proposal came back as something else: an after-dinner room, a place to take a glass of wine off the bar. They walked through it, and then they understood it.
The craft
It started with a slab. Before the palette, before the cabinetry, before anything else, Kris went looking for the drama that would set the tone — and found it in the stone that became the dining room fireplace. She has called it the art that created the space. Everything after it was chosen to support it: the agate for the family room found second, the counters and backsplashes deliberately quieter so the rooms would not get busy. The slabs came from Midwest Tile, after she had searched every distributor in town.
The dark cabinetry follows the same logic, and answers the obvious objection. The brief asked for bright and open; the kitchen went dark. But the client had lived with dark cabinets before, and the richness of the wood tones is what the house needed — warmth to balance the lighter walls and trim. Take the dark out and the light stops reading as light.
The lighting was found the same way, from one fixture outward. The entry piece came first, at market. The lounge fixtures are the same collection in different shapes, so two connected rooms relate without competing. The dining room was the hardest: nothing else could hang in there, so that one fixture had to carry the whole room on scale alone — big enough not to be missed, restrained enough not to shout.
And two columns couldn't move at all. They were absorbed into the kitchen refrigerator wall and are completely concealed — the wall reads as cabinetry because the loads were routed through it deliberately, not because something got boxed in afterward.
How they live in it now
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