Every Halloween of Ryan Mori’s childhood, his father tricked out their house in Santa Barbara with a “Pirates of the Caribbean” theme, which boasted elaborate decorations like sails on the roof and a wooden ship’s bow. “Trick-or-treaters who dressed as pirates got an extra bag of themed toys,” Mori recalls. So when Mori, now 24 and a property manager, aspiring writer and video game designer, demolished the residence to build something more to his tastes, he asked architects at Becker Henson Niksto to incorporate understated references to those seasonal adornments into a modern design.
Then Mori met Andrea Monath Schumacher on a plane, and upon learning she was a designer, he regaled her with his intentions for the new house. It sounded a bit eccentric, but Schumacher gave her flight companion her contact information, and he followed up with the architects’ plans. Indeed, their “pirate” touches were light rather than literal: a glass “plank” walkway over a fountain below and concrete “lily pads” that would convey visitors over water to the front door.
“He’s confident and a little edgy,” explains the designer. So Schumacher responded with a program that captured Mori’s young energy but balanced it with the sophistication that comes with age and experience. That sometimes meant toning down Mori’s impulses. For example, he wanted the entire kitchen surfaced in slabs of Antolini’s amethyst Precioustone Collection – illuminated from behind, no less. “I pushed back because it was going to be too much,” she states. “Instead, we used it in the butler’s pantry,” and deployed Azul Macaubas quartzite throughout the rest of the kitchen.
“He also had a lot of things he wanted, but the house was just not that big,” even at 6,000 square feet. That meant packing multiple functions into individual spaces. A room downstairs triples as a home theater, lounging and entertaining space and recording studio. The butler’s pantry with the amethyst walls also accommodates a wet bar with “a faucet that does all sorts of things – water that can be still or sparkling, hot or cold,” describes Schumacher, hidden storage space, a laundry chute and washer and dryer, all in a very narrow square footage.
Throughout, Schumacher subtly references Mori’s millennial predilections. “His tattoos, intentionally artful, treat the body as a canvas,” observes Schumacher. To wit: she upholstered original Milo Baughman chairs in the living room and Vanguard barstools at the kitchen island in Jean-Paul Gaultier’s Komodo fabric, whose graphic quality evokes tattoo artistry. The studded passementerie on the customized Vanguard sofa adds a confident edge while maintaining fashion- forward refinement.
Other accents lean unconventionally nervy: black titanium on the kitchen’s hood and range, faucets and fixtures with exposed mechanics that impart industrial chic, the snake motif of a guestroom blanket, the open-plan main space’s black concrete-look tiles, and a 1970s Jacques Duval-Brasseur praying mantis coffee table whose illuminated tail is made of purple mica.
The latter, while unquestionably a costly collectible, nevertheless has a whimsy that complements a life- size, three-headed dragon suspended from the ceiling and a Godzilla sculpture made of old motorcycle parts outside, both by Kalifano Metal Art. “I had to talk him into doing the chandelier dragon since he had never done anything like it,” admits Mori. “But I assured him we were building the house with the load in mind.”
Nearby, Schumacher offset all the whimsy with a cabinet flush with the wall that she accessorized with organic pottery and Asian artifacts. “It’s important to me that a house looks collected over time,” Schumacher shares. “I hate it when a house looks like you haven’t been anywhere.” No chance of that here. This residence is fun and fanciful, but also decidedly cool and collected.
Photography by Roger Davies.
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