A basement can be the largest space in a home, but it often ends up as a storage area for forgotten toys and miscellaneous office supplies.
It doesn’t have to be that way. The following transformations by four local interior designers demonstrate that a basement can be much more than an afterthought.
According to Washingtonian, the designer, of Georgetown’s Regan Billingsley Interiors, worked with Pinehurst Design Build in North Bethesda, led by Tom Gilday.
Despite the basement’s space challenges, a pool table was among the clients’ priorities. The husband, a bourbon collector, also craved a speakeasy-like space to display favorite bottles and entertain friends. “This was really a space that had to serve many functions,” Billingsley says.
Prior to the renovation, the basement had been partially finished—it contained a TV room and office (later combined to create a larger TV room), storage areas (one is now the speakeasy), and three spaces still in the floor plan: a gym, a bedroom, and a bathroom. But it all felt “very hard, very cold, and very dark,” Billingsley says. She addressed the lack of good lighting by adding built-in fixtures, and she softened the space with textural touches and natural materials, such as a rug made from 100 percent felted New Zealand wool.
“Even though there are no exterior windows, you feel some association with the outdoors,” Billingsley says. “You don’t feel like you’re underground.”
The speakeasy is accessible via a secret door that on one side holds pool cues and stacks of books. Billingsley wanted visitors to feel like they were slipping into an early-20th-century hideaway, so she looked for decor that hailed from that era, including reclaimed barnwood, a phone dating to 1920, a factory light from 1930s Paris, and an old whiskey barrel, which doubles as a bar table. Guests can sip cocktails while perched on one of the red mohair-covered barstools.