The Room That Was Doing Five Jobs and None of Them Well

This project just earned a Residential Specialty Award in the Regional 2026 Chrysalis Design Awards, and we wanted to share the full story behind it. The Chrysalis Awards recognize the best in residential remodeling across the country, honoring teams for design, craftsmanship, and problem-solving. This is our fifth Chrysalis Award in four years, and this one might be our favorite, because it went to a laundry room.

If you have a room in your house that can’t decide what it is, you’re not alone.

In a lot of homes, especially ones built before mudrooms became a design priority, one room ends up absorbing everything. The laundry. The dog stuff. The overflow pantry items. The sports gear, the shoes, the bags that don’t have anywhere else to go. It becomes the room everyone uses and nobody loves, because it was never really designed to do any of this in the first place.

That was exactly the situation at Bent Pine Court, a Durham home we worked on for a busy family with kids, a houseful of pets, and a laundry room that was simultaneously trying to be a pantry, a mudroom, a storage room, and a back-of-house catch-all. It wasn’t doing any of those jobs well, and the rest of the house was feeling the strain.

The goal wasn’t just storage. It was relief.

When a space like this isn’t working, the chaos doesn’t stay contained. It spreads. Things migrate to the kitchen counter, the hallway, the bottom of the stairs. Our design goal wasn’t just to organize the room, it was to give this family a space that could genuinely absorb the daily chaos so the rest of their home could breathe.

We started by looking at what the room was being asked to do and designing around that honestly, rather than trying to make it look like something it wasn’t. Custom built-in cabinetry with consistent hardware and a color-drenched palette unified what had been a series of fragmented zones into one cohesive room. We folded the separate pantry storage into the new cabinetry layout, which freed up meaningful square footage without losing any capacity. And at the back of the space, we added a wet bar with dedicated wine storage, because even a hardworking utility room can have a moment of personality.

The problems nobody sees are often the ones that matter most.

Midway through construction, we hit unexpected structural soffits and hidden plumbing that required us to rethink portions of the layout in real time. Close coordination with the contractor kept the design vision intact while solving for what the walls contained. This is the part of a renovation that rarely makes it into the photos but makes an enormous difference in whether a project comes together the way it was drawn.

We also designed a custom half-door gate that pockets neatly into the doorway opening. The family needed to keep their dogs from bolting out without closing the room off from the rest of the house. A standard door solved one problem and created another. The pocket gate solved both.

What this project was recognized for.

This laundry room and mudroom renovation earned a Residential Specialty Award in the Regional 2026 Chrysalis Design Awards, which recognize excellence in design, craftsmanship, and problem-solving across residential remodeling nationally. For us, the recognition meant something because it affirmed what we believe about every project: the overlooked rooms in a home deserve the same level of intention as the ones everyone sees first.

Utility doesn’t have to mean ordinary and this project is proof of that.

If your home has a room that sounds familiar, let’s talk.

Whether you have a laundry room that isn’t working, a mudroom that never quite got designed, or a space that’s doing too many jobs at once, we’d love to help you figure out what it could be.