A Spanish Bungalow gets the high-end hotel makeover

When friends see the suite-like bedroom David Galindo designed for Chris Sesoko and Javier Rodriguez, they figure the Belmont Heights couple razed an exterior wall and pushed out into the back yard of their 1920s Spanish bungalow. In fact, they merely cleaned their room.

It was about time, says Galindo of David Galindo Home. “They had this long, narrow bedroom with a box-like closet that impinged on the room,” he says.

That closet was likely an afterthought, an architectural P.S., or maybe just the bad weekend project of a previous owner whose aesthetic was Early Soviet Union: As Galindo describes it, the closet was like a room within a room, 10 feet by 10 feet, jutting into the bedroom—a kind of elephant in the living room, if you sleep in your living room.

Galindo ordered the closet destroyed; that created about 100 square feet of usable floor space where Sesoko and Rodriguez needed it most—at the entrance to their bedroom. Then Galindo added two narrower closets, one along that same back wall and another facing it from across the room, on the wall next to the bedroom door. He added glass closet doors with aluminum edging and “lights inside that give the room the illusion of more space.”

Galindo used several other tactics to create a sense of spaciousness without knocking down exterior walls:

KEEP YOUR BED NEAT AND LOW
Galindo designed a new bed for Sesoko and Rodriguez with high rails “so that the mattress comes down about five inches deep,” he says. Advantage? “You can make the bed by just tucking the sheets behind the high rails. They kind of hide everything.” That bed is also lower to the ground than most—another strategy for giving the appearance of more air and light. “If you get the bed low enough, if it’s less of a big, bulky thing in middle of the room, you create more space between the ceiling and bed and allow more light into the room,” he says. That didn’t stop Galindo from adding a fairly palatial upholstered headboard—“a little bit of architecture that just frames the bed nicely,” he says.

CLEAN UP YOUR WALLS
Galindo recommended wallpaper from Wallteriors. “It’s handmade but it doesn’t cost a fortune,” he says. “Each piece is unique. You just lay it on any way you want—checkerboard-style or brick. In this case, I ordered rectangles to tie into the rectangle feature on the closet doors—picked up on that grid in the wallpaper.” Galindo says the wallpaper, though monochromatic, is its own kind of artwork; nothing else needs to hang there. That too leaves the room neater, cleaner, more linear—“really masculine, without being cold or austere,” he says.

A LITTLE COLOR, PLEASE
To lighten up the monochromatic palette, Galindo recommended just a wee bit of what he calls “pop color”—in this case, “saffron orange curtains and some orange accent pillows.”

USE PENDANT LIGHTS
Galindo hung pendant lights over lean, clean bedside tables that might otherwise support a lamp and clutter. “The overall effect is pretty contemporary,” he says.

CHECK INTO A HOTEL
“A lot of my clients come to me after they stay in a boutique hotel or the W or something,” Galindo says, “and they tell me they want to recreate that suite experience.”

DAVID GALINDO HOME 2815 E BROADWAY | LONG BEACH 90803 | 562.930.0033.

Tags: david galindo home, homes, Long Beach, redesign, remodeling, Shelter