A 50-year-old house on Cedar Creek Lake gets renovated and designed.

Tom and Jen Sherman fell in love with a lake lot. But the 50-year-old house that came with it had issues: Too many walls and not enough lake. “You would walk in the house and you didn’t even see the view,” Tom says.

That’s not true anymore. The Shermans worked with Vernon Construction and Remodeling and Frisco-based Lewis & Rose Interiors to gut and expand their home in Cedar Creek, about an hour southeast of Dallas. “You just walk in and you can see all the water now,” Tom says.

The work finished in late 2025, but the story starts years earlier with a mild case of neighbor envy.

The Shermans, who live in Carrollton, first owned and loved the lake house next door to the one they just remodeled. But they would visit their Cedar Creek neighbors and come home admitting to each other that they liked the other lot — a peninsula with a 270-degree view of the lake — better than their own.

They fessed up to the neighbors and asked for the chance to buy if the property if they ever decided to sell. And one day, that call came. The Shermans sold their first lake house to friends and bought the place next door. 

“Now what are we going to do with the house?” they asked themselves. 

This wasn’t Brett Nicole Seidl’s first job in the development. “I love renovations down there because the homes are so weird,” says Seidl, owner and principal at Lewis & Rose. “And I love weird. … There’s angles galore, walls where there shouldn’t be walls.”

The Shermans say “quirky” is a decent description of the house before they renovated — “a very ’80s vibe,” Jen Sherman notes. 

Unlike new construction, remodeling sometimes requires advanced levels of creativity for solutions that can handle existing problems. In fact, before connecting with Vernon, the Shermans interviewed a handful of builders who all suggested demolition and new construction. But tearing down just didn’t feel right to them. They clung to the possibility of keeping the bones of what was and turning it into what they wanted. Vernon and Seidl agreed and signed on to the project.

The first step was gutting the interior. In some cases, even studs were removed to reimagine various spaces inside the home. The team tried to leave as many exterior lines as possible, while adding square footage to give each bedroom its own bathroom.

Seidl’s job was to make the house fresh and modern without eliminating its character; the goal was never for it to look like a new build. Her process starts with room-by-room dreaming: How will the space be used? What would make it perfect?

“We get really personal with [clients] at this meeting,” Seidl says. The Shermans’ planning document included words such as timeless, curated and charming.

Everyone gives the same answer when asked what’s the best spot in the new space: the kitchen and cozy reading nook extending off it. Maybe that’s because the design there incorporates details that seemed incongruous at the beginning of the process. Tom remembers wondering how it would work to have a kitchen with a fireplace at one end.

The space beyond the main kitchen area includes four chairs that swivel to face into the reading nook, out to the water or back into the broader room. It manages to be both intimate and conversational without being shut away. The Shermans already have formed a habit of having their morning coffee there. “It’s just wonderful,” Tom says.

The nook also includes a wall of books that nods to Jen’s passion: She’s the owner of Bookish, a Cedar Creek-area nonprofit that sells new and used books, gifts and drinks as part of its mission to promote literacy and reading. The shop hosts book groups, donates to local partners, elevates regional authors and more. The reading nook and books might make the home more definitively hers than any other single element. “You just walk in there and it’s this ‘Wow!’ moment without being pretentious,” Seidl says. 

The combined space was one the trickiest pieces of design math in the whole house. The kitchen island, a trapezoid, was a particular challenge. “My ninth-grade geometry teacher would be so proud,” Seidl says, laughing.

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You can see the lake now the minute you enter the front door, but it’s not the only vista added in the renovation. “Every room in the house has a view of water, even the laundry and the garage,” Tom says. 

The whole back wall of the house is now windows on the lake. Inside, colors and materials were chosen to complement that view. Splashes of blues and greens are everywhere. “We brought those colors inside,” Seidl says. In the kitchen, Taj Mahal quartzite countertops and rattan stools at the island reinforce the natural feel.

Seidl’s goal is that a project won’t scream a particular style (traditional or modern or French farmhouse, say) but that it will reference instead the owners, a way of life. 

It was a challenge to find the balance between elegance and the fact that, “at the end of the day, it’s a lake house made for families.” One of her primary goals was “making sure those [aspects of the project] speak to each other.”

Some lake houses are for weekends and vacationing, but the Shermans wanted this project designed for their future: retirement and full-time living, with lots of space for visits from their adult children and the grandson they just welcomed into the family, not to mention the friends they love to host. “I didn’t want it to feel like just a lake house, a weekend home,” Jen explains. 

“The long view is getting much shorter,” Tom adds. 

They had worked with a decorator occasionally, on small projects, but this was their first experience with a designer to oversee a whole-house job. “I have told so many people after doing this, ‘You just need it,’” Jen says. “It just was so smooth and seamless, and that’s so valuable.”

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