When it got here to her circle of relatives’s lush and leafy oasis in Venice, Los Angeles–primarily based designer Kate Driver began off, surprisingly, by abandoning her aesthetic roots. In September 2016, she and her husband spontaneously deserted their renting life—and Driver’s long-held dream of proudly owning an “previous home with character,” not in contrast to the Georgian-style houses of her native Atlanta—to dive head-first into proudly owning a new-build house with no actual architectural soul to talk of.
“However after we walked by, it felt like no place we had ever been earlier than, like a tropical wonderland,” Driver, the founding father of the inside design studio West Haddon Corridor, says of the house’s hovering home windows and proliferation of palms. “In order that night time we felt actually impressed. We stayed up till 3 a.m. googling ‘methods to purchase a home’ and put in a suggestion the subsequent day.”
Within the eyes of a lesser visionary, the home’s grand 25-foot heights and 4,500 sq. ft of concrete flooring might have felt overwhelming to furnish. However for Driver, who on the time had simply found she was pregnant together with her first youngster, the home was merely a clean canvas. “I simply turned obsessive about making the home really feel prefer it has been right here eternally,” she says.
Introducing classic and vintage items was the best—however not the one—means. “I’ve been amassing items from totally different eras and totally different components of the world for a very long time,” says Driver, who has lengthy admired Roman couturier Giambattista Valli’s eclectic cache, displayed in his Paris condominium in seemingly improvised style.
“I aspire to that type of layering—wealthy and textured however very private,” Driver says. To wit, the lounge in Driver’s house is a cosmopolitan pastiche of collectibles previous and new, manifesting as a spontaneous and synergistic tableau. A fairly prim Fritz Hansen midcentury sofa, coated in lush Liberty floral velvet, gives a stage of decorum offset by the humorous geometry of Ettore Sottsass’s well-known Tahiti lamp, a playful postmodern interpretation of a flamingo. Elsewhere, the gravity of dual walnut espresso tables by West Haddon Corridor—emblematic of Driver’s want to design items which are “distinctive and practical anchors within the visible ambiance”—are challenged by the charming granny fringe of an vintage flooring lamp or American printmaker Denise Kupferschmidt’s punchy cobalt portray. That portray, in flip, sourced by Driver’s buddy, artwork advisor Illa Gaunt, is a nod to the unfastened types of Henri Matisse.
The house is consistently in flux, increasing and contracting with items and folks: For instance, the decorator’s extra tenured objects typically depart for purchasers’ residences when recent finds just like the Roger Capron tiled espresso desk within the visitor condominium, or the entryway’s concrete Willy Guhl planter, arrive from world markets like Marché Paul Bert, Driver’s favourite Paris flea. And when a legion of buddies comes over for a taco brunch, like they did lately to fête Driver’s now-eldest youngster on her fifth birthday, typically they don’t go away till after dinner. In line with Driver, these unintended all-day occasions owe their length and ease to the house’s pure heat and adaptability.
“I really like designing areas that really feel intimate for a bigger group but in addition vibrant and full for a smaller group,” says Driver. The upstairs touchdown was reworked into an intimate sitting room, the place the designer positioned a Nineteen Seventies Luis Montiel tapestry—a “retro rainbow,” as Driver calls it—in distinction to a needlework rug with a extra severe palette. An outside eating room, which hosts the resident household of 5 on West Haddon Corridor picnic benches as simply because it accommodates 25 visiting taco buffs, is heated and suitably foliaged, anticipating the uncommon event when Southern California’s perpetual balminess—and the backyard’s perennial palmy-ness—aren’t as much as al fresco eating requirements.
Because it seems, designing a home that feels prefer it’s been round eternally is immediately proportional to the extent of languor exhibited by company who can’t consider a extra enjoyable place to spend their total day. ”I really like that it seems like house to them too,” Driver says.