Opening Up
Designer Julie Hart was smitten with the Sunset Park neighborhood of Santa Monica and its quiet streets lined with California bungalows. Many of these homes were developed during the ‘30s and ‘40s when McDonnell Douglas had a plant on Ocean Park Boulevard, and a few former employees still live in the area, as well as a growing number of young families with children.
Hart saw the neighborhood’s potential. After leasing a house in the area for two years, she and her partner, Monet LeMon, a vice president for executive recruiting firm TRRG, purchased the modest 1936 one-story house and began renovating. An admirer of mid-century architects Craig Ellwood and Cliff May as well as Shaker traditions, Hart transformed the 925-square-foot home into a 21st century gem by combining clean Modernist lines with Shaker simplicity and functionalism. “It’s so much fun to watch people’s faces when they walk into the house for the first time,” she says. “On the outside it’s still very traditional with its clapboard siding and small porch, and then you walk into this very nontraditional interior.”
Among the things Hart needed to address in the house were issues of light, circulation and storage. She began by opening up the home’s warren of tiny, dark rooms to create one large loft-like space for the living, dining and cooking areas. “The house was so small, we needed to utilize all the space all the time,” says the designer. The open floor plan allows her to cook in the kitchen while having a conversation with guests a few feet away in the living room. To further enlarge the room, Hart removed the claustrophobic 7-foot-high ceiling, revealing the 13-foot-high pitched gabled roof. “I crawled up into the attic and I thought ‘this is all just wasted space.’ ” So she installed a new skylight in the roof, paneled the ceiling with pine and painted it a high-gloss white to brighten the once-dim interior.
Hart also wanted to establish a relationship between the home’s interior and the outdoors. “Typically you used the door of the laundry room to get to the backyard. These houses had almost no link with the outside,” she says. Two pairs of wood slider doors now open onto a new redwood deck. Steps lead from the deck to the yard and a newly enlarged garage, which doubles as LeMon’s home office. A bright orange “Mr. Ed”-style door playfully marks the entrance. “Dutch doors are brilliant. They allow you to bring in light and air while maintaining your privacy and hiding junk you don’t want anyone to see,” says Hart, who liked the door so well she created another from an existing door in her own office inside the house.
In addition to reconfiguring the living spaces, Hart transformed a small second bedroom into a master bath and walk-in closet, and then added a 275-square-foot master bedroom onto the back of the house. A large casement window overlooks the yard while the hopper window above brings in cooling breezes. Storage was perhaps the biggest challenge in redesigning a small home occupied by women. “I had to add storage anyplace I could,” Hart says. Eighteen feet of storage cabinets, which serve as both pantry and closet, line the wall beside the dining table and hold everything from dishes to shoes. Nearby, a free-standing central island dividing the dining and kitchen area stores pots and pans. More than three dozen Shaker-style pegs line the interior hallway, where Hart and LeMon hang purses, jackets, hats and scarves. Extra bed linens and pillows hide in a giant pull-out drawer beneath a king-size bed.
“With a few Modernist changes these small bungalows can become delightful, clean-lined homes of warmth and character,” Hart says. “Not everyone needs to live in an architectural statement to enjoy where they live.”