Bare essentials

Interior designer Nick Berman looks at rooms as blank canvases. “I view a room from an artist’s point of view,” says Berman, who studied painting before turning his attention to interiors. “In a home, each plane is a separate canvas. I try to organize elements--color, texture, the relationship of objects--to hopefully make a beautiful composition.”

When Berman and his wife and business partner Debbie decided to move from their Sherman Oaks ranch in the early ‘90s, he was looking for “a retreat in the hills, something anonymous I could put my mark on. I didn’t want a finished product.” The couple found their haven in a 1970s home in the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking a rustic canyon in Brentwood. On a clear day, the view from the two-story home, which steps down the steep hillside, stretches all the way to Catalina. Deer frequently graze below the cantilevered decks that wrap around the back of the house.

Berman saw beyond the structure’s Moroccan overlay and its series of small, dreary rooms, arched doorways and dark tiled floors. “You could see [the house] had pure, simple lines,” he says. “It just had to be stripped down to reveal the beauty.”

He began with the front of the house, creating a serene courtyard entry, the first degree of separation from the outside world. He selected colors from the surrounding landscape for the stucco and Douglas fir wall, painting them moss-green and terra cotta. A grid pattern, a recurring motif in Berman’s work, divides the upper wall. When the sun shines through the small cutouts within each panel, dappled shadows dance on the courtyard floor. “The grid carves space out of a flat plane and makes the surface more interesting,” he says. “It’s also a puncturing devise that gives you glimpses into the next space.”

Inside, the designer brought in light and opened the layout by removing walls between the living and dining rooms and kitchen. He replaced generic sliding doors with a 14-foot-long picture window and two pairs of French doors, which flood the room with light and frame the canyon views.

To add drama to the living room, he tilted the fireplace wall forward, the top of the wall stopping just short of the ceiling. “It throws off your perspective and makes the wall appear to float,” he says. Replacing a dated brown-tiled fireplace is a simple firebox opening in an ochre stucco wall without a mantle or surround. Above it hangs what appears to be a thin, primitive wood carving. It’s an old chicken feeder, but no matter. The overall effect is of a large abstract painting.

The house is a showcase for the rustic minimalist furnishings he designs with partner Gennaro Rosetti, and he frequently brings clients to the home to see his pieces in an actual setting. Examples include a 6-foot-square Douglas fir coffee table and a 10-foot-long and 4-foot-deep sofa that are over-scaled. “I wanted to create as much mass in the house as possible to give it strength,” he says. “All the forms and textures have to be powerful.”

Berman likes to keep interiors simple. “The only complexity is in the palette of textures and finishes,” he says. To that end, his furnishings come in an array of woods and unusual finishes and rich, tactile fabrics. Kitchen cabinets of plain sliced oak wear a ceruse finish. Maple dining chairs with hand-carved handles are stained in natural, nut and honey and upholstered in varying shades of chocolate and printed cowhide. As a natural foil for the furnishings, he installed a cleft-cut Idaho quartzite floor throughout the house that sparkles when it’s hit by light.

The designer turned the upstairs guest bedrooms into home offices, reserving the lower level for a guest suite and family TV room. For the master bedroom, located upstairs at the back of the home, he extended the room four feet, then added a mitered window so that he could see Santa Monica Bay and hawks soaring on canyon thermals from his bed. He designed his indoor-outdoor bathroom to overlook a large koi pond set in an enclosed patio, where he likes to talk with Debbie or entertain small groups of friends.

Berman says that, except for forays to the factory and showroom, he rarely leaves the house. “I never imagined we could live and work this way, surrounded by nature and at the same time be a five-minute drive from the city. I’m happy as a clam.”

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RESOURCE GUIDE

Nick Berman Design, Berman/Rosetti, Los Angeles, (310) 476-6242; Douglas fir-and-wenge 6-foot-square coffee table, $5,950; wenge-and-hair-on-hide Julia ottomans, $2,000 each; wenge Ocampo dining table, $8,800; maple-and-hair-on-hide Foal dining chairs, $1,100 each; maple-and-leather Fretwork bar stools, $1,025 each, all Berman/Rosetti furnishings available through Mimi London Inc., Los Angeles, (310) 855-2567. Nick Berman for Sutherland teak lounge chair, $2,417, and teak coffee table $3,316, both available at David Sutherland Showroom, West Hollywood (310) 360-1777.