Notes from the Studio · Updated Monthly
Editorial pieces on the rooms we're working on, the antiques we're chasing, and what we're learning about California, light, and the slow craft of a home.
It started with the archway — that narrow Moorish curve that made every room beyond it feel like a discovery rather than a destination. Restoring the house meant resisting the impulse to perfect it. Some of the best decisions we made were leaving things alone.
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The most-photographed chair in our last project came from a small estate sale in Pasadena. The decision-making behind it took six months. A note on the slow practice of finding objects.
The light in Montecito is unlike anywhere else we work — softer than Los Angeles, warmer than Big Sur, with a particular afternoon clarity. How that one fact shapes every material decision in the house.
Why we always mix old and new — and why a room without at least one piece older than the youngest person who lives there will never quite feel like home.
How the studio collaborates with architects from the earliest stages — and why interiors that feel inevitable were designed when the architecture was still being drawn.
On designing interiors that age beautifully. The specific decisions that make a room feel better in year ten than it did in year one — and the ones that don't.
A working list of pieces we'd buy if we found them: a brutalist sconce in patinated brass, a Provence armoire with original hardware, a 1930s Welsh blanket. Sourcing requests, in public.