This 700-Square-Foot Kansas City Bungalow Is All About Approachable Opulence
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Before he made a name for himself as the man behind No Vacancy, an eight-room Kansas City boutique hotel known for its plush bohemian interiors, Spencer Sight was a real estate agent fresh out of college. “Helping other people find homes was nice, but it wasn’t really creatively engaging,” as he tells it, so he began buying homes on foreclosure to flip them, sharpening his interior design instincts with each successive remodel.
When he caught wind of a compact two-bedroom house up for sale, he was far away from home, in Guatemala, but intrigued enough to persuade a colleague to represent him at auction one snowy morning. As Sight recalls, reception wasn’t great that day, so the two were disconnected for hours before he finally got the news. “I came to find out I was a proud owner of a little 700-square-foot bungalow,” Sight says.
The 1920s house in Kansas City’s Columbus Park, which was “chopped up into a bunch of little rooms” at first, wasn’t immediately love at first inspection, but Sight saw a lot of potential. The historic Italian neighborhood itself, which reminded him of a different era, held promise of its own. “I would always go over to that area and feel like I was escaping the city for a little while,” he says.
Flipping houses is very different from remodeling your own, though, as Sight found. He made an early decision to knock down some walls and open up the living area, which would reduce the space to a one-bedroom—a choice he knew would degrade the resale value. Still, the remodeling experience did give him an edge with materials. “I was never economical with the flips and I didn’t use cheap materials,” Sight points out, “so I had a lot of good sources for tile and limewash paint,” both of which combine to a splendorous effect in the earthy kitchen space. It has a warm adobe look to it, punctuated by glamorous accents like the bulb sconces, black cabinets, and wraparound marble counters.
To manipulate the cramped dimensions elsewhere, a vaulted ceiling and skylights in the living area flood it with light while dark violet paint in the bedroom encloses you like a cave. An extensive collection of vintage pieces culled from auctions, local shops, and sourcing trips across the country also give the space a layered, considered feel, though the exact combination has been tinkered with over the years. “I’ve arranged and rearranged incessantly over the course of my time here to get the right proportion of furniture in the correct layout, to where it creates these little vignettes within the space,” Sight says.
Other design choices like a blue kitchen backslash have been sunsetted over the years as part of an ongoing workshop of ideas that have informed his work on No Vacancy, which came along a few years later. “The house was a beta phase for this experiment in running a hotel,” he explains. He even rented the house out for a year to help him understand the short term rental business before scaling up to a hospitality setting. “It was a fun exercise to see the home’s evolution and realize how many different iterations of itself one tiny space can hold,” Sight muses.
1/7Sight found this retro vanity at a flea market in South Florida and was so taken with it, he transported it back with him. “I love the glossy laminate finish and how the mirror creates depth in the house, giving the illusion of additional square footage,” he explains. Sheer Etsy curtains also help draw in light to open up the home.
2/7Sight’s eclectic art collection includes works (clockwise) from Ken Bini, a folk art painting of a cow by Jim Sudduth, a painting of Kansas City’s Vietnam Cafe, and framed Kansas City Bowling patches—many acquired at estate sales and auctions.
3/7This record area is one of Sight’s favorite spots, rounded out by a painting from Sarah White, a copper-wrapped console sourced from local vintage spot Urban Mining, and an Eames lounge chair that the designer rewarded himself with after a series of successful flips. “It’s sort of the command center of the house, and where I spend most of my time in this room,” Sight says.
4/7Sight adopted his dog Lionel during the pandemic, a few weeks after painting the walls of the home, and jokes that Lionel has grown and grown since then to the point that he’s “honestly, way too big for this house.”
5/7A creamy bouclé Hay Sofa in the living area plays off the white light fixtures, from a vintage mushroom floor lamp to a hanging globe pendant.
6/7Violet limewash Sydney Harbor Paint in the shade of Futa Ai contributes to the cocoon-like feel of the bedroom, dotted with playful accents like a Salam Hello textile over the bed, a teeny Soho Home table lamp, and a painted glass frame by his friend Elliott McAnany that refracts light from the window.
7/7An inky olive color on all sides creates atmosphere in the bathroom, though humorous accents like the cobra candle holder and a botanical drawing of a peach that Sight thought “clearly belonged in the bathroom” keep things from feeling too serious.
