Home tour: My Aunt & Uncle’s home in California

I can’t say where it is and I can’t say who owns it – but they are family and  I spent many a great weekend here growing up.  I can remember the smell of the house most of all. It always smelled like something good was either cooking, or about to be cooked. And it always felt homey – like sitting under a quilt while reading a fantastic engaging book during a Fall morning drinking a lovely cup of tea. And it’s the feel of this house I tried to reproduce when I designed my own.

I was there on a summer morning for breakfast with the family. Brunch was set out on the sideboard and everything else was on the table for a help yourself atmosphere. We sat on the back porch gossiping and catching up.

It’s not a huge or grand home. Just two bedrooms upstairs and 1 and a 1/2 baths. When you enter there are stairs directly in front of you, on your right is the living room (below) and on your left is the dining room (above). The room off of the dining room is the library / TV room.

Today someone would buy this home and knock down all of the walls to create an open plan space. Yet so much of that cozy feel is dependent on the confinement of the space. People have forgotten how nice a smaller room is to actually live in – a place where you can collect your thoughts instead of having them fly away in the expanse of it all. And it’s not that this room is small by traditional standards, but a McMansion it is not.

The morning of the breakfast – you can see this is a well used kitchen. That Viking range is so unbelievably sexy.

I love the chaos of food preparation on the counter and the calm of flowers on the windowsill.

The end of the kitchen is the breakfast nook. I love the red, which brings a strong energy to the place (and encourages cooking BTW). It’s hard to do red well – and this red is brilliant.

If I recall correctly the table is Italian and the wall prints are French. Isn’t this table stunning?!

Three fine French prints.

Upstairs is another great use of intense color. The bathroom is black and white with this intense dramatic purple ceiling. I fell in love with the ceiling, the patterned black subway tile trim and the gorgeous flowered black and white shower curtains.

I hope I was able to convey the feel of this house – which is so much more than just decor. It’s in the essence of the space and the way people live in it. I think we all have the house that inspires us when we’re growing up – and as I grew up living in a townhouse (all of them the same) I just loved this exotic quirky house when we came to visit. And promised myself that my own home would be like this someday. In the next few weeks I’m going to do a home tour of my own house – so you’ll get to see if I succeeded or not.