Design Your Best Life

By Lisa Arnett
March 2025 View more Featured

Five ways to transform your home into an inspiring and empowering place to live

After being in the industry for 20 years, Naperville-based interior designer Lauren Collander has come to a conclusion about her line of work. “Everybody thinks our job is artistic,” she says. “It’s actually psychology. We go to a client’s home, and they tell us their problems. It’s all about [determining] what is stressing them out, what is their dream, and how we can make it happen for them.”

In the spirit of that, we asked interior designers and home renovators to share their stories about helping homeowners improve their daily lives through thoughtful changes. From a sunroom addition for a nature-loving homeowner to a top-to-bottom rehab for a widow moving into her next season of life, the results are transformative. “If your home doesn’t work for you, you can’t be calm. You can’t think straight. You can’t do anything else,” Collander says. “It’s the first step to set yourself up for the way you want to live.”

1. Dedicate space to gather and retreat

Cozy family rooms, hidden basement lounges, lady dens, and more provide places to connect and escape

In a family home with many people sharing the space, living your collective best life might involve having spaces to gather, retreat, or both.

Michelle Gentile, owner of Michelle Gentile Interiors + Home in Downers Grove, recently worked with a Downers Grove couple who desperately needed a central gathering space for their family. “They have five kids, and [their home] was big enough for them, but the way it was laid out didn’t make any sense,” Gentile says. “They had a lot of choppy rooms and different elevations from past additions, and a too-small kitchen. They had a playroom that you had to step down into that was hard to get to. It wasn’t functioning for them.” The new design centers around an open-concept kitchen and family room. “We did a big sectional [sofa] and a giant island that can fit eight people, and a Kohler sink that has trays that are built-in so you can dry your dishes right in the sink,” Gentile says. “They are a big entertaining family, and now it just all makes a lot more sense for them.”

In a Naperville project, Collander transformed a finished basement into a stylish lounge with a hidden door concealed by slatted wall details. “We created a little Champagne corner where we did a banquette,” she says, “and this is where [the homeowner] and a girlfriend would perch while her husband and his friend would sit in these big leather armchairs.”

There is one thing purposely missing from this basement lounge: an actual bar. “I love, love, love a bar-height table instead,” Collander says. “You can have the kids down here for pizza night, you can do a puzzle on it, you can play games with friends. It’s more flexible than an actual bar, and it’s a lot less alcohol focused.”

Collander also worked with a Downers Grove family who built a second dwelling in the empty lot behind their home for the specific purpose of hosting large gatherings. The heart of the space is a family room with a dramatically vaulted ceiling accented with chocolate-hued wood beams. A generously sized sofa and tufted leather chairs situated around a fireplace provide ample seating for family members and friends to commune.

For some families, a space to escape is just as important. “We joke that we have had man caves for decades; let us introduce you to the lady den,” Collander says. “We have been doing them for 10 years, and it’s time that everyone knows about them.”

As to what exactly a homeowner might use her lady den for, that’s entirely up to her. “You go in there, you shut the door, and you forget the other things that are happening. It supports the importance of alone time and whatever your hobbies are and whatever makes you happy,” Collander says. “You can invite your girlfriends in here to play cards, or you can sit here and read a novel on a Sunday afternoon. The most important thing is that I want you to need nothing when you’re in there. So you’ll need a beverage station and your favorite snacks and a comfy sofa and a gorgeous wallpaper that makes you happy.”

2. Surround yourself with art you adore

Make your home your mission statement with intentional artwork

A surefire way to feel at peace in your own home is to make space for whatever it is that sparks those warm and fuzzy feelings for you. “Surround yourself with things that make you happy, that create a memory for you, stir an emotion,” Collander says. One Naperville homeowner she worked with decided to go a step further and set a very specific mission statement for all the artwork that would decorate her family’s space. “This client decided she was only going to support female artists,” she says. “That idea empowers her.”

For the home office, Collander and her client chose this bold and colorful painting of a woman lounging on a sofa—clad in a bathrobe and towel turban, her hand held to her forehead—by Shannon Kay Lewis. (A Kansas City–born painter based in Chicago, Lewis was one of several local artists selected to paint a letter in the Black Lives Matter street mural on Clifton Avenue in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood in 2020—she did the “S” in “Lives.”) They decided this lounging painting would make the perfect focal point on a black wall in her home office. “It’s her favorite thing to see everyday,” Collander says.

They also commissioned new original work for the home’s entryway by Chicago artist Britni Mara (see this month’s cover). “She paints on canvas and then she puts it on the wall and continues the painting on the actual wall,” Collander says. They even asked Mara to involve the client’s son, then age 2; his playful paint strokes are now a whimsical part of the whole work of art. For an upstairs bathroom, they selected another painting by Mara to add a splash of color to an otherwise all-white corner. It’s in just the right spot for the homeowner to admire from her soaking tub.

3. Set up your home office for success

Reduce distractions and protect your work-life balance with a strategically situated workspace

With remote work more popular than ever, making sure your home office works for you is key to living your best life. If the 2020 pandemic sent you clamoring to carve out a makeshift office, now’s the time to rethink whether or not it actually works—both for you and other members of the household.

Converting a rarely used formal dining or living room into a home office by adding French doors has been a low-lift upgrade for many households. However, because those spaces are typically located at the front of the home, you’re mere feet away from a host of daily distractions—doorbells, deliveries, and more. Many new-build floor plans also situate a first-floor home office near the front of the house, inviting the same pain points. “You’re your own receptionist for your own house,” Collander says. “It’s a recipe for disaster. And then the kids come home from school, and everyone has to be quiet because a parent is on a phone call—it’s just this stress magnet.”

Collander works with her clients to consider alternate locations for a home office that allow for less disruption and also a clear separation of work and home life. “You don’t want to see [your home office] all the time because it feels like work is stalking you,” she says. “The best place might be in a sun-filled basement. It might be in a spare bedroom around a corner. My home office is on the second floor down a long hallway…and then above the garage.”

If you’ve been making do with a temporary setup, consider investing in more permanent fixtures to make your workday run smoother. That might be as simple as an ergonomic office chair or as elaborate as adding custom cabinetry with charging stations for devices and pull-out drawers to conceal a printer and files.

4. Reboot for your next era

Get a fresh start after a major life change

Going through a significant life change or personal tragedy can bring shifting needs in your home that can be hard to face. Interior designers are oftentimes the ones stepping in to help a homeowner figure out how they can best set themselves up for success at home after a divorce, death in the family, or natural disaster.

Gentile worked with a client who was ready for a new start after her husband of 35 years died. The homeowner originally planned to sell their Downers Grove house and relocate to their second home in Florida. But after a hurricane damaged that home, she opted to hire Gentile for a full first-floor renovation so she could stay here permanently.

“It had been about seven years [since his passing], and she was deeply in love with her husband, so it was hard for her,” Gentile says. Together, they sorted through what furniture to let go and what sentimental pieces to keep and work into the new design, such as a wooden desk from his den. When the homeowner was able to recover several beloved pieces of artwork from her Florida home, Gentile had them reframed and found just the right spots to show them off.

“We wanted to make it more of a sanctuary for her to relax in and really modernize the space,” Gentile says. They said goodbye to the 1990s honey-toned oak built-ins and cabinets in the living room and dining room, respectively, and removed a wall to create an open floor plan for the homeowner to more easily entertain friends as well as her three adult sons and their future families.

The new kitchen features a color palette of deep blue-green, ivory, and gold. “For the island, we worked with Calia Stone, a high-end stone company, and [chose a quartzite] called Manhattan that has a lot of blues and greens, and it’s swirly so it almost feels like the bottom of a river or ocean,” Gentile says.

The homeowner was so thrilled with Gentile’s work that she asked her to redo her bedroom and bathroom as well, replacing an outdated hot tub with a spacious soaking tub and steam shower. “They say your home is a reflection of your mind or your spirit, so I feel like if you have a fresh start and an uncluttered space around you, it just makes you feel good, and people can thrive in that environment,” Gentile says.

5. Connect with nature

Bring yourself closer to backyard views with a sunroom

Locals with lush yards are bringing the outside in by adding sunrooms to the rear of their homes. “It’s a connection to the outside, a way to be closer to nature and feel like you’re outdoors, but you’re completely covered and away from the elements,” says Tony Ducato, sales manager for Reliable Home Improvement in Naperville.

For a client’s home in Wheaton, Reliable added a fully enclosed sunroom with a wood-paneled ceiling and floor-to-ceiling windows for abundant natural light. “It’s completely heated and cooled, so it’s no different in temperature than the family room or kitchen,” he says. “And with a vaulted ceiling, it appears to be a lot larger so you get that feeling of volume.”

Rather that building an addition, other homeowners have opted to convert unused space elsewhere in the house. “If you have existing space that you are not using to begin with, like a formal living room or dining room, converting that [to a sunroom] creates somewhere for your family to hang out that’s like no other space in your house,” he says.

A screened-in three-season room is another option—and what Ducato chose for his own home. “I smoke cigars out there, I play poker out there,” he says. “You can’t use it 12 months a year, but it’s probably usable eight months a year. Still, that’s much more than an uncovered patio or deck.”

Fireplaces can add a measure of coziness—though they’re not for everyone. “It really adds a luxurious feel, but a lot of people don’t want to block the view to their backyard,” Ducato says. “It’s not that they don’t love the idea, but it takes away space that could be windows.”

Photos: Marina Storm, Picture Perfect; Michael Alan Kaskel; Picture Perfect House; Martina Magnusson Photography; Pete Aimaro