A Touch-Up for All Time : Newport Beach House Gets Updated--but Not Much
The test of a well-designed house is how it looks years after it was done. If you can walk in and know that a house was decorated in the 1960s or 1980s, chances are the design was too trendy, too off-the-showroom-floor.
There are houses done with a contemporary motif that are classics today because of their innate style, while there are houses in a supposedly “traditional” vein that look cold and pretentious.
The best designs combine the traditional elements with the contemporary.
An Orange County house that fits this timeless criteria was designed by John Cottrell of Los Angeles more than 12 years ago. He worked with the architect on the renovation of a Newport Beach house, creating a vaulted living room ceiling from wasted space, ordering fireplace mantles made to the scale of the rooms and designing the flooring throughout.
The decor was eclectic, with a strong leaning toward the traditional English country look.
“When the owners called me back after 12 years and said they wanted to bring the house up to the 1990s, I literally disappeared,” Cottrell said. “I didn’t return their calls because the house had been done well originally, so why change things? I envisioned them wanting bleached floors and a total whitening of things. I simply refused to do it.
“If that’s what they wanted I felt they should hire someone else,” said Cottrell, who’s been an interior designer for 30 years and has seen trends come and go.
As it turned out, Cottrell did get together with the owners and he did do new work on the house. “I came back and enriched and embellished it,” he explained.
Cottrell felt that the house had actually gotten better with time and aging.
Feeling that we should run our homes, not have our homes run us, he used furniture and fabrics that would last and be both decorative and comfortable. “We added some finer pieces of furniture in the living room this time around. There are new accent tables and French chairs,” he said. “They already had some Chinese porcelains, and so we added more.”
Cottrell switched the fabrics around where they had faded and took the draperies apart and had them relined. But aside from that, the living room remained as it had been. The original carpet had been designed by Cottrell after an old Aubusson rug. He had it custom woven, and it still looks new today, as does the antiqued ceiling.
“I had always loved the entry floor that I’d patterned after an old Provence floor I’d seen. I made it look as old as possible by stamping on and breaking the tiles so that have an aged feeling to them,” he said.
Today, the floor just looks older, which is exactly what Cottrell wanted.
Cottrell found the dining room cabinet in an old warehouse where it was dark, old and grungy looking. “I called the clients and asked them to trust me and buy it. It looked like a piece of junk, but I knew I could bring it back and make it wonderful.”
The banjo cabinet, as the owners call it, inhabits one wall in the dining room and is a strong focal point there. “In this room I left the fabric wall coverings, and just spruced up the antique woodworking and drapery,” he said.
The buttery pegged antique flooring also just got better with age.
The kitchen was lightened by replacing the dark lower cabinets with pine ones, and the curtains were replaced. The French butcher’s block table and the trompe l’oeil cabinets looked as they had a decade ago.
Very little was done in the family room. Cottrell added pillows and had the sofas reupholstered back to the original brown and white chenille, after a short life in a floral print. “You can always change a room through reupholstering. It’s better than selling or buying something new,” he said.
In the master bedroom, the four-poster bed was replaced with one more chaise-like. “The owners wanted something freer and more open,” Cottrell said. He also added the large cabinet in the room and an entertainment center. The furniture was moved around.
“I like comfort most of all,” Cottrell said. “The best way to design is to buy a few good things and add to them. Changing things just for the sake of changing is a mistake. I’ve seen people move from a large house into a smaller one and sell the very things that meant something to them. Later on they regret it and can’t rebuy them, either because they’ve become too expensive or they’re simply unavailable.
“I really see myself as a coordinator or collector, rather than a designer,” he said. “I like to take the beautiful things I can never have and work with them in people’s homes.”
