DESIGN & DECOR
A Balanced Homelife
Monique Sabatino of Balanced Interiors shares her unique spin on turning a house into a home.
B Y K A I T LY N M U R R AY | P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y M I C H A E L L E F E B V R E
“We used to call ourselves Narragansett wannabes,” says
Monique Sabatino, owner of Balanced Interiors. She and her husband, Mike, met
while attending the University of Rhode Island and thus once spent many a day by
the ocean. “Upon graduation, we said someday we’d be back to live in this beach
community.”
Thirty years and three children later, they made good on that promise when
they came across a “diamond in the rough” property within Narragansett’s coastal
Bonnet Shores neighborhood. Built in 1930, the two-bedroom, one-bath property
had been on the market for two years.
“It was as though it was waiting for us,” she recalls. “My husband turned to
me when seeing it for the first time and asked, ‘Can you do anything with this?’”
Sabatino, who established Balanced Interiors after graduating RISD’s interior
design program in the early 2000’s, answered with a resounding ‘yes.’ There was
plenty of work to be done.
“We were urged by contractors to knock the house down and start all over, but
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2020
we really wanted to preserve the charm of yesteryear that beckoned us here,” she
says. The house had good bones and we wanted to avoid unnecessary waste.”
And so, they kept the large field stone fireplace, fir floors and cottage-style
woodwork intact while opting to gut and renovate the kitchen and bathroom in order
to make the property livable for a couple of summers. Then, once they sold their
home in Lincoln and decided to turn the South County property into a year-round
home, they employed Kettelle Building Movers and O’Hearne Home Development
to put on an addition in the form of a new basement, construct a master suite and
expand the sunroom.
“Having downsized from our home of twenty years, we wanted a home that
wasn’t too big for the two of us but big enough to welcome our adult children
home whenever they needed a landing pad. Adding the addition under the
existing house really made the whole project come together,” she says. “And then
we love the outdoors, so having a yard to garden in, patios to relax on and enjoy
and space for the dog to roam were just as important to us.”