Semiahmoo family upgrades home for a modern, coastal feel

Semiahmoo residents Matt and Inna Rigberg purchased their home in 2019, but saw it as needing an updated look. After several months of remodeling starting this February, the family is settling into their home – upgraded with a coastal feel and an emphasis on bringing the outdoors inside.

The couple updated their home’s interior from a French country home with yellow tones and metal accents to a more modern home with a coastal feel. To maintain the coastal theme, the couple focused on bringing more light-colored neutral tones into their home like beiges, off-whites and light grays.

Inna hired Painting with Integrity’s Ken Brooks to paint the home to match the ivory window frames and repainted the kitchen cabinets from a lacquered, country yellow oak to an off-white. The gray marble countertops were replaced with white marble to match the cabinets. All of the home’s lighting was switched from 2,700K incandescent to 5,000K LED lights.

“2,700 was way too yellow and it clashed with the paint and the 5,000K really brings out the natural, daylight feel inside the house,” Matt said. “It really worked out well.”

The couple also had Cascade Floors’ Erik Ernst switch all of the flooring in their home from red oak wood to Luxury Vinyl Plank in the color “Salty Strand” by Cali Bamboo. They only put carpet, which they kept as a neutral tone, on their stairs to prevent slipping.

“The big thing for us, moving from Arizona to Washington, was to try to incorporate the colors of the Pacific Northwest from outside and make it a smooth transition into the house,” Matt said.

Inna said they wanted to keep the wood tones of the doors and stair posts as accents throughout the home.

“No matter which color the wood stains are, you can still incorporate any wood tones into a home and just update the colored tones to go with that earthy, coastal feel,” she said.

The couple retiled their fireplace with Bianco Perla marble from Lowe’s to tie into the kitchen backsplash and breakfast bar.

As for the backyard, they replaced older, picket-style fencing that obstructed their water view with cable railing to help bring the outside into their home. They added an underdeck ceiling, landscaped the backyard and put in a pond. Eventually, they said they’d like to get approval from their homeowners’ association to add a rock wall decorated with moss and plants.

Inna said she did lots of research online for beach house styles to accomplish her desired look. Out of all the upgrades, Inna said redoing the floors made the biggest difference to the home’s feel. Matt added the floors gave them a clean canvas to build on.

“It’s a whole different theme but keeping the bones of the house,” Matt said. “You can see how much the former owners poured love into the house and we wanted to pay homage to that while bringing our own style into the house.”