Kitchen and home renovation in Ann Arbor, MI

One project across the main level

The owners did not want a kitchen that looked new next to a staircase and floors that did not. So the kitchen remodel ran together with the flooring, the stairs and the back deck, handled by one crew on one schedule. That is the case for a whole-home scope, and the reason our design-build process keeps the same team from the first drawing to the last board.

Doing it as one project is also what makes the finishes agree. The wood tone in the kitchen cabinets picks up the tone of the new floor, the stair treads match that floor rather than fighting it, and even the deck outside was chosen to sit with the navy siding instead of clashing. A kitchen done in isolation would have left the owners staring at a dated railing every time they walked to the front door. Handling the connected spaces together closes that gap.

A kitchen built around stone and dark wood

The cabinets are a deep wood tone, paired with black counters and a natural stone backsplash that runs speckled and veined across the wall. It is a warmer, heavier look than the white kitchens everyone defaults to, and it suits an Ann Arbor home with mature trees out every window. A stainless range and a pendant over the work zone keep the room practical under all that texture.

The stone is the piece your eye keeps returning to. Rather than a repeating tile, the backsplash reads as a continuous slab, so the grain carries behind the range and the sink without a grid breaking it up. Against the black counters and the dark cabinetry, it does the work a busy tile never could. It is the kind of natural stone work that rewards a close look.

Running stone as a slab is harder than setting tile. The piece has to be templated to the wall and the counter as one unit, cut around the outlets and the window, and set so the seam at the corner all but disappears. The cabinets underneath have to be dead level first, because a slab has no grout lines to hide a run that drifts.

That is the quiet skill in a kitchen like this: the parts that look effortless are the ones that took the most setup, from the levelled cabinet boxes to the dedicated circuits behind the range and the pendant. It is also why the dark palette works. A busy white kitchen forgives a lot, but deep wood and black stone show every misaligned line, so the only way to run them is to build straight and let the material speak. That is the standard behind our countertop and surface work across the board.

Floors and stairs to match

New hardwood runs through the main living areas, and the staircase came back with a wood railing and hardwood treads that tie to the floor below. Redoing the stairs at the same time as the floors is what keeps a house from looking half-finished, where a fresh floor meets a dated rail at the landing. Here the run reads continuous from the entry through the living space and up.

Stairs are fussier than they look. Treads have to be templated to the existing stringers, the railing has to meet code for height and baluster spacing, and the whole assembly has to land flush with a floor going in at the same time. Sequencing that with the flooring crew is the difference between a clean, continuous run and a patchwork of transitions. Because one team held both, the treads and the floor were ordered to match and installed in the right order, so the grain and the tone carry straight through the turn.

A back deck built for the yard

Outside, the project added a wood deck sized for outdoor dining, set against the navy-sided house and looking into a wooded yard. Pulling the deck into the same job as the interior meant one crew, one set of decisions and a finish that suits the house rather than a bolt-on that fights it. If a deck is on your own list, our deck construction work is where that starts.

A deck is more structure than surface. The footings have to go below the Michigan frost line so the frame does not heave through a hard winter, and the ledger has to be flashed and fastened to the house so water never tracks behind the siding. The whole thing has to be sized and permitted for the loads it will actually carry.

Building it alongside the interior work let the crew tie the exterior door, the threshold and the deck height together, so stepping out to the yard is one clean move rather than a drop onto a bolt-on platform. It is the same principle as the rest of the job: the pieces were planned as a set, so they meet the way they should. You can meet the team that ran it, or book a free consultation to talk through a project of your own.

Taken together, the kitchen, the floors, the stairs and the deck read like one home rather than a set of separate updates. That coherence is the whole argument for handing a list like this to a single team that serves Ann Arbor and the rest of Washtenaw County.

Planning a kitchen, or a kitchen plus the rooms around it? That is our favorite kind of project, because it is where the finishes finally agree with each other. Browse more finished projects for ideas, start your project online, or tell us about your home and we will map the scope with you.