It’s hard enough to undergo a home renovation when you’re on the ground, meeting with the design team and making decisions. But what’s it like when you are Duff McKagan, on tour as a founding member of one of the world’s most legendary rock bands? That’s another level entirely. As eternal optimists, Guns N’ Roses’ bass guitarist McKagan and his supermodel wife Susan Holmes-McKagan saw only positives as they embarked on a major global excursion and simultaneous multiyear renovation of their beloved home, a 1927 English Tudor on Seattle’s Lake Washington.
The couple, who was married in the home’s backyard 25 years ago, weren’t simply scrolling through Instagram for inspiration, they were living it for some three years on the road. The real-life research mission had them sleeping in, sitting on, and admiring eventual references everywhere they went. “We’d take pictures, like, ‘Check this out, we can do this at our house,’” the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer says, “There’d be shelves at a hotel in Bangkok…” Holmes-McKagan chimes in, “The bar at Reykjavik Konsulat Hotel [was an inspiration]. And our entry mudroom was directly influenced by the Four Seasons Hotel Washington DC’s natural light and round windows.” These worldly elements don’t just look good—they conjure happy, meaningful memories for the couple.
But those interior design moves came only after significant architectural work was done by Todd James Bertellotti of ObjectSpace and Paul Moon Design. “Susan had this vision,” McKagan says, to open up the five-bedroom residence’s small 1920s-style rooms, raise ceiling heights, and reclaim a sense of vintage elegance. The true impetus for their overhaul, however, was climate-related. “It gets hot in the Northwest now, so it was, like, ‘We gotta get AC.’ And Susan says, ‘We gotta get a pool!’ And it just went bananas.”
