Hawaiian breeze
Interior designer Brad Dunning has made his reputation decorating architectural gems for Los Angeles’ design cognoscenti. Photographer Dewey Nicks’ Irving Gill office, fashion designer Tom Ford’s Neutra house and actress Sofia Coppola’s A. Quincy Jones home have all received the Dunning treatment. When he was called in to work on the renovation of a small Laurel Canyon home two years ago, the designer faced a new challenge. “I generally get involved restoring the architecture and then choose pieces to complement it,” he says, “but this project was essentially starting with a blank box.”
Dunning was called in to consult after the original 1920s bungalow had been torn down and a new structure partially framed. The client, Dorothy Day, an architecture aficionado in her mid-20s, requested the laid-back ambience of the Hawaiian Islands where she had once lived. In addition, she asked him to consider incorporating a number of architectural styles she admired.
“She tossed around looks from Victorian and Craftsman to modern and mid-century,” Dunning says. The designer, working with Pasadena architect Chris Peck, decided to run with the eclectic look Day wanted. “This house is inspired by just about every style of the last century,” Dunning says. “With many of the houses I work on, people admire the architecture and want to adopt and nurture it. Here the style flowed out of the personality of the owner.”
Dunning credits the kitchen’s functional painted cabinetry, with faceted knobs and concrete top, to Modernist Irving Gill, who, he says “was a master of cabinetry.” The influence of another Modernist can be seen in the horizontal configuration of the panes in the large den window, while a wrap-around balcony recalls curves of a 1930s style. “Think Harwell Hamilton Harris meets Irving Gill in Maui with a touch of Streamline Moderne thrown in for sensuous accent,” he says.
The first floor of the 2,800-square-foot home features an open-plan living, dining and kitchen area with a 10-foot-high beamed ceiling downstairs and a peaked ceiling with exposed rafters upstairs. A dramatic compound staircase that the designer describes as “curving back like a cresting wave” of teak leads to a master bedroom suite on the second floor. Although the project began as a renovation, Dunning says, the corner fireplace in the den and the horse watering trough in the garden are the only remaining original features.
To complement the array of architectural influences, Dunning mixed Moroccan, Indian, Balinese and Japanese pieces with furnishings by mid-20th century masters such as Hans Wegner, T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings and Warren Platner. A ‘60s dining table designed by an Italian Modernist and manufactured in Indonesia is surrounded by Eero Saarinen chairs. “The table is this odd hybrid--a composite of primitive Balinese with Italian modern,” Dunning says. “It appealed to me on an aesthetic level as well as a reflection of what the house evolved into.”
The designer created a casual Hawaiian ambience by installing teak floors throughout the house and covering windows with matchstick blinds. A Capiz shell chandelier and sisal carpet in the den and a grass-cloth wainscot in the bedroom are additional island touches. Upstairs in the sitting area, an Indian daybed is set against a curved wall of windows “to open the house as much as possible to the outdoors.”
Dunning worked with Los Angeles landscape designer Michael Swimmer to transform the overgrown exterior. Swimmer replaced the nondescript rectangular pool and broken concrete-and-brick patio with a new deck of eastern bluestone and a free-form pool surrounded by a tropical garden of chamaedorea palms, giant birds of paradise, New Zealand flax and beds of clivia. Dunning designed the new fireplace and canopy that have become the focal point of the outdoor space, where the owner frequently entertains. The canopy’s steel I-beams are the designer’s Modernist nod to Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House No. 22. Dunning quips: “Yet one more influence we threw into the blender.”
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Resource Guide
Brad Dunning Interior Design, Los Angeles, (310) 385-0006; Chris Peck, architect, C.M. Peck Architecture and Engineering, Pasadena, (626) 683-0708; Michael Swimmer, landscape designer, Swimmer & Associates, Los Angeles, (310) 837-9494.
