Heartwood Estates, a modern new-build home in Omaha
This is a full custom home, designed across every floor rather than one room at a time. The brief it answers is simple to say and hard to do: a modern house that still feels warm to live in. Open where it counts, calm everywhere else, and finished to a level that holds up for years rather than photographs well for a week. Every space was planned against the others, so the materials, the lighting and the furniture read as one house instead of a set of rooms that happen to share an address. The result is a home that looks designed without looking staged, which is a harder line to walk than it sounds. What follows is a walk through it, from the street to the lower level, with a note on how the whole thing was pulled together at the end.
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The exterior
From the street the house is clearly contemporary, but it is not cold about it. The front is broken into sections, with a mix of dark and lighter cladding and a long, low roofline, which stops a large home from reading as one heavy block. Tall windows run across the front and pull daylight deep into the plan, so the inside rarely needs lamps during the day. The landscaping is kept plain, green and clipped, because the architecture is doing the talking and does not need the competition. It sets the tone for everything behind the front door: clean lines, honest materials, and nothing added only to look busy. A house like this is easy to overdo on the outside, and the restraint here is a choice, not an accident.
The great room
The great room is the heart of the house and it is built around a single idea: one tall feature wall that runs the full double height. Wood cladding climbs from floor to ceiling, wrapped around a long linear fireplace and a mounted screen, flanked by two panels of figured stone that catch the light through the day. Floating cabinets keep the floor clear and the wall unbroken. Because the room is two storeys, the furniture is kept low and wide on purpose: two deep sofas facing each other across a round timber table, with a pair of curved chairs closing the circle. A large soft rug holds the group together, so the volume feels like a room to sit in rather than an atrium to cross. The wall of glass on one side keeps it bright, and the open stair beside it ties the space to the floor above without closing it in. The hardest thing in a double-height room is keeping it from feeling like a lobby. The answer here is scale and warmth, big soft seating and a wall of real wood, so a room this size still feels like somewhere you would spend an ordinary evening.
The kitchen
The kitchen is open to the living space and designed to take it. A long island anchors the room, with seating along one side so it works for breakfast, homework and a glass of wine while someone cooks. The cabinetry is kept light and quiet, then warmed with runs of walnut so it does not read as a showroom. Behind the range the stone slab runs straight up the wall and continues across the hood surround, which turns the cooking wall into the feature rather than something to hide. The range itself is a proper piece of equipment, finished with brass knobs that pick up the warm metals used through the rest of the house. Lighting is layered, recessed overhead for the work and softer fittings over the island, so the room moves easily from a busy weeknight to something more relaxed. Nothing here is decorative for its own sake. In a kitchen that gets used this hard, every choice has to earn its place, and these do.
The staircase
A house on three levels lives or dies on how you move through it, and the staircase is treated as a feature rather than a service route. The treads are open and the railing is kept to fine vertical lines, so light passes straight through and the stair never blocks the rooms around it. Dropping through the stairwell is a long cascading light fitting that gives the double-height space a centre and makes the climb feel like part of the house rather than a corridor between floors. It is the kind of detail that is easy to get wrong and expensive to put right later, which is exactly why it was planned from the start rather than chosen at the end.
The primary suite
The primary bedroom is deliberately calm after the openness downstairs. A tray ceiling with hidden cove lighting lifts the room and throws a soft wash across the plaster, while a tall panel of dark textured wood sits behind the bed and gives the space a clear centre. Everything else is kept symmetrical and restful: matching walnut nightstands, a pair of slim pendants dropped either side of the bed, and a long bench at the foot. A single armchair sits by the window for the five quiet minutes nobody plans for but everybody wants, and the carpet underfoot is soft enough that the room feels a world away from the hard floors elsewhere. It reads like a good hotel room, which is the point. Somewhere that asks nothing of you at the end of a long day.
The primary bathroom
The primary bathroom carries the same restraint. A freestanding tub sits near the window as the obvious centrepiece, with a large walk-in shower behind clear glass so the tilework reads as one continuous surface rather than a patchwork. The vanity is a long floating run in walnut, lit by backlit mirrors and slim sconces so there are no hard shadows when they matter most. The styling is kept natural and sparing: a stool, a little greenery, nothing that will be in the way by the second morning. It runs straight through to the closet, so washing and dressing sit together as one routine rather than two rooms apart. This is a bathroom built for daily use first and photographs second, which is the right order and a rarer one than it should be.
The children's rooms
The children's rooms were given real thought, rather than treated as spare bedrooms with a bright duvet thrown on top. One is soft and warm, with gentle pinks, a playful spotted bedcover and a built-in desk, done so it suits a young child now but will not need gutting in a few years. Another leans cooler and sportier, deeper blues against white, with built-in storage and a proper place to work and display the things that matter at that age. Each room has its own identity and its own storage planned in from the start, so they feel designed to the same standard as the rest of the house rather than left for later. Children notice when a room is actually theirs, and these are.
The upstairs bathrooms
The secondary bathrooms are finished with the same care as the primary, which is usually where a project quietly gives up and does not here. One shower is wrapped in marble behind a single pane of glass, with a round decorative piece on the wall so the room has a point of interest beyond the practical. The vanities pair dark cabinetry with round and arched mirrors and warm gold fittings, bright enough for a busy morning and hard-wearing enough for the years of them ahead. These are the rooms guests use and children grow up in, so they were specified to last rather than to look good only until the first scuff on the paint.
The lower level
The lower level is finished to be lived in every day, not kept for occasions. A long sectional faces a wall-mounted screen for the easy end of family life, and a full bar runs along one wall with proper upper and lower cabinetry and a line of stools, so it works for a quiet evening or a house full of people. The lighting was planned carefully, because the quickest way to make a lower level feel like a basement is to light it like one, and here it reads as another floor of the house rather than the space beneath it. A full bathroom off the room means nobody has to climb the stairs mid-film, the sort of ordinary decision that makes a plan work in real life rather than only on paper.
The materials
Hold the rooms side by side and the reason the house feels like one place becomes clear. A single palette runs through all of it. Warm walnut against pale cabinetry and plaster, stone used as a feature rather than a background, black for the slim window frames and fittings, and brass and gold brought in just often enough to tie the metals together. Nothing fights for attention. A material chosen for the kitchen turns up again in the primary suite, a tone set in the great room carries down to the lower level. This is the part of a whole-home project that is invisible when it is done well and obvious when it is not, and it is only possible because the selections were made together, in one pass, rather than room by room over months as a budget allowed.
Furniture and furnishings
The house was not only designed, it was furnished, down to the pieces that make a room work rather than just fill it. Seating is sized to each space, rugs ground the groupings, lighting is chosen as much for how it looks switched off as on, and the smaller layer of art, greenery and objects is kept deliberately light so the rooms breathe. The loft is a good example, a comfortable everyday space with a generous sectional, a clear spot to work and enough storage to stay tidy without looking clinical. Handling the furnishing alongside the design is what lets the whole house land at once, finished, rather than arriving as empty rooms waiting months for the right pieces to turn up one at a time.
How the house came together
A home like this works because the order of decisions was right. The layout and the big moves came first, then the materials as one set, then the lighting planned around how each room is actually used, and the furniture chosen last to suit the spaces rather than squeezed in afterward. Running all of that through one pair of hands is what keeps a house this size coherent. There is no handover gap where a kitchen designer, a tiler and a furniture shop each make a reasonable choice that does not quite agree with the others. It is slower to plan and far faster to live with, and the finished house is the argument for doing it that way.
Frequently asked questions
READY TO BEGIN?
This is what a whole-home project looks like when the design, the sourcing and the finish are handled by one person across every room. If you are building, remodelling or furnishing a home around Omaha and want that same consistency from the entrance to the lower level, it starts with a conversation. Call (402) 235-8276 or use the contact page, and we will talk through what your project involves and where to begin.