When it received right here to her household’s lush and leafy oasis in Venice, Los Angeles–based designer Kate Driver started off, surprisingly, by abandoning her aesthetic roots. In September 2016, she and her husband spontaneously abandoned their renting life—and Driver’s long-held dream of proudly proudly owning an “earlier house with character,” not in distinction to the Georgian-style properties of her native Atlanta—to dive head-first into proudly proudly owning a new-build residence with no precise architectural soul to speak of.
“Nonetheless after we walked by, it felt like no place we had ever been sooner than, like a tropical wonderland,” Driver, the founding father of the within design studio West Haddon Hall, says of the home’s hovering house home windows and proliferation of palms. “So that night time time we felt really impressed. We stayed up until 3 am googling ‘ buy a house’ and put in a proposal the next day.”
Inside the eyes of a lesser visionary, the house’s grand 25-foot heights and 4,500 sq. ft of concrete flooring may need felt overwhelming to furnish. Nonetheless for Driver, who on the time had merely discovered she was pregnant alongside along with her first baby, the house was merely a clear canvas. “I merely turned obsessive about making the house actually really feel want it has been proper right here with out finish,” she says.
Introducing traditional and classic gadgets was one of the best—nevertheless not the one—methodology. “I’ve been amassing gadgets from completely totally different eras and completely totally different parts of the world for a really very long time,” says Driver, who has prolonged admired Roman couturier Giambattista Valli’s eclectic cache, displayed in his Paris apartment in apparently improvised vogue.
“I aspire to that kind of layering—rich and textured nevertheless very non-public,” Driver says. To wit, the lounge in Driver’s home is a cosmopolitan pastiche of collectibles earlier and new, manifesting as a spontaneous and synergistic tableau. A barely prim Fritz Hansen midcentury couch, coated in lush Liberty floral velvet, affords a level 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 twin walnut espresso tables by West Haddon Hall—emblematic of Driver’s need to design gadgets which might be “distinctive and purposeful anchors throughout the seen ambiance”—are challenged by the charming granny fringe of an classic floor lamp or American printmaker Denise Kupferschmidt’s punchy cobalt painting. That painting, in flip, sourced by Driver’s buddy, art work advisor Illa Gaunt, is a nod to the unfastened kinds of Henri Matisse.
Buy now for limitless entry and all the benefits that solely members get to experience.
The home is constantly in flux, growing and contracting with gadgets and different folks: For example, the decorator’s further tenured objects often depart for purchasers’ residences when latest finds similar to the Roger Capron tiled espresso desk throughout the customer apartment, or the entryway’s concrete Willy Guhl planter, arrive from world markets like Marché Paul Bert, Driver’s favorite Paris flea. And when a legion of friends comes over for a taco brunch, like they did simply these days to fête Driver’s now-eldest baby on her fifth birthday, usually they don’t depart until after dinner. In step with Driver, these unintentional all-day events owe their interval and ease to the home’s pure warmth and adaptableness.
“I like designing areas that actually really feel intimate for a much bigger group however as well as vibrant and full for a smaller group,” says Driver. The upstairs landing was reworked into an intimate sitting room, the place the designer positioned a Seventies Luis Montiel tapestry—a “retro rainbow,” as Driver calls it—in distinction to a needlework rug with a further important palette. An outside consuming room, which hosts the resident family of 5 on West Haddon Hall picnic benches as just because it accommodates 25 visiting taco buffs, is heated and suitably foliaged, anticipating the unusual occasion when Southern California’s perpetual balminess—and the yard’s perennial palmy- ness—aren’t as a lot as al fresco consuming necessities.
As a result of it appears, designing a house that feels want it has been spherical with out finish is straight away proportional to the extent of languor exhibited by firm who can’t contemplate a further pleasant place to spend their whole day. “I like that it appears like residence to them too,” Driver says.