A Dental Office Reception Area Makeover | Interior Designer Los Angeles

As a business owner then I’m sure you’ve heard of branding. And in essence, implementing good branding is really about how you make your customers feel. The thing is: your brand also extends to your interior design.

If you own a brick-and-mortar business then you might not notice many of the things that your customers and clients see when they visit your business. You go there everyday, and so you’re not really looking at things the way an occasional customer sees it. That’s why it can be really beneficial to hire an interior designer. They see things that you’d probably miss!

A fabulous dental office, recently hired me to update their office. They really roll out the red carpet for their patients and the interior of the office wasn’t true to the comfortable, modern, patient-centric focus that their business had.

So, today I’m sharing the transformation here with you! Let’s start with a before picture…

So the first part of a makeover is always to assess the current situation. The room had a strange layout with a pony wall. Luckily, that was not a supporting wall and we could remove it. And the furniture that was currently there was a bit over-sized for the space.

This room was definitely going to need: new paint, window treatments, furniture, and flooring (because we were removing the wall for a better flow).

Hopefully, you can see what I mean about the decor not matching the brand-feel at all.

The second part is to go over branding, layout, and design aesthetics. Once we decided on that the project was ready to be started.

Truthfully, it’s rare that clients have a HUGE makeover budget. So, we really had to bargain hunt for this makeover. The goal was to keep cost as low as possible, while still making an impact (which I think we definitely achieved).

Since this project was going to take several weeks we did it in phases.

Phase 1: Demolition & Installation of New Flooring

We had the pony wall and post demoed. And we also pulled up the old carpets. I went to a local flooring company and got a pretty good deal on the new laminate floors since it was low-inventory-on-the-way-out (basically, the floor that they want to get rid of). I even bargained for the installation price, which they obliged to, since we were doing the demo.

This is why having a budget really comes in handy because you know the allotted amount you have for each part of the process.

The next day they came in and installed the new flooring.

Since this was a business and they weren’t closing their doors to do the makeover we updated a few pieces before we had purchased all the furniture. We also mounted the TV right away, and simply took it down to paint behind it later.

Phase 2: Choosing Paint & Painting

Paint can definitely be a tricky thing. Which is why I tell clients to color swatch on their walls. You’ve not only got to pay attention to how dark/light that the paint needs to be, but then there’s also undertones and how that color can really look different at different points in the day.

We finally settled on a shade called “Filtered Shade” by Valspar. And the following weekend was spent painting.

Phase 3: Furniture & Decor

The following weekend we had to get the rest of the decor and furniture set up. The goal was always to create a place that felt like home. So a decent amount of time was spent on finding pieces that were going to be comfortable and feel really inviting.

Additionally, this was a tight budget so we made every penny count!

Here’s what we bought and where we bought them:

Gray couch from Ashley Furniture (on sale)
Light Gray wingback chairs from Target (also on sale!)
Large jute rug from Overstock
Glass coffee table from Overstock
Round wooden and metal framed side table from TJ MAXX
Rectangle wooden and metal framed side table from ROSS
Faux Fur decor pillows from Walmart
Essential oil diffusor from Amazon

We also swapped out the old vertical blinds for new modern shades. The “new” smile picture above the couch is a real statement piece. It was hand painted over the old orange floral one.