JWC Media
a luxury lifestyle website that delivers a colorful and passionate telling of neighboring events, fashion, beauty, finance, and the pursuit of leisure.
By Janis MVK
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARGARET RAJIC
The four seasons room’s furnishings, curated by Ellyn Anderson of Walter E. Smithe, create a calm, inviting seating area centered around the fireplace.
There’s a particular kind of clarity that comes from curating a space with intention and personality—especially when it means taking the parts of a home that often gets overlooked and turning them into a genuine reflection of the life you’ve built.
For one Barrington homeowner, that clarity arrived in the form of a pool house that is, frankly, anything but ordinary.
The project came to the owner of Drury Design, Gladys Schanstra, by way of a familiar modern-day crossroad. The homeowner and the family had long split their time between Illinois and Florida, drawn south by warmer winters. But the pull of home, being closer to family, and staying connected to roots that run deep, began to win out.
“Is that where we’re going to put our investment?” Schanstra recalls the family asking themselves. They decided it was. So rather than simply enjoy what already existed, they chose to build something new around it, a space to make staying year-round feel like the obvious choice.
The result is a pool house that functions as a full-service entertaining destination equipped with a bar, laundry facilities, restroom, and a functional room that operates during any season. What could have been a glorified cabana became, under Drury Design’s direction, a space warm enough for daily family life and polished enough for any occasion instead.
For Schanstra, the design began as it always does: with listening. “The beginning process is really as important as the final product,” Schanstra says. “That will direct and dictate the whole course and direction of the style, the function, and the look of the project.”
For this homeowner, Schanstra found a client with a clear and confident aesthetic: classic and timeless.
The cabinetry, sourced from John Michael Studio, is a soft off-white metal chosen with durability in mind knowing that even sheltered cabinets would be exposed to humidity when the glass doors open to the pool. The bar is anchored by a Galley Workstation fitted with a colander and cutting boards, alongside a tightly packed suite of high-grade appliances.
“You look at it now and it’s very open and very calm,” Schanstra says.
The bathroom is a deliberate counterpoint. A showpiece. Mosaic tile covers the walls, the ceiling, and frames the entire side of the room, arriving like a punctuation mark in an otherwise hushed palette. This space reflects the definition of deliberate design, a Drury Design specialty.
Perhaps the most quietly consequential decision, though, was the flooring. The team initially planned for porcelain tile, practical and pool-appropriate. But as the vision of seamless indoor-outdoor flow came into focus, so did the solution. The homeowner already had bluestone throughout her home and its front walkway, so to match it, sections of the floor had to be excavated to ensure the stone sat perfectly flush from inside to out.
“It was the right decision,” Schanstra says. “The natural stone melted very well with the rest of her house.”
Then there are the unlacquered brass fixtures—a choice that reveals something essential about this homeowner’s sensibility. Unlacquered brass patinas tarnish, but it also tells a story of time and life. “Some clients absolutely don’t want that. But this client knew immediately.” In a space designed for longevity, there’s something fitting about a finish that only grows more itself with age.
What Drury Design delivered here is more than a pool house. It’s an argument for staying in a place that holds your life and making the spaces where you gather worthy of the gathering. Schanstra hopes that anyone who sees it will slow down and look closely.
“Once you pick up on those things,” she says, “you really begin to appreciate the space beyond whether or not it’s your taste.”
On a summer evening, with the doors thrown open and the bluestone running unbroken from inside to out, that feeling is impossible to miss. The feeling of being home.
Drury Design is located at 512 N. Main Street in Glen Ellyn, 630-534-9794, drurydesigns.com, @drurydesignkb.
