Before & After: A Renovation Transforms a White Rock Home into the Most Flexible House in the West

There’s flexible design—being able to turn your kitchen island into an extended dining table for 10, for example—and then there’s really flexible design. When designer Andrea McLean first met with Lucy Willcox and Rick Campbell, the owners of this home in White Rock, B.C., she quickly realized that their vision sat firmly in the latter camp. “Lucy loves to move her furniture around, even once a week,” says McLean. “They have a beautiful eclectic mid-century furniture collection—she just loves to switch things up a bit.” 

While the original house itself wasn’t in great shape, the lot was one in a million: positioned on a hill overlooking Boundary Bay, it has a public easement on one side, so the homeowners won’t have to deal with another building getting in the way of the view.

The location also meant that keeping those views was king when it came to designing the new space—but 360-degree windows don’t always set the stage for flexibility. “It’s a similar condition to working with condos,” says McLean. “You want to embrace the view, but you also have to have a few interior walls for the television, or artwork or cabinetry.”

Architect Randy Bens had worked on the building plan, and McLean was brought on board to design the interiors later on in the project. (McLean is a registered interior designer, but is also working toward registration as an architect; the dual background and the ability to understand and incorporate architectural plans gives her a unique perspective.) She listened to the couple’s non-negotiables—Lucy wanted a view from their bed so she could see the ocean as soon as she woke up in the morning, plus that flexibility of furniture design—and then got to work creating an open-concept plan that would reflect the geography outside the windows.

Bens had a plan to expose the Douglas fir beams on the sloped ceiling of the main living area, and McLean took inspiration from this in her materials selection. “From the living room you’re looking at the geography—it’s front and centre, that B.C. coastline—and Douglas fir is a B.C. wood that is being expressed structurally, becoming an interior aesthetic,” she says. “I really wanted the millwork to tie into that.”

To bring in the coastal-inspired design she was looking for, McLean collaborated with general contractor Ron Kliewer of KBC Developments and the millworkers at Intempo Interiors. The challenge was not just to use the same Douglas fir from the home’s structure in the creation of the cabinetry, but also to make that material really look and feel like wood—which isn’t as simple as it sounds. “Douglas fir can be quite orange, and we wanted this to look like it had been sun-bleached over time, like a piece of driftwood on the beach,” she says. The team at Intempo needed to whitewash the wood to bring the orange tone down, and to wire brush the surface to bring out the grain—which meant creating a custom, thicker veneer that could handle the resurfacing.

And the while the outside of the cabinets is neutral and organic, McLean brought colour into a few select interiors—royal blue, sunset pink, rusty orange: a moment of delight when opening a cabinet door. “They’re colours you’d see in the sky or the ocean at sunset or sunrise,” she says. 

In the open-concept living area, one key piece in the overall layout ended up being critical to the master plan: they needed to decide where the fireplace would go. Traditionally, it would sit on an outside wall, but the build-out for the venting would have led to smaller windows at best, and a fireplace blocking the ocean view at worst. It was Lucy who suggested a suspended fireplace in the middle of the room, along with the Togo sofa and chair. “She was absolutely right,” says McLean, who notes that the suspended fireplace is a perfect fit for the very-movable Togo pieces. “The hearth rotates 360 degrees and can be positioned in any direction you want.”

Most importantly, the space functions just as the homeowners hoped it would: without restrictions or boundaries, and as open as that stunning view outside. Now, each of those floor-to-ceiling windows provides a new opportunity to reset the floor plan on any given night. “They’ve pulled that dining table out and pushed their Togo furniture over there, or Rick might set up his art easel,” says McLean. “They love how this plan is flexible for them—each space doesn’t need to be labelled.” 

More Photos of This Incredible White Rock Renovation

This story was originally published in the May/June 2023 print issue of Western Living—find the digital issue here.