Inside the 11 Margo Way Transformation

The brief

11 Margo Way sits at the end of a private cul-de-sac in Alpine, behind a gated circular arrival, on 2.35 acres. The house itself was never the problem. Built in 2007 and recorded at 9,027 square feet across three finished levels — 14 rooms, seven bedrooms, eight full and two half baths — it had the scale, the structure and the setting Alpine buyers look for: brick and slate outside, a two-story foyer, an indoor heated gunite pool, an elevator, and grounds that hold their privacy.

What dated it was concentrated exactly where houses age fastest. The kitchen — the room a home of this scale is ultimately judged by — belonged to the year it was built. The bathrooms, all of them, across both primary suites and the family bedrooms, told the same story. And the fireplace mantel, the focal point of the principal living space, no longer carried the room around it. Around those three, the architecture was still asking to be taken seriously: a mahogany library with coffered ceiling and fireplace, a formal dining room with a butler’s pantry, primary suites with sitting rooms and fireplaces.

The brief for B&Co. Design | Build was therefore precise rather than sweeping: renovate where it counts — the kitchen, the fireplace mantel, and every bathroom — and run a design pass across the principal rooms so the renovated work lands in interiors that feel considered as a whole. Not a rebuild. A reframing, with the heavy work aimed at the rooms that decide a house.

How the commission ran

B&Co. runs design-build the way this project ran — one firm reading the house, designing the intervention, selecting the materials, and doing the work, so nothing is lost between a designer’s intent and a builder’s execution.

It began with the read: walking all three levels and separating what earns renovation from what earns design. Kitchens, mantels and bathrooms are construction; foyers, halls and bedrooms are, more often, composition. Getting that line right is what keeps a renovation budget aimed at value instead of spread thin across fourteen rooms.

Design and materials came next, together, in the B&Co. Surfaces library in Closter — stone, tile and finishes for the kitchen and the bathrooms composed against each other on the table, not ordered from catalogues mid-project. A house with ten bathrooms’ worth of wet rooms cannot have each one designed in isolation; the library is where they become one palette.

Then the renovation itself: the kitchen rebuilt around its breakfast and sitting areas, the mantel reframed, and the bathrooms renewed floor by floor. The design pass followed through the principal rooms — foyer, living room, dining room, hall, suites and the lower level — so that what the photography would eventually show reads as a single, settled interior.

The full commission — the read, design and materials, the renovation and the design pass — ran roughly six months, and closed the way B&Co. presentations do: architectural plans redrawn clean, the walkthrough film, and the before-and-after photography that documents every room in this study — the full presentation completed ahead of the home’s 2026 showing season.

The work

The kitchen. This was the center of the commission, and it was treated that way. The room’s organization — cooking and working space arranged with breakfast and sitting areas, so the kitchen functions as a living room that happens to cook — was retained and rebuilt with new surfaces, fixtures and finishes drawn from the Surfaces library. French doors keep the room tied to the patio, the lawn and the pool environment beyond, and the butler’s pantry off the formal dining room keeps service at estate scale. Two before-and-after views of the kitchen anchor the property’s own presentation, because the room carries the argument: this is where the house stopped being dated.

Not a rebuild — a reframing, with the heavy work aimed at the rooms that decide a house.

The fireplace mantel. In a formal living space, the mantel is not a detail — it is the wall everything else answers to. Reframing it reset the room’s proportions of attention: the eye goes where it should, and the millwork and furnishings around it fall into order. It is the smallest of the three renovation items and, per square foot, quite possibly the hardest-working.

The bathrooms — all of them. Two primary suites, the family bedrooms’ baths, and the powder room off the main level: every bathroom in the house was renovated, specified from the same Surfaces palette so that the primary bath, a third-floor guest bath and the powder room feel like members of one family rather than separate projects. Consistency is the luxury here. A guest should never be able to tell which bathroom was done first.

The design pass. Around the construction, the remaining rooms were designed rather than renovated — the two-story marble-detailed entrance foyer, the living room, the formal dining room, the second-floor hall, the bedrooms and closets, and the lower-level great room with its theater and bar. Sixteen before-and-after comparisons on the property’s site document the full sweep, construction and design together, room by room.

Materials

Every hard finish in the renovated rooms came through B&Co. Surfaces, Beyder&Co.’s own materials library — stone, tile and wood selections specified for the kitchen, the mantel surround and the bathrooms from one inventory, in one place. That is the practical meaning of the firm’s structure: the people who design the room are the people who hold its materials, and the palette of a ten-bathroom house can be composed on one table before a single wall is opened.

The palette itself was kept natural and architectural. Rift-cut, quartered white oak runs throughout the house as flooring — a calm, linear grain that lets rooms of this scale feel composed rather than busy. Natural stone carries the kitchen and the mantel surround, and returns in the bathrooms as natural stone vanities, with tile across the bathroom floors and walls. Nothing in the renovated rooms is a product story; it is a materials story — a few honest materials, repeated with discipline from the kitchen to the smallest powder room.

The result

11 Margo Way today is the same house the public record describes — Colonial, 2007, 9,027 square feet, 2.35 acres — with its three weakest rooms made into its strongest. A kitchen that carries daily life at estate scale. Bathrooms that no longer date the floors they serve. A mantel that holds its room again. And around them, principal interiors designed into one coherent presentation, from the gated arrival to the lower-level great room.

That is the design-build argument in a single address. A brokerage can describe a house; a builder can renovate one. Holding the disciplines in one firm — B&Co. Realty, B&Co. Design | Build, B&Co. Surfaces — is what lets a property be read correctly in the first place: what it is, what it could become, and exactly which three rooms stand between the two.

Design | Build · Questions

11 Margo Way, answered.

What was renovated at 11 Margo Way?

The kitchen, the fireplace mantel, and all of the home's bathrooms were renovated by B&Co. Design | Build. The principal rooms — foyer, living room, dining room, suites and lower level — received a design treatment documented in the project's before-and-after photography.

Who carried out the design and renovation?

B&Co. Design | Build, the design-build firm within Beyder&Co., with materials supplied through B&Co. Surfaces, the firm's materials library in Closter.

How long did the 11 Margo Way renovation take?

Roughly six months, from the initial read of the house to the completed presentation — design and materials selection, the kitchen, mantel and bathroom renovations, and the design pass across the principal rooms.

Where is 11 Margo Way?

On a private cul-de-sac in Alpine, New Jersey — a gated Colonial estate on 2.35 acres with 7 bedrooms, 8 full and 2 half baths, and 9,027 square feet of living area as reported in public records.

Does B&Co. Design | Build take on kitchen and bathroom renovations in Bergen County?

Yes. Beyond full custom homes, B&Co. Design | Build undertakes focused commissions — kitchens, bathrooms and principal-room renovations — across Bergen County's Northern Valley, including Alpine, Tenafly, Cresskill, Demarest, Englewood Cliffs, Saddle River and Closter.

What is B&Co. Surfaces?

B&Co. Surfaces is Beyder&Co.'s luxury materials library — stone, tile and finishes selected and supplied for the firm's design-build projects and available by appointment in Closter.