HOME TOUR | Light and Airy Modern Coastal Beach House

Our projects are known to be easy breezy. It's a very carefree, like, just an easy, relaxed feeling, and there's always a little bit of vintage. It's a little bit edgy. We're always trying to do something different and to top the last project that we did, and I know if I get house envy, then, like, we did it. I'm very big on personal style of the client. There's always gonna be some little vintage weirdo piece that reminds me of them. I'm like, here's the weird piece that reminds me of you, but I feel like that's what they want from me. They want a personalized experience, and they want a house that's not like everybody else's house. I'm Christina Kim, and I'm the owner of Christina Kim Interior Design, and our firm is based in Manasquan, New Jersey. Today, we're in beautiful Belmar, New Jersey, which is an hour south of Manhattan. We are on Inlet Terrace, which is a canal to the ocean. This was my pandemic baby. When we started this project, it was just paper. There were just plans. I mean, there were beautiful plans. North End Builders, Christina Kim Interior Design, and Mary Hearn as the architect, and we just sort of poured over those plans. We let ourselves dream a little bit. When you walk in, there's big, beautiful double doors. We actually doubled the size of the doors. It almost reminds me of a southern porch, that feeling of hospitality. Welcome, come on in. The foyer was the very first design idea that I had. Marble checkerboard floors are such a classic design element, but I wanted them to be the faded-out quality. I did a cream with a soft blue-gray. The living room seating arrangement was really important because it really did have to be very comfortable. People have to be able to sleep on these sofas all through the night, and they do. The first thing that we did was design the custom marble fireplace. It's a little modern. It's a very old-world material. We did use what I like to call a fashion marble, but it's an arabescato. It almost reminds me of graffiti, and it's that movement that keeps things interesting, and we did a really clean shape on it. Beam placement is something that I think adds a lot of character to a home, especially a new build, but they need to be planned out from the very beginning. Here, you'll notice that we omitted any type of crown molding because we decided that we were gonna have beams. We're gonna have lots of beams, and they were gonna be more important than the crown. We had them finished exactly how we wanted them, and then had a local ironmonger make these custom beam straps for us. Just a little detail. These chairs are pallet tech, and they're done in an outdoor fabric. We also did striped end tables from made goods, as well as lamps from our terriers. The kitchen was the first major room that we designed. We often start with the kitchen, and we're there for a few weeks. We actually took out some cabinetry from the plans just to really focus on the natural light, and to keep everything functional underneath. Everything would be from the waist down, and then it was about mixing materials. So we have our cutting board station here, and we kept everything as drawers, so yes, that is definitely a trend in kitchens today, but it is very, very useful, particularly if you're not that tall like me, but you don't have to travel very far. Pretty nice. So in dining rooms, I almost always start with the lighting. Vintage Italian lighting from the 1970s. The lights are very light and airy. They almost remind me of feathers. And then designed a custom table from Aronson Woodworks. It was fashioned after a ping pong table. I just thought that whole feeling of relaxed luxury leisure that made me smile. At any given moment, you could put the ping pong net up and play a game while you're watching the water. One of my favorite design elements is a display cabinet that we designed and built to display her grandmother's milk glass collection, and that made her happy. The pandemic presented a lot of challenges. Our timeline got extended, and at the end point of a project, that last quarter, your client is so wanting to move in and to see everything come together. And it's really important to say, hey, let's do this right. This is the last layer of finishes that go on that people are going to actually see. This is not the time to rush. So they trusted us like they did with every design decision, and then the result was just so great. The office design started from, you know, I found this little green vintage lamp that I absolutely love. I marched it into Sherwin-Williams, and I had them shoot the color. We swapped the walls in that green, the baseboard. We found a desk from a showroom sale and actually had it stripped down locally. So it was completely different. It was just like a dark espresso finish. Seeing that just naked wood, I said, keep it raw. Which is exactly what we did. The music room was important. I wanted that to feel a little different than the rest of the house. So we have this blue and white wallpaper. The daughter is an accomplished musician. So she has her piano. She sings a twist on the classics. But, you know, if you turn, there's a big photo of Bruce Springsteen, who's Jersey Shore's answer to God. I feel like basements get a bad rap, but they can be quite elevated. We painted all those cabinets a custom color. I like to say it's a pistachio color. The bar opens up to all the outdoor space. So it's a pass-through bar. There's a custom pool table made with a tabletop. So that can double as a second dining room table. So the wine room is a special room. It's not that this wine room is so big. It's just very well considered. So traditionally, wine rooms are really dark. They could be dark wood or iron or moody. And this house is so light and airy. I didn't want it to feel like that. There's, you know, a blue and white stripe wallpaper in keeping with the rest of the house, very modern coastal. So the mud room in this house is definitely a hardworking spot. The thing about the Jersey Shore that I love are there these old school locker rooms near the beach. So you find these wooden locker rooms that you can put your towels in and you have your beach chairs up at the beach. And I wanted it to feel the same here. This is actually an iPhone pick. So it's our client's daughter who went to a concert, See Here Now in Asbury. She took this great iPhone pick and I just thought it'd be great to just blow that up. When I saw a built-in on the architectural plans, I was so excited. I knew exactly what I was gonna do. Boom. Cabana towels. This is the daughter's room. So she's a college age girl. We wanted to make sure that the room felt grown up enough and elevated enough, but still fun and still feminine. You have two vastly different ceiling heights. So here we kind of created this little alcove and decided to do the Philip Jeffries accent walls here. One, because as soon as you walk into the room, that's what you see. Don't have your feature wall behind you. It has to be in front of you. White oak desk, brass touches, killer view. So this is the primary bedroom. This room, I really wanted it to feel like a lake house. The light in this room is so incredible because you're facing the water. I did everything that I could to really accentuate that feeling. So how peaceful to wake up in a four poster bed and look at that. So my firm is asked often about wood ceilings. I bet you didn't know wood has a personality. It does. Pine to me is a very humble material. It has like a very cozy feel. And we asked our mill workers to put the faintest amount of whitewash. I actually even asked them to pare it back. Do less, do less. And then we ended up with this and it was just perfect. It's no secret that window treatment really finishes the room, but I encourage people to use color and to use pattern. So a small scale or a mid scale, in this case, a mid scale pattern feels really nice. If you're using a smaller or a mid scale, it will come off more as texture than a really jarring pattern. And it adds a very custom quality and it's interesting. So here we're in the primary bathroom and I just love that it's quiet. It's a very subtle bathroom. It's not ostentatious. A lot of times in a primary, we'll use, you know, a really fancy marble, but here we decided to go with something a little more interesting and subdued. So, travertine. This is silver travertine. And if you look at it up close, it really reminds me of the shoreline. It's a really large shower. So I thought a really large format brick pattern tile would really be nice in here. And I love that they're glossy and I love that they're milky. So the outdoors here are very deceiving. You usually don't get a lot of space at the beach, but it's a big pie-shaped piece of land and there is a covered dining area, multiple seating areas, a fireplace, a fire pit, a volleyball court, and a beautiful infinity pool. Everything about this house is focused on this view. So it was, again, really important that we had the perfect seating. What I really love about this sofa is that it feels almost like indoor furniture. You know, it's gone are those boxy cushions. We did a knife edge. It's a detail maybe you don't notice right away, but it really feels elevated and they look so comfortable because they are so comfortable. The end result of this project is exactly how I'd imagined. All those renderings and all of those nights thinking, is that fabric right? Does that pattern go with that? Is that the right marble? Like, it all came together and really was my vision executed.