Small Spanish Entry Foyer Renovation: Before and After

“Hi guys, today I wanted to share these Before and After photos of a small Spanish entry foyer remodel for a small home in Santa Barbara.

My clients were a young couple who had fabulous careers in the tech industry up in the Bay Area, and had purchased this home as a second home. With the intention of eventually moving to Santa Barbara…

But for the next several years, they wanted to maximize their investment and make it a very charming vacation rental.  And something that an out of towner would want to rent for a month or two.

And so they wanted to have me think about ways to charm the place up.  And for this episode, I just thought I would focus on the entry foyer itself.  Because these small little homes in Santa Barbara are built quite basically, yet you can just pull a ton of charm into a space simply by adding architectural features.

So, I’ll make this brief- it’s a small little room to describe.  But I proposed that we thicken the wall, you can see this little header that, if you scroll down to the before picture you can just see that it was a defined little entry foyer.

But I thought these oversized corbels that we created and plastered in, could actually make it feel like a very special place to come into the house, and also leave the house.

And so, the gal that I was helping (and her husband), but she had found a blue and white tile Spanish tile mural, and she had envisioned it being installed on the wall.  So, as you enter through the front door, you would see this beautiful mural- which at first it took me aback.

It’s like… “Ohhhkaaay”- but honestly, it’s just really added a ton of character to the entire house. It’s just a really fun place to walk past, walk into, or leave- and so she matched the front door with a beautiful Santa Barbara blue paint color… just used the existing front door.

You’ll note that the coat closet, we kept the shaker style. You know these are doors that were traditionally put in the simpler Santa Barbara homes of yesteryear, you know… the 30s and the 40s.

I’ve even been on large estates where these painted shaker style doors are part of historic Spanish homes. It’s just something that you wouldn’t expect, but it’s a fact.  The other thing that we did, which I proposed- was a plaster coved ceiling.  You can’t quite see it.  I wish my photo had turned out better.

But I did an oversized plaster coving inside the entry foyer ceiling.  And that was done with architectural foam.  So, I had a fabricator cut it on his machine, based on a template that I had provided to him.

I’ll probably be showing… I share a lot of that stuff in my coffee table book, but as I grow this photo blog, I’ll be adding pictures and helping explain that whole process.  So, if you have a small Spanish home, or you wanna make a charming small Spanish home, there’s just a ton of stuff that you can do!

And I just thought I would share this very, very simple project to encourage you.  And I encourage you to also look around throughout the entire site. I have a search bar at the bottom where you can type in a word that you’re looking for, a type of room and exterior element… whatever- and hopefully something will pop up for you. 

So please come back soon. I don’t know what I’m gonna be posting next.  I just rifle through literally hundreds of thousands of photos, thinking what am I gonna do today- and so this is the one, this is the project that I chose for today. Have a great day”—Jeff Doubet, September 14, 2025