Beverly Hills Living Room Remodel: How Swapping Two Rooms Changed Everything
Sometimes the most transformative renovation decision isn't about what you add or what you change. It's about where things go.
This Beverly Hills home had a dining room and a living room. Both were fine. But the flow between them — the way the home moved, the way it felt to walk through it, the way it worked for the way this family actually lives — wasn't right. Something was off in a way that's hard to explain until someone finally names it. This Beverly Hills living room remodel is the story of what happened when we did.
We named it. And then we fixed it.
The Problem — A Layout That Didn't Match How They Lived
Before we touched a single finish, before we talked about fireplace surrounds or built-in shelving, we did what we always do at the beginning of a project: we listened.
This family loves to entertain. Football Saturdays and Sundays are a full production — friends over, food out, the Lions and Steelers on the screen, the kind of afternoon that spills from room to room and needs a home that can hold it. They also needed a space that worked for quieter evenings — a proper living room that felt warm, anchored, and completely theirs.
The problem was that the existing layout put the living room where the flow of the home wanted a dining room, and the dining room where the natural gathering energy of the house wanted a living room. A seemingly small mismatch. A very significant daily frustration.
The solution, once we saw it, was obvious: swap them.
Move the dining room to where the living room was. Move the living room to where the dining room was. Then — because the newly positioned living room needed to become something worthy of the life being lived in it — design it properly from scratch.
The Beverly Hills Living Room Remodel — Warm, Modern, and Built for Gathering
With the layout decision made, we had a clear canvas: a room that needed to feel modern and warm simultaneously, with a fireplace that anchored it and built-ins that gave it personality and purpose.
The brief was specifically not to make it feel like a showroom. This room needed to work on a Sunday afternoon with eight people in it, a fire going, records playing, and kids underfoot. It also needed to look beautiful on a quiet Tuesday evening when it was just the family. Those two requirements aren't in conflict — but they require intention to achieve together.
The Microcement Fireplace — Restraint as a Design Statement
The existing fireplace surround was transitional — quartz marble, clean millwork, perfectly acceptable. It was also starting to feel expected. The family wanted something more modern, more organic, and more distinctly theirs.
We removed the existing surround entirely and rebuilt from scratch with a single guiding principle: let the architecture speak.
The new surround is finished in hand-applied microcement — seamless, matte, and continuous from the firebox up through the full wall surface. The firebox opening is a softly curved arch rather than a standard rectangle, introducing an organic quality that adds warmth without adding visual complexity. No mantel shelf crowding the composition. No decorative molding. No grout lines or stone veining to interrupt the surface.
Just the wall, the curve, and the finish.
Microcement has a quality in natural light that no other finish replicates — soft and
almost chalky in the morning, deeper and warmer as the afternoon light shifts. It changes throughout the day in a way that makes the fireplace feel alive even when it isn't lit. For a room where the fireplace is the focal point, that quality matters more than it might seem.
The antique portrait above the mantel. The ceramic vessel on the floor. The vintage books stacked to the side. None of these details would read as clearly against a busier surround. Against the microcement, every object in the room has space to breathe and be seen.
This is what we mean when we say the design succeeds because it got out of its own way.
The Custom Arched Built-Ins — Personality Without Clutter
Flanking the fireplace, a custom built-in shelving unit was designed to give the room its character — an arched central niche for the turntable and display, open shelving on either side for books, ceramics, and the objects that make a space feel personal.
The built-ins are painted in the same warm white as the walls, which makes them feel architectural rather than added — as if they've always been there and the room was designed around them. The arch in the central niche mirrors the arch of the firebox, creating a visual conversation between the two elements that unifies the wall.
Inside the niche, a marble tile backsplash behind the turntable adds the one moment of material contrast in an otherwise restrained room — cool stone against warm plaster, a detail that rewards looking closely.
The record storage beneath the niche — custom pull-out cabinetry with dividers — is the detail that makes this room completely specific to the people who live in it. Designed for the collection, sized for the records, finished to disappear into the cabinetry when closed.
The Before — What We Started With
The before photos tell the story as clearly as the after ones.
The original dining room — now the living room — had a standard dining table configuration, cane chairs, and a globe pendant that worked well for the space but didn't create the atmosphere the family was looking for. The room was perfectly functional as a dining room. As a living room, it needed to be transformed.
The original living room — now the dining room — had the bones and the position in the home to work beautifully as a dining space once the living room furniture moved out. The same globe pendant that read as a dining fixture in the old dining room works equally well above the new dining table in its new location. Almost nothing needed to change on that side of the swap.
The asymmetry of effort is part of what made this project so satisfying: the dining room relocation required almost no renovation at all. The living room transformation required everything. The investment was concentrated entirely where it needed to be.
Built for Football Sundays — and Every Other Day
We talk a lot about designing for how people actually live, not how they imagine they might live. This project is one of the clearest examples of what that means in practice.
A living room built for entertaining fall Sundays with football on and friends in from multiple rooms needs a fireplace that feels welcoming without demanding attention. Built-ins that hold the things the family actually uses without looking like storage. A layout that invites people to spread out rather than clustering in one corner. Warmth that comes from the materials rather than being forced through styling choices.
The microcement fireplace is warm by nature — the finish absorbs and radiates light in a way that cooler materials don't. The built-ins hold the records, the books, the objects that signal to guests: this is a home, not a showroom. The layout, once the rooms were swapped into their correct positions, creates the natural flow that the family was missing — people move through the space rather than collecting in it.
On a quiet Tuesday evening, the same room settles into something more intimate. The fireplace carries the room. The objects on the shelves are the right ones. Nothing fights for attention.
This is what we mean by designing with intention.
What This Project Teaches Us About Layout
The specific lesson from this Beverly Hills home is one we see apply across Oakland County — in Birmingham bungalows, Bloomfield Hills colonials, Rochester Hills ranches, and Beverly Hills mid-centuries.
Before you change the finishes, change the layout.
A kitchen remodel that doesn't address a broken floor plan produces a beautiful room that still doesn't work. A living room renovation that doesn't address why the room feels wrong produces a beautiful room that still feels wrong. The finish is what you see. The layout is what you feel — and what you feel every time you walk through the door and every time you try to host and every time the morning routine doesn't flow the way it should.
We start every project by understanding the layout before we talk about anything else. Sometimes the layout is fine and the finishes are the fix. Sometimes — like this Beverly Hills project — the layout is the fix and the finishes are the celebration.
The Details at a Glance
Location: Beverly Hills, Michigan
Project Type: Living Room Transformation / Room Swap / Fireplace Remodel / Custom Built-Ins
The Swap: Dining room and living room positions switched to improve flow and function
Fireplace: Existing quartz marble surround removed and replaced with hand-applied microcement with softly curved arched firebox opening
Built-Ins: Custom arched shelving unit with marble tile niche detail, open shelving, and custom pull-out record storage
Finish: Hand-applied matte microcement — Costello & Customs
Photography: Shelby Dubin Photography
Thinking About Your Layout?
If your home has rooms that feel off — spaces that work individually but don't flow together, or a layout that made sense for a previous owner but doesn't match how you actually live — we'd love to start with that conversation.
Sometimes the most impactful renovation is the one that moves things rather than changes them.
Schedule a Free Discovery Call → or call us at (248) 242-5790
We serve homeowners throughout Beverly Hills, Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, West Bloomfield, Rochester Hills, Royal Oak, Ferndale, Troy, Oakland Township, and the greater Oakland County and Metro Detroit area.
Costello & Co Construction is a licensed, women-owned design-build firm headquartered in Birmingham, Michigan.
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