One of the most impressive recent commissions in the AD100 designer Jake Arnold It almost didn’t happen. A few years ago, the Los Angeles decorator and co-founder of The Expert received a message on Instagram — where he has 273,000 followers — from someone who was building a house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “I completely ignored it,” admits Arnold. “I thought, ‘This person must be crazy. I’m not going to answer‘”, and did not do it.
Shortly following, however, the courier and recipient met in person: “I was out to dinner one night in LA and a guy came up to me and said, ‘I texted you regarding my house and you didn’t reply!’ Arnold remembers. The prospective client turned out to be a successful hotel developer that he had hired Peter Papadopoulos of the Smith and Moore architecture firm in Palm Beach to build his young family a 10,000-square-foot canal house in a gated enclave of Fort Lauderdale.
Arnold was intrigued.
“The House’s owner has a passion for design”, says Jake Arnold, who had fond memories of spending his childhood winter break in Miami, even though he hadn’t worked in Florida before. “He showed me the plans of the house, and it was incredible”Arnold recalls of the white, stucco-clad, stepped-roof, five-bedroom house, inspired by the Bermudian architecture of Alys Beach, a neo-urban community in the panhandle of Florida: “It was very different from anything I’d done before.
The setting of the house facing the sea, with a lush plantation of palm trees, bougainvilleas, jasmine and sea grapes, makes one “feel Like I’m on vacation 24 hours a daywhich is exactly what customers wanted,” adds Arnold.
That idea of complete relaxation, tropical and vacation served Arnold as general inspiration for the house, whose architects had envisioned it for indoor and outdoor living and entertaining. As she worked with the owners, she began to outline more details.
The couple found the formality of the traditional vernacular architecture of Palm Beach and the British Caribbean appealing, but they wanted Arnold to soften it with the cool low-key vibe that you create in your California projects. Her husband liked contemporary Belgian minimalism in neutral tones, while the wife, according to Arnold, had a slightly more tailored, colorful and dramatic personal style.
Jake Arnold took these ideas and turned them into a relaxed outlinefunny enough, that extends the look of and bungalow high design beach or from a coastal cabin to the entire surface of the house. Color contrasts are low, materials are natural, and surfaces are matte or polished. The interior rooms blend seamlessly with the outdoor areas, while the green environment of those outdoor spaces inspires the interior decoration. Textures and scales stand out with subtly whimsical details here and there, but no element strays from Arnold’s calming, understated composition.
“They didn’t want anything to feel stiff or expensive,” says the designer, who used the interior architecture to help create a relaxed and modest atmosphere. Throughout, he clad the high ceilings in whitewashed cypress and used a similar shade for the smooth, hand-applied plaster on the walls. It mitigated the formality of the traditional doors of two high-profile sheets with more whitewash and added gentle curves to finish off the wide openings that connect one open-plan room to the next. (The arches, Arnold says, would have seemed “too Spanish.”)
The wide entrance hall, with its gently winding staircase and checkerboard-shaped floor, gives way to a spacious open area containing seating areas, dining room and kitchen. To accentuate the wood-tone palette, Jake Arnold used pale yet moody blues—inspired by water views—for cabinetry, a raw stone coffee table, and stonewashed linen sofa covers.
“The clients they wanted everything to be really livable and effortless and look good, even if it wasn’t perfectly tidy,” says Arnold. Vines from Gournay wallpaper climb the dining room walls, while mossy olive cushions cover a wicker daybed in the living room. suite major. Elsewhere, a scalloped-back velvet sofa in a similar hue takes pride of place under an oversized pendant by Atelier Vime in the library, and stylized palm trees from a Claremont wallpaper adorn the study.
Usually, the house conveys the feeling that any resident or guest might get out of the pool in a wet bathing suit and a towel, walk in and sit wherever you want without feeling out of place, “which is exactly what I would do,” says Arnold.
Article originally published in AD US.