Just Like Old Times

It was a hippie-bohemian Shangri-La,” says architect Odom Stamps of the 1904 carriage house he and his wife, Kate, renovated in less than a year. When they first saw the South Pasadena building, matchstick blinds and a macrame plant holder hung from the entry porch and a washer and dryer sat by the back door against green fiberglass panels. “We long ago stopped seeing houses as they are. We only see what they can be,” explains Kate Stamps, interior designer for the couple’s design and landscape firm, Stamps & Stamps.

Without changing the basic footprint of the pre-Craftsman carriage house and its 1940s two-room upstairs addition, the Stampses added 1,100 square feet. They created space for a playroom for daughter Emma and a dining room by enclosing the upstairs sleeping porch. A new staircase in the former dining nook links those rooms to a new master bedroom and bath, laundry room and walk-in closet below.

To eliminate unsightly exterior renovations of the past, Odom installed a white balustrade along the second story similar to ones he remembered from his childhood in the South. “It has the advantage of looking like a porch from afar,” he says, “but it makes the house more ethereal and less weighty.” A band of casement windows replaced a smorgasbord of window styles, and old stucco was concealed under more appropriate cedar shingles stained dark brown.

But the real magic was giving the place a palpable sense of history. “When friends see the house for the first time, they can’t believe it wasn’t always like this,” Kate says. Among the finishing touches, the couple ripped out the 1920s floor, then stained and waxed the Douglas fir subfloor. They covered plaster walls in the living room--and new dining room walls--with 12-inch-wide wood planks, then artificially aged them with layers of paint and glaze. And they incorporated antique textiles--Kate’s trademark--in every room. Nineteenth century shawls drape living room windows; purple toile from old bed valances found in London hang in the dining room. “Antique fabrics give an instant patina and are often less costly than buying new,” says Kate, who finds hers at auctions and flea markets.

Collections of European and American antique and vintage furnishings--along with 18th and 19th century watercolors--complete the warm, inviting interiors. “We mixed beautiful things with others that were just charming,” Kate says, referring to the carved saint’s head topped with a straw doll’s hat and the Chinese dragon bench that once belonged to Odom’s great-aunt and now serves as playful counterpoint to English antiques. For the Stampses, the best houses are always both attractive and comfortable. As Kate puts it: “You have to be a good steward of your possessions, but at the same time, you have to enjoy them.”