When InRegister set out to feature one of Baton Rouge’s most talked-about new builds, they landed on a home with a personal backstory: builder Todd Normand’s own family home. Designed inside out with longtime collaborator Kenneth Brown of Kenneth Brown Design. The feature, photographed by Sarah Essex Bradley, walks through the home’s natural textures, careful materials selection, and features the kind of luxury that shows up in details rather than excess. We were glad to see it published, and even happier to have been part of the story.
Todd Normand knows luxury homes. As the owner of Bernhard Normand Construction, he’s built his career on them. But when it came time to build his own family’s home, the standards he holds for clients suddenly had a much more personal set of stakes. His wife needed a space for yoga, and their family needed a theater room on the first floor. Every decision, he said, ran through the filter of what his own household actually needed day to day, not just what would photograph well.
In the yoga space, you’ll find a full custom mirror wall that runs along the room. It’s a practical feature for a home gym, but in a house built on this level of precision, practical still had to mean flawless.
The primary suite is where the quieter, more personal glasswork lives. In the closet, glass-front cabinetry puts Katie Normand’s shoe and hat collection on display, turning storage into something closer to a gallery, while closet mirrors and a dressing closet mirror give the space function without breaking its calm, curated feel.
That same attention followed us to every bathroom in the house, from the primary bath, the gym bathroom, the guest bathroom, the upstairs bathroom, even the pool bath out back. Shower doors don’t get the same spotlight as antique or colored mirrors, but they are held to the same standard – clean lines and a precise fit.
Our fabrication facility handles custom mirror and cabinet glass in-house. For the gym mirror wall, the antique mirror, the grey-toned mirror, the dressing and closet mirrors, and the glass-front millwork, we cut, fabricate, and fit those pieces ourselves. The shower doors across the homes’ bathrooms are a different kind of precision: less about custom fabrication, more about clean, exact installation, repeated consistently from the primary suite all the way out to the pool bathroom.
That’s really what a project like this comes down to. A builder who spent his career setting the standard for other people’s homes decided to hold himself to the same standard, down to the mirrors and the shower glass. For us, that’s the kind of trust that means the most. Not just being hired for a job, but being part of the small circle of trades a builder calls on when it’s his own family’s home on the line.