Small Footprint, Full Brand

When Preferred Living brought Crimson in on Essex, the ask carried a degree of difficulty the square footage didn't telegraph. This was PL's first community in Grandview Heights — a brand-new market test for the developer in one of Columbus's most in-demand neighborhoods — and the clubhouse had to carry the full Preferred Living look and feel in a meaningfully smaller footprint than the amenity spaces the brand is known for: roughly 2,025 square feet. One open room to make one first impression, so every zone a resident would expect from a boutique luxury building, from lounge to coffee bar to business center to fitness area, to an outdoor gathering space was packed into a compact footprint without ever feeling crowded.

The key design move was to stop chasing contrast and let color do the zoning. Crimson washed the entire clubhouse in a single unifying color (Benjamin Moore Raccoon Fur) in an eggshell sheen, on every wall so the eye could take in the room as one generous, considered space rather than a series of small, competing moments. From there the team layered in pattern and confident color to give each zone its own personality: a Phillip Jeffries hand-blocked linen wallpaper on the back leasing wall, a charcoal Phillip Jeffries herringbone vinyl in the club room, plaid Maharam upholstery on the banquettes. In a compact footprint, the usual playbook like high contrast, strong material shifts, and hard architectural breaks would have chopped the room up and made it feel smaller, so we quieted the contrast and let pattern and color carry the interest and do the opposite: it made a small plan feel layered, intentional, and generous in what it offered.

The Red Glove moment was the kind of save that never shows up in a finished photo. Above the banquettes, the trim and the sconces were colliding — the millwork was catching the backplate of each sconce, so neither read quite as intended. Rather than let it look like an afterthought, Crimson had custom trim plates fabricated midway through construction so every sconce sat as though the trim had been built around it — made for each other, not worked around each other. A compact clubhouse with this much pattern is only as good as its execution, and Crimson stayed hands-on throughout the build, walking the site regularly, catching issues like this early, and protecting the design intent finish by finish. It's exactly the category of work that's invisible in the final image and the reason the final image reads the way it does.

Leasing told the story. Essex was Preferred Living's opening move in Grandview — the building the developer used to learn what the neighborhood's residents actually wanted — and it performed well enough to keep the partnership going. In the year and a half after Essex wrapped, Crimson designed more PL clubhouses across New Albany and Westerville and began work on two of the developer's larger communities, Langham and Fairfax. A compact clubhouse, done with restraint and real follow-through, proved the thesis: in Grandview, residents respond to a space that feels cohesive, considered, and legitimately boutique — and the first impression a clubhouse makes is the first impression the building makes.