Full Exposure
Until five years ago, Laura Hull, an editor at Metropolitan Home magazine, lived across the street from the beach in a two-bedroom mobile home in Carlsbad. Today the editor and fine arts photographer resides light years away in an industrial cityscape of toy factories and train switching yards at the Santa Fe Art Colony, a former tailoring plant for terry-cloth bathrobes. “I felt I was working too much and not doing enough art at the time,” says Hull, explaining the impetus for moving to the community of loft-living artists.
One of Hull’s first tasks was to refinish the floors, which previous tenants had splattered with paint. “It took two weeks to strip, seal and polish them,” she recalls. The next step was to recapture the mezzanine areas overlooking each of the two large rooms in the 1,300-square-foot loft. Electric and gas pipes ran mid-thigh through the center of each space, she says, essentially rendering them unusable except for storage. By rerouting the pipes along the ceiling, she turned the front room’s small space above the open-plan kitchen and living room area into a library; the mezzanine above her back studio/office has become her bedroom.
She salvaged a wooden staircase from a neighbor who was throwing it out, took it apart rung by rung, then reassembled it to access the upstairs reading area, which she previously reached by climbing a ladder. She added a cabinet underneath the stairwell to serve as a combined storage/pantry space.
The kitchen, with its vintage O’Keefe & Merritt stove, originally held a single sink and cabinet. Hull added a row of top and bottom cabinets and rerouted the gas line so the stove could be placed along the same wall. By spraying the unfinished cabinets from Home Depot with multiple layers of matte-white lacquer and adding modern nickel-plated hardware, she created a sleek, contemporary look.
She hand-scraped paint to expose loft ceilings and overhead beams, but left them in their weathered condition to reflect the building’s age. She primed the side walls and painted them a warm white. “It’s a combination of rustic and smooth finishes,” says Hull. “I like seeing the contrast of textures.”
Does she ever miss her former home by the ocean? “I’ve lived by the water my entire life, but I love my huge space and living in a community of other artists.”
As far as the industrial landscape goes, Hull, who often scouts tony homes on the Westside for her magazine, likes the contrast of neighborhoods. “I love coming back to the older industrial buildings. They have a sculptural-graphic quality about them I find real beauty in.”