It’s a time-honored adage that every home tells a story. For a couple intent on raising their young family in a setting rich with both history and happiness, that adage came alive through a thoughtful balance of preservation, palette and personality. The idea was to restore and enhance the defining architectural details and millwork that made their new home special, while ushering it into the today with a joyous burst of color and creativity.
“The home’s original stylistic direction was this storybook Germanic Tudor pastiche,” recalls interior designer Leo Cesareo. “That’s what we leaned into, but with a modern, maximalist, sort of whimsical twist.”
As the home is north facing and has a tendency to be dark, the intention was to bring in color and light and to open the home up as much as possible, while still maintaining separate rooms. Among the major structural changes were the repositioning of the kitchen from its central placement to the rear of the home, where light is abundant, and the addition of an entire story at the basement level.
“They wanted that separation of spaces and to preserve the architectural details of the interior,” explains architect Keith Kirley. “We were building upon and interpreting the existing details to integrate them into the new spaces so that the home felt seamless.”
That seamlessness is enhanced by a through-line of color rooted in the dreamy wallcovering that sets the scene in the entry foyer. “That was the main inspiration,” Cesareo says of the hand-painted de Gournay selection. “Up close, it has so many colors flowing through it, and you see those colors referenced in different shades of green in the dining room, pinks in the kitchen and blues in the living room.”
The completed home is a picture-perfect exercise in how living with history need not look like one is living in the past. “It’s cohesive,” Cesareo says of the colorful, respectful home. “It works because we were choosing the best of all these elements and understanding this is a house in California, not a manor in Europe. We were allowed to play a little and bring in a bit of fantasy. And that freedom led to something really special.”
Interior Design: Leo Cesareo
Architecture: Kirley Architects
Builder: Jetton Construction
Photography: Christopher Stark
Styling: Yedda Morrison
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