Step Inside a Soothing Los Angeles Home With a Perfectly Restrained Palette
The posh enclave of Brentwood, in Los Angeles, is no stranger to glamour, given its celebrity denizens and tree-lined streets stocked with distinguished manses. For one jet-setting family looking to put down roots, however, the aim was actually to tone down the glitz. They had purchased a classic, white-paneled, 11,000-square-foot home that a previous owner had amped up (imagine a study coated in bright green lacquer and a dining room bathed in black), but wanted to slip into something more comfortable. For the transformation, they turned to M. Elle Design, whose portfolio of work they’d long admired.
“They wanted us to run with that fresh, coastal, indoor-outdoor feel that’s relaxed, yet elegant,” says designer Marie Turner Carson, who owns the studio with her sister, Emily Turner Barker. “We first stripped things down to make the home more contemporary and take it to more of a restrained palette.”
The initial work entailed peeling away layers of paneling, wallpaper, and paint to create gallery-like spaces for the clients’ growing art collection. The designers also elevated the staircases, which had curved banisters that were “too traditional and formulaic,” Carson says. Instead, they opted for slim, clean-lined oak handrails and black, steel balusters. The team stripped the oak floors—giving them a soft, warm luminosity—lay new marble flooring in the entryway, and replaced most of the millwork throughout the residence, to “add layers of design to upgrade all the spaces,” as Carson puts it.
The major intervention, however, was in the kitchen, which was completely gutted and reoriented with a range wall in the back, parallel double islands commanding the center, and a sink wall to the side. “Symmetry was important to the client, so we worked to get things orderly in the remodel,” Carson says. The most transformative move was knocking down the wall between the kitchen and the formal living room, creating a seamless flow between the two and linking them to the family room. “It opened things up in such a different way, and now the spaces speak to one another,” she says. “The rooms have their own personality, but are linked by an overarching aesthetic.”
While most of the home displays a subdued palette of warm whites and grays, moments of drama punctuate the tableau. In the dining room, a bronze, asymmetrical oak branch chandelier from Cox London echoes the gnarled canopy depicted in a colorful triptych by American artist Charles Gaines. The molded oak chairs from Ruemmler continue the theme, their natural grain pattern repeating like tree trunks in a forest and radiantly paired with the room’s golden linen curtains. In the library, a steel bar cantilevers off an oak-and-marble volume in a chiaroscuro of dark versus light, thin versus thick.
Finding the right balance is all in the details, Carson says. “If you have the great bones of the room and you know the shape and scale of the pieces are correct, there is kind of that magical element at the end that brings in the finishing touch that makes all the pieces sing,” she says. Whether it be the perfect artwork to hang over the fireplace or a sculpture that activates a corner, the right accessory adds a new layer of dynamism.
All in all, the remodel took a little over a year—with the family finally moving in after a leak in the kitchen flooded the first floor and made a reinstallation necessary. Bad luck aside, the residence is an oasis for the extended family to gather, offering sun-drenched spaces that flow outdoors to the deep yard. “It’s timeless, inviting, and livable,” Carson says. “Anyone who comes in is impressed, but can sit down immediately and not have to walk on eggshells.”
