When Preferred Living brought Crimson in on Belmont House, the brief carried two challenges that didn't usually travel together. This was a luxury PL community on Columbus's west side, at the corner of Trabue and McKinley, and it had to read unmistakably as Preferred Living. But Belmont was also the first PL clubhouse where Crimson stepped off the brand's signature navy and built a new palette from the ground up with deep greens in Sherwin-Williams Billiard Green and Dard Hunter Green, warmed with golden yellows and red-orange accents. And the clubhouse wasn't meant to read as amenity space at all. It was meant to read as a boutique luxury hotel, every room feeling like a property a resident might check into for a long weekend, not just pass through on the way home.

The key design move was the two-story lobby. Crimson designed a grand wall punctuated by five arches in light, natural-oak-toned wood with applied moulding — built, like the bar, by Fairfield Woodworks — anchored by a sweeping open staircase and a checkerboard marble floor in soft gray and deep onyx, bordered in warm beige (Hamilton Parker's Atlas Marvel). Across two of the walls, muralist Sarah DeAngulo Eberly, a longtime Crimson collaborator, hand-rendered black-and-white nature scenes that reimagine an earlier sepia landscape and turn a traditional architectural moment into something distinctly modern. Custom resin-and-metal pendants by Spike Lighting fill the void overhead, and the open staircase carries the curve language through. Off the lobby, the bar takes its cue from Soho House New York, long admired by Crimson's principals and Preferred Living for the rug-fronted millwork at its front desk — and the Belmont version is fronted in vintage-style rugs that Cheryl sourced piece by piece and hand-cut to fit, their rounded edges echoing the arches above. Inside, custom U-shaped banquettes by Fortner define the social zones. Fifteen-plus custom pieces in all make Belmont feel less like a clubhouse and more like a hotel floor that happens to have apartments above it.