HOLLYWOOD SPANISH COLONIAL RESTORATION

My cousin Jeff and his husband Alan bought this beautiful Hollywood Gem, in order to lovingly restore it to its original architectural roots. They felt they had a really big canvas that they could not only restore, but make better than the original. Their vision was for the house to flow from the kitchen through the library and the family room, and out to the patio and the pool, with lighting as the central work of art.

Jeff was drawn to old Spanish houses by the movie Sunset Boulevard. “The character lived in this amazing Spanish mansion, and I remember thinking as a young boy, 'I want to live there!'” he says. A self-described frustrated architect, Jeff has obsessed over houses his whole life. “l will drive down a street and see a house I want to see and I just want to go knock on the door and see if they will let me take a look. As a kid, I actually used to do this — I’d ask them if I could use their bathroom,” he says.

Jeff poured over books of classic Spanish homes to help with the restoration. They wanted to restore each room to what they thought was the original design. They took our clues from the few rooms on the main floor that had not been altered which were characterized by thick plaster walls that were extra deep at the passageways. So they adopted that thick sort of castlelike character into all the rooms to create that really beefy Spanish look that he likes. Most rooms were gutted down to the studs and rebuilt with this design aesthetic.

He says one of his biggest design dilemmas was trying to make sense of a bad 1960s addition, which created a huge, long room, “like a giant bowling alley.” Their solution was to divide the space in two, creating a living room in the front and a family room in back.

Ever an artist, Jeff redesigned the living room more for beauty than for comfort. “I want it to be a great visual, even if we don’t go in it, because you see it so prominently from the rooms we do live in. I simply enjoy its pure visual beauty," Jeff says.

See lots more of Jeff in “Postings from the Road” on the home page, and also in the Palm Springs Midcentury Modern story within this Portfolio.