Embracing the Familiar

The best homes tell a story, and filmmaker Jeffrey Harlacker’s hilltop aerie, with its 360-degree views of Los Angeles, the Pacific and the San Fernando Valley, is no exception. “It’s a fantasy of an older California home,” says interior designer Andrew Virtue of the modest two-bedroom, 11/2-bath house built in the ‘30s. “We imagined it as a weekend retreat that had accrued things over time, furnished with older pieces from a family’s main home.” Virtue supplied many of the 19th and 20th century furnishings from his eponymous La Brea Avenue store: Victorian tables and lamps, a ‘20s children’s school table, a ‘30s steel bed and dresser and pillows covered in vintage fabrics. Harlacker put a personal stamp on each room with his own collection of oil and watercolor paintings, art pottery, vintage books and photographs.

To enhance the historic aura of the house, Virtue and Harlacker also installed vintage doors with antique hardware: Victorian French doors with hand-rolled glass in the living room and a distressed green-and-white screen door from an early California bungalow in the kitchen. “I wanted to backdate the house and make the doors look like they had always been here,” Virtue says. As for the floors, he and his client kept the dark green linoleum that was hidden underneath gray commercial carpet in the kitchen because “it was perfect for our time frame.” The dark brown parquet floor in the master bedroom--which Virtue describes as “a chic cross between a sanitarium and a Boy Scout camp”--was painted a subtle sage green. And a sea-grass rug was chosen to soften the cement floor in the living room, which, in an earlier incarnation, used to be the garage.

Citrus colors, both inside and out, also help recall romantic picture-postcard images of sun-drenched orange groves. Indeed, the colorful landscape was an important influence on the palette, says Harlacker, an avid gardener whose terrace features several potted citrus trees as well as plantings of orange and yellow nasturtiums, calendulas, black-eyed Susans and ‘Radiation’ lantana. Inside, the palette mirrors the outdoors, from the lemon-yellow kitchen to the eye-popping orange living room, where Virtue used six layers of transparent glaze tinted varying shades to achieve just the right hue. “Ever since I can remember, orange has been my favorite color,” says Harlacker, whose Bauer and Fiesta pottery echo the walls. To him, the vibrant result is not only exuberant but soothing. “The house evokes a feeling of an earlier time in California when life wasn’t so hectic, when people had time to enjoy their home and garden. For me, it’s a place to be centered.”