The White House : The ‘Non-Color’ Scheme of This Harbor Residence Is More Breathtaking Than Bland

One thing about white, it catches the eye.

And if a little white stands out, a lot of white . . . well, a lot ought to really make a statement.

It does.

Witness Toni Tuso-Faber’s contemporary remodel on Huntington Harbour’s Davenport Island. The pure white structure shines like a beacon, its pristine exterior drawing attention both in the glare of day and the artificially lighted glow of night.

This, dear reader, is a white house.

A white house that is white from the top of its bold, geometric facade to the ceramic tiles that cover the driveway, the courtyard, the terraces, the back deck and even the side yard.

And that’s just outside.

Chez Tuso-Faber is white inside, too.

The walls are white, the floors are white, the countertops and cabinets are white. The appliances are white. The furniture is white. The artwork on the walls is white.

Even the garage is white, with the same white tile from the driveway covering the floor, and a white rubber mat carefully placed to catch the occasional unsightly drip of oil from Tuso-Faber’s--you guessed it--white Mercedes.

Not to put too fine a point on things, but even the fire extinguisher mounted on the wall in the master bedroom closet is white.

What relief there is comes from the jungle of lifelike green silk plants scattered throughout the house; from the silvery sheen of stainless steel and chrome hardware and fittings, including the striking 20-foot stainless columns that frame the fireplace; and from the sweeping views, through expanses of glass, of Harbour Channel and the boats that line it.

Tuso-Faber, a former Miss California, onetime magazine publisher and now designer and manufacturer of a custom clothing line, likes white.

Some people, she says, have called the place “the ice house, or the ice queen’s castle, which means it strikes them as cold. But to me, white is warm and homey. It gives me a real good feeling.”

White, she says, has been her “favorite color, or non-color, I should say, ever since I was a little girl. My mother told me that my room was all white when I was a baby, so maybe that’s it.”

Whatever started it, every house Tuso-Faber has owned--and the Huntington Harbour place is No. 6--has been all white.

In Tuso-Faber’s book, a house is background for the people in it, not a centerpiece that diminishes by its very nature those who have gathered within.

White accomplishes that goal very well, she says. “It’s like a blank canvas. You can set the mood with lighting and plants.”

And you can be sure, in a house like this, that the people in it will never take a back seat to their surroundings.

That is not to say that the house is innocuous. Even with all that white, it is more breathtaking than bland.

But this is not a place in which most people would choose to raise a family.

Imagine having to clean sneaker tracks off the all-white floors and fingerprints off the all-white walls every day--even in the garage. Then there’s the oversized glassed-in shower and oval raised tub standing proudly side by side in the middle of the master bedroom.

Tuso-Faber is quick to point out that the unusual placement of the shower and tub wasn’t part of the entertainment scheme. It is just that she hates to feel closed in.

Tuso-Faber, who added the Faber to her name when she married Beverly Hills jeweler Bruce Faber six months after completing the intensive remodeling, planned the house for entertaining. And for that purpose, it works like white fur on a pedigreed Samoyed.

When Tuso-Faber bought the house in August, 1988, she was attracted by the location, the fact that it came with about 70 feet of channel frontage and three large boat docks and by its potential after what she initially envisioned as “a slight remodel.”

Huntington Harbour is a nearly 900-acre enclave of expensive homes built on land reclaimed from a massive saltwater marsh in the mid-1960s. A number of homes, including Tuso-Faber’s, are built on a threesome of man-made islands while others offer owners frontage and docking space on the community’s system of canals. When the first residences were built there in the late 1960s, the developers astounded buyers by asking as much as $80,000 for a two-story waterfront home.

Tuso-Faber’s white house started life as a typical California coastal home of the early 1970s. Stucco walls, an A-frame roof line, a blue and gray color scheme and a dozen or so clones within a five-block radius.

Initially, Tuso-Faber intended the house to be her primary residence--she says she never would have committed to the huge remodeling job that ultimately was done if she’d intended to sell right away.

But marriage to Faber changed her plans and for the past 11 months the house has been on the block with a cool $1.9-million asking price.

She says she’s not afraid that the contemporary design and stark color scheme will drive potential buyers away. None of her other all-white houses proved difficult to sell. Nor, she maintains, is the price a stumbling block. At nearly 4,100 square feet and with its channel frontage and triple boat dock, Tuso-Faber says, the house is not overpriced for the Huntington Harbour area.

The holdup simply is that in the current market it takes a lot longer than in the frenzy of the late 1980s to sell a house in the $1 million-and-up category.

When Tuso-Faber bought the house she intended merely to enlarge the master bedroom and knock out a living room wall to enlarge that room and add a full-service bar. And, of course, to redo everything in white.

But as most often happens with remodeling projects, that soon mushroomed and by the time she was finished nine months and nearly $500,000 later, there were only three rooms in the whole house that hadn’t been gutted.

“I like things to match,” she says, “and as we did one new thing we had to go through the rest of the house and redo it to keep consistent. We put recessed lighting in the new front entry, for example, and then we just had to take out all the rest of the ceilings and lower them for recessed lighting, too.” And on it went.

The Italian marble flooring (Newport white is the color) in the new entry, living room and bar addition just had to be carried over into the rest of the downstairs--the dining room, den, kitchen and guest bathroom.

To unite all that silvery-veined marble flooring--2,400 square feet of it--Tuso-Faber and Irvine architect Timothy Wilkes decided to open up the ground floor by tearing out most of the interior walls.

“Once the walls were open and we saw what had been done in earlier remodels, we decided we’d better rewire most of the house,” Tuso-Faber says.

And as long as it was being rewired, she thought, why not put in a state-of-the-art security and sound system?

That went in with help from her father, an electrical engineer.

One feature is a 25-inch color television hidden in a recessed cabinet on a 12-foot wall in the nearly 900-square-foot master bedroom suite.

A chrome-framed, white-on-white collage on the wall divides horizontally and slides apart with the push of a button on a remote-control device to reveal the television. The set is hooked into a surround-sound system with four speakers recessed in the bedroom ceiling and two more in the living room. The same system is also completely wired for audio components and all the hookups are hidden in the master suite’s 5-foot-by-28-foot walk-in closet.

Back on the first level, Tuso-Faber brightened the foyer and a long entry hall with a $10,000 indirect lighting system that utilizes cold cathode lights. Each of the bulbs, which last about five years under normal use and cost about $80 a pop, must be custom-made to fit the specific installation, Tuso-Faber says. The system is predominantly used in galleries, museums and jewelry stores because of its clear, crisp illuminating power.

A mix of incandescent and halogen lighting is used in other rooms, with halogen spots washing over the entry and master bedroom doorways.

Tuso-Faber, who worked closely with Wilkes on the plans, says they spent nearly four months designing the redo and then redoing the design as her horizons expanded.

When work began in December, 1988, curious neighbors first saw new exterior framing being erected in front to accommodate a two-foot garage extension and an expanded entryway. The new facade, repeated in the back, also gives the exterior its contemporary look. (The original roof line remains but is concealed behind the new front and rear facades.)

Tuso-Faber, acting as her own general contractor and dealing with about 30 subcontractors during the remodel, also had workers extend the entryway and close off a panel of windows that had provided a street view from the dining room.

A 6-foot-wide, cedar-lined storage closet was installed between the now-blank dining room wall and the new front facade on that side of the house.

The front windows went, Tuso-Faber says, “because I didn’t want a street orientation. The focus of the whole house needed to be pulled back to the water” through massive glass windows and sliding doors that open onto the rear deck.

It was to facilitate that open feeling that Tuso-Faber had the interior walls separating the kitchen, dining room and den removed.

Acres of stark white laminate cabinets were installed in the kitchen and dining room, a side door was replaced with frosted glass blocks to let in additional light and the kitchen was outfitted with marble counters and all-white GE Monogram series appliances, including a six-burner range, double convection ovens, microwave, double-door refrigerator-freezer, dishwasher and trash compactor.

A lawn area originally squeezed between the back of the garage and the living room became a marble-floored entertainment area with a marble-topped bar that seats six beneath its cantilevered ceiling.

Opening the house onto the 20-foot-wide rear deck that leads to the boat docks and the water beyond are three massive sliding glass doors, one in the den and two in the living room.

A huge single-sheet glass window measuring 12 feet wide by 8 feet tall tops the living room doors and all of the glass is shaded by wide vertical blinds covered in white fabric on their exterior face and with shiny chrome Mylar on the interior.

An $8,000 glass and stainless steel staircase occupies the center of the ground level, dividing the food and family rooms from the entertaining areas and leading to the four bedrooms and three bathrooms upstairs.

It was both for aesthetic and practical reasons that Tuso-Faber used a lot of stainless in the house. The tough metal withstands the corrosive salt air better than most other materials and its high-tech shine complements the contemporary design without undoing the white-on-white scheme.

Most of the custom door and window hardware is stainless, as are the 20-foot columns that flank the living room fireplace (the original rock facing is still there, enclosed in the smooth coated drywall that gives the towering fireplace its new shape).

Living with all that white and shiny metal in a saltwater environment hasn’t been difficult, Tuso-Faber says.

The house needs a good exterior washing down once a year--but most homes in the smoggy, dusty inland areas of Southern California could use a good annual scrubbing, too. The other major concern is keeping the paint work or plating fresh on exterior metal to prevent rust and corrosion.

Still, in the two years she lived there, and in the year it has stood empty since she moved to Los Angeles after her marriage, Tuso-Faber says the house has not demanded any special maintenance or repair.

That, she says matter-of-factly, is because she planned things that way. “This was my house, to live in, and I used a lot of the finest materials and the finest craftsmen. That’s why it cost what it did. Neither of those things come cheap.”

Next on the list of things to do?

“I want to do another contemporary home. But this time, I want to build it from the ground up.”

Needless to say, it will be a white house.