Fortunate Sun
If singing colors are an antidote to the blues, Joseph Marek and John Bernatz have found a formula for happiness: an egg yolk-yellow living room, a dining room of pumpkin orange and a vivid lavender front hall. Even from the outside, you can see it coming in the gold roses and purple irises tossed among the garden greens. Even the home’s facade, which was painted gray-white when they arrived in 1997, is now washed a sunny ochre.
Color has been a major theme of the transformation here since the two began painting and planting--creating, in essence, a personality for a place that, Marek says “wasn’t Spanish or modern or Mediterranean but had elements of each. Since the architecture wasn’t pure, we didn’t have to be pure in how we treated it.”
Built in 1938, not far from the beach in Santa Monica, the tile-roofed house lent itself, he says, to an eclectic approach. Outdoors this meant that Marek, a landscape architect who grew up mostly in the South, could give full vent to his California plant passions: succulents and roses, birds of paradise and palms. Indoors, amid the hot-climate hues, he and Bernatz, a travel agent raised in Newport Beach, went with modernism.
Given Marek’s profession, and the fact that gardens take time to grow, he started the front landscape first, tearing out lawn, planting olive trees and installing a street-side juniper hedge. He designed an entry court with a fountain, raising it two steps above a stone path and partially enclosing it. As a foil for deep, lush planting borders, he tucked in a bit of lawn, edging it with lavender, echium, agave, yellow columbine and his cherished ‘Golden Celebrations’ rose. Into one end, amid a crowd of gold birds of paradise and ‘Provence’ lavender, he sneaked a garden surprise--a pot-pond full of goldfish.
“I choose plants I like, not what I know beyond a doubt are going to thrive,” he says. Nevertheless, “after a reasonable length of time, if a plant doesn’t stand up and say hello, it’s out.”
Such no-nonsense pragmatism doesn’t always extend to roses, which are Marek’s favorites and some of the few plants he brought with him from a former garden. Behind the house, he now has 100, picked for fragrance and “voluptuousness” (no super-starched hybrid teas) and arranged, of course, by color--from a few whites to peaches, oranges and yellow-golds. Some try his patience, such as the English ‘Norwich Castle,’ prone to rust. But he’s usually willing to keep them unless, like ‘Crystalline,’ their scent proves faint or, like ‘Oldtimer,’ their blooms lack staying power.
From spring through fall, Marek’s roses are the backdrop for the outdoor dining room he designed beneath a Chinese elm originally framed by a concrete deck. But he and Bernatz also snip roses for the indoors, where their warm tones complement a paprika-colored sofa and green linen-wrapped chairs.
Santa Monica designer Kim Alexandriuk, whom Bernatz calls “our modernist muse,” helped them furnish the inside, showing them photographs, taking them shopping and integrating their collections (of palm-tree-patterned lamps and art, for instance) into rooms with Christopher Farr rugs and Billy Haines chairs. “Mostly, aside from clean lines, they asked for comfort--deep sofas and soft fabrics, velvets, chenilles, linens and leather,” she recalls.
Adds Bernatz, “We wanted a livable house, but we also love to entertain--move the furniture, roll the rugs back, dance!”
“Happiness is much more important than luxury,” Marek says. “We all need things around that make us smile. Life is hard. Have fun.”
