Outdoor Living Space Remodel — Winter Springs, FL

The Remodeling Story

They asked about the fireplace. The answer was the back wall.

Our clients called about their family-room fireplace — unhappy with its squatty proportions and the lopsided look of a television alcove on one side and a small bar on the other. That was the brief. But this Winter Springs home sits on a wooded lot with a golf-course view beyond, and the room’s rear wall — blank stucco pierced by two small half-moon windows — was keeping every bit of that view out. Our design team asked a bigger question: what if the wall itself opened?

The built answer replaced the closed wall with a gabled elevation of glass — French doors flanked by sidelights under a wide arched transom, framed in black so the composition reads against the cream stucco. Outside the new doors, a herringbone paver terrace steps down to the lawn, furnished simply with Adirondack chairs facing the trees. Lantern sconces flank the opening; the roofline’s new gable gives the elevation the height the old wall never had.

The room didn’t need a bigger television wall. It needed the wall with the view to stop being a wall.

Inside, the room’s composition settled around the light: the interior now borrows the terrace and the fairway as its far wall, and the old asymmetry the clients disliked gave way to a room organized toward the doors. More than 50 Winter Springs projects over two decades carry this kind of work.