A DIY Renovation, With Factory on Hand

When embarking on a home renovation, it helps to own a business that makes high-end products for top architects and designers.

Adam Kamens, 45, is the chief executive of Amuneal, a Philadelphia-based company that designs and fabricates products like custom stairways, shelving units, tables and kitchens for homes, restaurants and stores. Clients include the Saks Fifth Avenue, W Hotels and Twitter.

Mr. Kamens’s wife, Kim, was pregnant with their now 13-year-old daughter when the couple bought their house in the Bella Vista neighborhood of Philadelphia for $690,000. They had previously been living above a glass-blowing studio they owned at the time, called Hot Soup.

With three bedrooms and 2½ bathrooms, the 3,600-square-foot, four-story house had plenty of room for their growing family. But the couple, who also own an apartment in Manhattan and a place in Long Beach Island, N.J., found their new house sterile and closed-in.

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It was essentially a white box with granite countertops and a stainless-steel kitchen—what Mrs. Kamens calls “spec-house chic.” And it had no natural communal spot, so each family member retreated to their own space.

That had to change, so 2½ years ago they hired RJ Thornburg, who calls himself an “anti-decorator” for his tendency toward minimalist designs. Mr. Thornburg, a longtime friend spent a few months just hanging out at their house, getting a feel for the light and the space. Then he drew a plan.

“It needed to breathe,” he says.

Ultimately, the renovation, with furnishings, cost about $500,000, with many features designed and fabricated at Mr. Kamen’s company: the huge pivoting front door of charred oak topped with graphite powder; the brass lights with acrylic lenses that hang next to the stairs; the Murphy bed in the fourth-floor office/guest room.

To open up the space, they replaced a closed central stairway with steel balusters and wood treads that seem to float up from the front door to the fourth floor.

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They took down a wall between the living and dining rooms, putting in two burnished-steel columns for structural support. An entire exterior wall in the living room was replaced by 18-by-9-foot glass doors that open up to a new ipe-wood deck and a new kitchen that has custom oxidized-oak cabinets and a large marble-top island.

Upstairs in the master bedroom, where 20-foot high ceilings had created a hollow feel, the couple put in a loft, reached by another steel and wood staircase. The loft holds a reading area with an Amuneal made system of custom brass poles holding wood shelves.

With Amuneal making most of the components, “there were no limitations,” says Dixon Shay, of Shay Construction, the contractor on the project. He says they would come up with an idea and then refine it, making different iterations until they got it just right.

A minimalist wood-burning fireplace with blackened steel boxes was one of the trickier projects, because of limits to where it could be placed. The design-build process took about a year as they tweaked the design.

Mr. Kamens’s parents started Amuneal in 1965, making magnetic shields that protect electronic components from magnetic fields, but the company struggled after his father died in 1985.

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Mr. Kamens returned to the family business after graduating in 1993 from Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied fine arts and psychology. He aimed to diversify the business, and by 1999, Amuneal was starting to make furniture. Their big break came a year later, with commissions from Barneys New York that eventually led to the production of a giant horse crafted from metal clothes hangers.

That led to contacts with top designers and architects for custom fabrication for retail, then residential work. The company now has $35 million a year in revenues and has 150 employees. There is a showroom in Philadelphia and one in the works in New York.

The renovation of his own home has been key to the development of his company’s residential products, acting as an incubator for ideas, says Mr. Kamens. The company now sells shelving units, Murphy beds and lighting modeled after the system the Kamens put in. Two new kitchen systems, introduced in May, are based on those in the Kamens’s house. “If we couldn’t figure out how to make it for ourselves then we couldn’t sell it to people,” says Mr. Kamens.

“Our litmus test is: Would we want it in our own house?” says Mrs. Kamens.

Write to Nancy Keates at nancy.keates@wsj.com