Foreign Accents
After living in London for five years, interior designer Jeffrey Alan Marks brought something back to California: an appreciation for English style. When he found a 1925 Craftsman-style bungalow on the bluffs in Del Mar, he envisioned a cozy country house with overstuffed furniture and boldly painted walls.”In England it’s not unusual to see every room a different color,” says Marks, who studied interior design at London’s Inchbald School of Design. “They’re not afraid of it.”
Once the manager’s cottage for the former Del Mar Hotel, the house has been a retreat for Marks, 35, whose home and business are in Santa Monica. Taking inspiration from the colors on a faded striped beach towel, he painted the living room a geranium red. He chose parakeet green for the library, creating a textured striped effect with a brush and oil-based paint. For the kitchen, he custom-mixed a yellow paint-- somewhere between lemon and gold-- “because it’s such a nice color to wake up to.” In the bedroom, Marks toned down sky blue walls with a milk- wash finish for a soothing effect.
“I wasn’t so concerned with making the place look larger as I was with creating warmth and intimacy,” he said about the house, which is less than 1,000 square feet. In contrast to the wall colors and to help “open the space,” he painted the existing built-ins (originally dark brown), the wood floors and the trim a high-gloss white. He created the illusion of a tiled floor in the kitchen with linoleum garage paint in alternating squares of white and soft green, topped by a clear sealant. He covered the wood floors throughout the house with sisal, and in the library added an antique Turkish cotton kilim rug.
Marks found the bamboo side chairs for the living room at junk stores. The sofa and chaise were custom designed by Marks and upholstered in bleached linen or cotton for easy care.”I wanted to relax here,” says Marks, who likes to swim and surf, “and not worry about suntan oil and sand.” He treated the windows simply with white linen Roman shades and added accents such as antique print pillows, trinkets from his travels, artwork--including his own photography--and hand-me-down china.
The English look of his beach bungalow is entirely different from his other house, which is “clean, spare and contemporary,” and more like what his clients expect from him. That distinction is what he likes best about it. “My clients wouldn’t like this. For one, they have bigger scale houses, and I wouldn’t have gotten away with the color,” says Marks, who is currently at work on the interior of the 1920s El Cortez Hotel in San Diego. “This is a great place to come to relax. I didn’t want to make it serious; I wanted it to be whimsical.”
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Jeffrey Alan Marks’ English Favorites:
* Tartan ware and chipped china.
* The comfort of friends’ country houses.
* Clotted cream and scones.
* Old fabrics and toiles.
* “A Sensible Life,” by Mary Wesley.
