Inside the Venice Beach Bungalow of a Former Apple Design Lead
Most people want the design of their home to be the very antithesis of their workspace. But industrial designer Christopher Stringer and his wife, artist Elizabeth Paige Smith, aren’t like most people. The creative duo wanted their dwelling to closely reflect their professional lives. “We’re fortunate because we have obsessions that happen to be our jobs,” says Stringer, a former top designer at Apple. “And the design of our home, the way we live in it, it seeps into our work.” But first, they had to find a home that could match their bold style.
After meeting in 2008, Stringer and Smith moved from L.A. to the Bay Area. “We spent about a decade in seclusion up there,” Smith quips. The artist, who is a self-described beach girl, thought Southern California would be perfect place to find a new home. “I lived [in L.A.] after school, and Chris has always felt a kindred spirit in the area, particularly Venice.” Which is precisely where the couple looked to buy a weekend getaway. Through a friend in real estate, they happened upon a 1927 California bungalow in Venice. “The moment we saw it, we thought, ‘This is exactly what we’ve been looking for,’” Stringer explains.
In 2018, after two years of renovation, the couple decided to turn the home into their primary residence. “We fell in love with it as something that wasn’t intended as our full-time residence,” Stringer says. “But we experienced a noticeable lifestyle change in this home. It became our sanctuary.” The couple felt it was important for the home to maintain its quintessential Venice Beach architecture. They didn’t touch the exteriors, and instead they shifted their creative rigor to the interiors of the space.
“We both felt a really strong desire to preserve the house, maintaining its original bones. We were not interested in building a box, as the newer developed homes here tend to strip away a lot of the culture of Venice,” Smith explains. This meant creating ephemeral and almost glowing rooms filled with cedar, walnut, and mahogany wood, Smith’s stunning art, and Stringer’s eye for aesthetic yet functional design. (Before he left Apple in 2017, Stringer greatly contributed to the design of the PowerBook, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, Apple Watch, Apple Pencil, and HomePod. Nowadays, his triphonic speaker design, Syng, is what’s making waves, and those globular fixtures make a few appearances in the home.)
Designing the interiors for two ultra-creative people would prove to be the major task in transitioning this home from a charming Venice abode into a highly stylized space. “The house is the chain of experiences we bury ourselves in, how we want to feel, where we want to be, how we build the story of the day,” Stringer says. “We really resonate with waking up with natural light, so above our bed we carved out a skylight. This starts our day with the sky straight overhead, which may sound invasive, but it gives us a signal of what the day is going to be like.”