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.
