TWIST ON TRADITION

Interior designer Monique O’Brien helps a young family reimagine a Lake Forest home she personally fell in love with eight years ago.

WHEN MONIQUE O’BRIEN Googled the Lake Forest address of a potential new interior design client, she got a wave of déjà vu. “I remember thinking it looked incredibly familiar,” she says. “But the moment I pulled up to meet her, I knew exactly which house it was.” As it turns out, O’Brien and husband Kevin toured and fell in love with this exact property back in 2018 while searching for a new house in Lake Forest. “It was a wonderful opportunity to return to the home and help bring it to its full potential,” adds O’Brien, who works with clients throughout the North Shore and Chicago area.

A native of Newport Beach, California, her Monique O’Brien Design specializes in custom, bespoke creations tailored to each client, their home, and their lifestyle. With more than 15 years of design experience, she worked for high-end luxury firms on the west coast before relocating to Lake Forest, where she now lives with her husband and their three daughters—Jane, a sixth grader, and twins Kate and Whitney, both freshmen at Lake Forest High School.

The client she met for this serendipitously familiar Lake Forest project had already started making changes to the vintage 1962 layout, but quickly became frustrated. “She explained that she kept buying pieces that were the wrong scale or just didn’t fit, leaving her stuck in a cycle of endless returns,” says O’Brien. “Because she had already wallpapered one room, we let that dictate where we started.”

The Schumacher grass cloth wallpaper was the jumping off point for a design transformation that included reimagining the original floor plan. “The client wanted to honor her grandmother’s traditional style while creating a fresh, livable space for her three children and two dogs,” says O’Brien. “To better suit their large family, we switched the floor plan. The former living room is now the dining room, and the previous dining area has become a sitting room. The entire design was inspired by the existing wallpaper in the new sitting room, which served as the color palette’s foundation.”

O’Brien’s vision for changing the floor plan was born out of necessity. The wife is one of six children and they all live in the Midwest, which means the home needed to comfortably accommodate large family gatherings. Once that decision was made, everything began to fall into place. “Sometimes you get those clients that are just a dream,” says O’Brien, adding that they met a few times to brainstorm about the concept before work began on the renovation. “The wife is also a working mom and was so easy to work with. For everything I showed her, she was ‘yes, I love it.'”

One of the client’s requirements was to find ways to work a few treasured sentimental pieces and family heirlooms into the design. “It was a joy to give those special items a purposeful place in the room,” says O’Brien, noting a credenza in the new dining room that she juxtaposed with a commissioned piece of art and bold new light fixture. “She has a bit of a feminine flair to her design aesthetic but as a designer, I love mixing those traditional elements with a modern piece of art—something to give it a bit of an edge.”

The project also included some construction and architectural changes, all designed and installed under O’Brien’s direction. “The new dining room space had an underwhelming fireplace so I kept the arches and added case moldings around the opening,” she says, explaining that she also designed a new mantel and hired a local carpenter to build it. “We picked out a piece of green marble for the surround and hearth that complemented the wallpaper, which added a special flair.”

For the cozy new sitting room, which has become a favorite spot for the parents to hang out or for their children to sit and read a book, O’Brien designed chairs and an ottoman with caning fabric and purchased a vibrant piece of art to hang over the Schumacher wallpaper. “The art in the home was one of my favorite things to curate,” adds O’Brien. “The client appreciates and loves art so that was a big part of the design curation for them.”

Other notable upgrades include adding classical wall moldings in the hallway and around the original laundry chute, improvements that bring architectural provenance. O’Brien also loved working on the husband’s office and a sophisticated bedroom makeover for one of their daughters. “Because the client is an avid golfer, finding unique pieces to personalize his office was a really fun process,” O’Brien explains, noting a commissioned work of art of Arnold Palmer by Dane Shue that incorporated some special dates in a Wall Street Journal background. “It tells the story of what was happening in that time and has Arnold Palmer in these wild colors.”

In both this room and the daughter’s room, O’Brien hired carpenters to install custom cabinetry and even a built-in window seat—elements that are as aesthetically pleasing as they are practical. “I really love how it all came together,” she says. “They are one of my dearest clients to work with, which made the whole process so easy. She’s such a wonderful person that it was a joy to bring her home to life.”

For more information about Monique O’Brien Design, visit moniquemobrien.com.