Kristan Cunningham’s dreams turn on a dime in L.A.
Kristan Cunningham wasn’t too thrilled with the house-for-lease listing photos, but the address was near architectural greatness — Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House on the hillside above and his Hollyhock House visible in the distance.
“This was the one property I was least interested in seeing, but once we went inside, I didn’t make it farther than the living room,” Cunningham says, describing how she was instantly taken by the interiors. Her partner of 15 years, Scott Jarrell, went upstairs. “Twenty minutes later he came to get me, saying, ‘You’re just not going to believe this, but the Ennis House would be right behind your drafting table.’ ”
Cunningham and Jarrell have a penchant for old homes in need of their TLC. It’s a brand of budget-savvy decorating that pleasingly mixes and matches styles and periods in a way that looks more luxurious than it actually costs. In the past decade, the couple has lived in a ranch house in the San Fernando Valley, a post-and-beam Midcentury Modern in Pasadena and, as Home readers might recall from a May 2009 cover story, a Normandy-style chateau on a Venice canal.
When their landlord sold that Venice rental last year, the couple toured 14 properties in a single day before landing at the imposing, vine-clad, Medieval-looking house near Griffith Park. It’s not the kind of home one might expect from Cunningham, formerly one of the stars of HGTV’s “Design on a Dime” and now host of the forthcoming “Super Saver Showdown,” a home design competition show that she describes as “Extreme Couponing” meets “Design on a Dime,” now in production for Oprah’s OWN channel. At more than 3,000 square feet, this was a lot of house for two young people who travel a lot, but Cunningham says she was smitten.
“When I finally made it upstairs, I cried because everywhere we looked, it was so beautiful,” she says. “That’s how we knew.”
Designed by Bartholomew Mako, a Hungarian-born artist, the residence has become Cunningham’s exercise in celebrating period architecture — complete with romantic friezes, storybook touches and a Batchelder tile fountain in the living room atrium — while decorating in a way feels contemporary, young and not restrained by a single style.
The task started with the palette. Cunningham and Jarrell considered the mostly white walls the ideal foil for the dark woodwork, including floors, doors, window trim and a box-beam ceiling.
“The wood was our touchstone,” Cunningham says. “It’s rich and warm and works beautifully with our teak pieces. The only room color we changed was the dining room, which we painted a dark bottle green called ‘charcoal smoke.’ ”
Views stretch from downtown to the beach, and at night that dining room becomes nearly jet black with a solitary light fixture glowing in the middle of the ceiling.
The black, creamy white and wood tones that dominate the house are neutral enough to allow for all manner of furniture and accessories. “Even our Danish furniture makes sense here,” Cunningham says, referring to a 10-by-7-foot teak wall unit originally designed with open-backed shelves. To make the piece look like a built-in, Cunningham and Jarrell bought sheets of teak veneer from Anderson Plywood in Culver City. They nailed the veneer panels to the wall before installing the shelving, and now? “It looks like one big, warm rectangle,” Cunningham says.
David Pierce, owner of MidcenturyLA a North Hollywood retailer of European midcentury furniture, has sold several pieces to Cunningham and Jarrell, including that wall unit and a sideboard in the dining room.
“Kristan does an incredible job blending our midcentury furniture with all other sorts and styles,” Pierce says. “I’ve always been impressed with her creative eye and how she merges a lot of different styles in a really elegant way.”
That mix is certainly evident in the vast living room, whose 10-foot ceiling called for comparably scaled furniture. Cunningham and Jarrell used the niche to one side of the original plastered hearth to stack firewood nearly to the ceiling.
“We considered building a box to store the logs, but we would have lost that edge detail of the mantel,” Cunningham says. “Instead, the wood makes this a beautiful, textured wall.”
In the center of the room, two sofas form a right angle on top of a graphic Beni Ouarain Moroccan rug that Cunningham snagged on the vintage design site 1stdibs. She and Jarrell already owned an 8-foot leather sofa but felt it needed a companion to fill the room.
“We found a 10-foot-long, black leather Chesterfield, which was our only really big purchase for this house,” she says. “It’s been our dream to have one, and we came across an amazing floor sample — and now the entire room is based around it.”
Cunningham hesitated only slightly when pairing the two massive leather sofas — one black, one brown. But the “guy-dog” factor won over.
“My brother Robert lives in our guest house, and the three of us share parenting responsibilities for our two dogs, Floyd and Bean,” she says. “So it’s not unusual for everybody to spread out in this room to watch TV — and hey, we now have 18 linear feet of dog-friendly lounging space.”
Tribal pillows and a cream wool rug thrown over the back of one sofa breaks up the dark mass, leaving most of the Chesterfield’s tufting to stand out. If a dog paw scratches the leather, Cunningham just uses a little vegetable oil to take the mark out.
At the heart of the cozy breakfast room is a round table that Cunningham bought for $600, which was “more money than we’d ever spent on anything at the time.” She bought it from Karen Harautuneian of Hub of the House a mentor and one of the interior designers for whom Cunningham worked prior to her first television gig on “Design on a Dime,” and it’s surrounded by two transparent La Marie chairs designed by Philippe Starck and a reupholstered Goodwill love seat. Cunningham spotted the early California rug for $100 at Wertz Brothers and had it cleaned. “I just found the same rug on Vintagemodern.com for $3,000,” she adds, a note of victory in her voice.
The master bedroom has a bay of Gothic-style windows that is narrower than the king-size steel canopy bed, requiring Cunningham to float the piece in the center of the room. For side tables, she and Jarrell attached two distressed wood toolboxes to the tops of X-base stools.
“I found the tool boxes while antiquing in West Virginia with Scott’s mother,” Cunningham says. “I always pay a ton to ship things back to Los Angeles, but since I probably spent one-tenth of what those pieces would go for here, it’s still a steal.”
The designer is equally proud of her matching Anthropologie pole scones, only one of which she paid retail. After typing in the description on EBay and Craigslist, she found someone nearby who was selling the same lamp at one-fourth the price.
The best pieces, she says, are about memory and emotion — not the thing itself, but the act of acquiring it. “It could be the deal we got, the place where we found it, the amount of time it took to find or the struggle to carry something back on the airplane,” she says. “I believe the most cherished items have a story — and that’s the difference between a ‘staged’ home and one where people actually live with beautiful things that they are emotionally connected to.”
The new show’s premiere date has not yet been set, but now that it’s in production, Cunningham is transitioning from the hands-on DIY gal never seen without her tool belt to a TV host who “gets to show up with pretty nails and a nice outfit.” Just don’t expect her to resist the urge to turn nothing into something.
“For a decade I have been building and sewing and painting and doing the design work,” she says. “So I hope to be the guiding force who shows people how to live a little lovelier within their means — and on a budget.”
