“That’s half the fun of living out here,” Stacey Reid declared one late afternoon, swiftly steering her gaze to an eagle soaring above outside her dining room picture window. “Sometimes they swoop right by the house.”
“There are a lot of geese, fish…but the bald eagle is the super star,” added husband Beau.
It’s the serene lake views and nearby wildlife of West Shores, a 640-acre residential lake community in Waterloo, that won the couple’s hearts and prompted their blended family’s move there in 2019.
“Beau was in Des Moines that day (it was listed for sale) and I said, ‘You need to get home. We need to go look at this right away,’” said Stacey, a real estate agent with Better Homes and Gardens. Beau, who works in employee benefits for Holmes Murphy, obliged.
While Stacey walked through the home, “I sat there on the deck the whole time,” Beau remembered. “She came back and said, ‘You kinda missed the tour,’ and I said, ‘We’re doing this, right?’” Enamored with the scenery, he was all in.
“Then COVID hit. It was perfect timing,” Stacey added.
The home’s bright southern exposure (without the sun’s intense glare) and gorgeous vistas of the lake community just couldn’t be better, asserted Beau. Its location on the north side of the neighborhood—with easy access to the exit and West Dodge Road, making for a quick work commute—was a bonus.
Outside, a private boat dock, a 100×40-foot sand beach with a fire pit, and beautifully landscaped berm with a babbling brook sweetened the pot.
Inside, however, was a quirky main-floor layout and modern farmhouse design that really did not suit the couple’s modern, unfussy tastes. But busy with college kids and managing careers, remodeling was not on their radar. Then, in July 2023, they decided to do away with the cumbersome layout.
“It wasn’t practical for us,” Stacey said. “There was a small kitchen island running the other way, with little seating that faced away from the lake. And there were angles everywhere.”
Added Beau: “The (kitchen) ceiling dropped down and came across at a diagonal to the entrance. There was a fireplace that came out at a weird 45-degree angle, and a little triangle pantry.”
“Maybe in 2004 when this (house) was built everyone didn’t go to Costco and buy a ridiculous amount of food!” Stacey said, joking about her grocery habits.
The couple brought in the design team of Clarissa Tuxhorn and Kinley Shallberg with Lee Douglas Interiors to help reconfigure the main level and create a relaxed California Modern vibe. KRT Construction was hired to complete the remodel.
“The remodel design came from Clarissa. She was amazing,” Stacey raved. “She had a lot of great ideas. Sometimes it would take me a while to get there…”
“It takes someone special to have that vision,” confirmed Beau. “And Kent (Therkelsen) with KRT has been great to work with. We’d throw out an idea and he’d say ‘Yeah, we can do that’ and figure it out. He’d get up there in the attic, checking the trusses. We’re lucky…this house has good bones, so there wasn’t much we couldn’t do.”
Among the changes made were creating direct access from the kitchen to the garage/basement steps, installing a large quartzite-topped kitchen island offering seating for six with lake views, and raising the ceiling for an airy feel, keeping the view at center stage.
“We chose rift cut white oak cabinetry that shows off the grain and used a natural stain to get that coastal feel,” Tuxhorn explained. Engineered white oak replaced the diagonal red oak flooring, and four panel windows off the dining room were replaced with a huge, single picture window offering unobstructed views of the lake.
“The light fixture above the island was a key design piece that Stacey found…we waited about 18 weeks for that light,” Tuxhorn said of the draped rope-style fixture. Its antique gold finish informed other hardware choices throughout the main floor, she said.
The odd fireplace was torn out, moved, and redesigned with a limestone surround and a faux limestone feature wall. “We do a lot of faux,” Tuxhorn said. “It’s a good way to give texture and control the color, and it’s cheaper than stone. We went tone-on-tone for that coastal look.”
A bar area was moved and reimagined using one of Stacey’s favorite design elements—a fluted stone backsplash with a marbled effect. A wall rack now displays the couple’s burgeoning wine collection.
Beau’s office saw a dramatic makeover. “It used to be closed off, with just a table and four chairs, and a barn door on a track,” he said. Two office walls received a Venetian plaster treatment and inky paint for a luxurious, modern aesthetic; the others were torn down and replaced with glass walls and a glass slider, which afford Beau both the privacy and lake views he desired. An espresso desk with a raised checkerboard front by Four Hands Furniture adds texture to the space.
The glass solution proved the project’s biggest challenge, Tuxhorn declared. “There’s a structural post on the corner, so we were able to run a steel header to there and chunk it up to support the heavy glass.”
“The glass company was reluctant to do it, but now they’ve put pictures on their website and they’ve gotten several inquiries,” Beau explained.
One element the team went back and forth on was replacing the great room’s arched windows with modern floor-to-ceiling, black-clad ones. Tuxhorn advised against it. “With all new windows, the design wouldn’t have flowed well to the outside,” she said. Instead, they chose to paint the interior window frames black to make them pop. “And oddly, arched windows are coming back in style.”
In all, the Reids couldn’t be happier with the makeover, which finished in March. They share the renovated home with two miniature Aussie labradoodles—Finley and Honey. “Honey ‘came with the house’…He was a COVID dog,” Beau quipped.
The couple love hosting their grown-and-flown kids and friends and taking the occasional sunset cruise. But Beau especially loves lake living this time of year. “I think we like it even better out here in the winter…the lake frozen over, just the solitude of it.”
For more information, visit leedouglas.com.
This article originally appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Omaha Home Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.