Designer Carolyn Miller Creates a Forever Home for a Couple After 30 Years

That was what I called Frank Lloyd wrong‘Designer Carolyn Miller says of her latest project, a 1930s Pacific Palisades farmhouse that has fallen victim to a series of poor renovations in the 30 years since the owners moved in. Once the home became inviting and charming, it transformed into a fragmented maze as the owners tried to create character. “A lot of the house felt disintegrated,” Miller says. The ceilings were of different heights and the stairs were that confusing space that divides the house,” she recalls. “Everything has its own idea.”

The clients, who were old friends of Millers, were about to sell the house and start over. “They were reluctant to put the good work on top of the bad,” Miller explains. But after some gentle persuasion, the couple finally agreed to one last renewal. “They wanted to return the house to the best possible condition. And they trusted me to do it.”

Getting it right meant embracing the home’s original craftsmanship and removing the remnants of remaking the past to achieve the practical and elegant aesthetic that clients have been searching for all along. “We always wanted to keep the magic,” Miller says. “But there were multiple areas not communicating with each other. So unlocking all of that and making it useful was the main goal.

To do this, Miller sought consistency between conservation and renewal. “The goal was to preserve some farmhouse, cottage feel with original and natural finishes while giving the client modern amenities, an expanded footprint, and a more sophisticated and forward-looking palette,” the designer says.

Structural changes – such as re-leveling ceilings and remodeling the kitchen’s design – introduce the kind of continuous flow that was missing from the initial floor plan, while adding original materials to the home recalls its history. To balance old and new industrial materials – like doors and steel beams – alongside a collection brimming with art and antiques. “We did some really special touches,” Miller says. “But I don’t consider it luxurious. I consider it to be down to the original craftsmanship.”

Take a tour of the house below.

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dinner room

“The dining room is really the lifeblood of the home,” Miller says. The space room is adjacent to the outdoor lounge and serves as the de facto main entrance. “It has the most access both indoors and outdoors,” Miller explains. “And you know, it’s where the dog door is,” she laughs. “It was also one of the main areas where we cleaned everything up,” Miller says, referring to the bishop. “We wanted everything to be just one height.”

The focal point of the room is an oversized painting by Swedish artist Andreas Eriksson. “I used that painting as the foundational piece for this space,” Miller explains. “I played with colors, so there are a few touches of red and green. And all the warm colors in the palette are off the oak furniture.”

dinning table: Habit. dining chairs: port. hard light: Moseley.

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Living room

“The point of this space was to have some sort of palette cleaner when you enter the house,” Miller says. The restrained background serves as the perfect canvas for the clients’ artwork collection, which “always felt like a jumble like that” versus the old scheme.

shelf: Francois & Co art: Rebecca Ward, Mackenzie Dove. cocktail table: Lawson Vining. coffee tableBy: Angelo Ostuni. Lamb: Vintage, Arthur Umanov. Candelabra: Allied Maker.

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kitchen

The bulk of the structural work is reflected in the kitchen, which needs a higher ceiling and new design. “It took most of the time,” Miller says of the process, which included leveling the backyard and installing new structural beams that support the new kitchen as well as the rest of the house.

“The goal was to reorient the kitchen to be as open and connected to the dining room as possible,” Miller says. Several windows were removed to fit a wall of appliances behind a larger, outward-facing island housing the sink. “We re-orientated the sink to be on the island so that it lines up perfectly with the opening toward the dining area,” the designer explains. “Before, the oven was where the oven is now, so she was just staring at the wall,” Miller explains.

Since the kitchen is more open, it was important for Miller to get the clutter away. “I wanted it to be really easy for them,” she says of her decision to add a hidden hardware garage. “Yes, they like it to be elegant. But in their daily life, they don’t want anything to be complicated.”

Domain: Fischer Bickel. dish washer: Millie. light fixtures: Early electricity. hardware: Rocky Mountain Hardware. stool: ethnic. Artwork: By Jonas Wood and Grace Weaver.

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the

“This was another mixture room where there wasn’t really a proper entrance,” Miller says. To create a distinction between the front door and the adjacent eye, she installed a steel interior window to visually separate any of the space. “It seems like it was always meant to be this way,” says the designer.

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master bedroom

“The main thing we did was refinish the roofs,” Miller says. “It was an overly dark and stained pine. So we basically bleached it and then bleached it with custom glazes to give it that lovely, warm tone.” The designer removed wall-to-wall carpeting and replaced it with red oak flooring to match the rest of the house (and restore a look that matched the house’s original era). “I wanted to unite the house with only one floor,” the designer asserts.

rug: armadillo. the bed: home before marriage. Candelabra: RBW. Wall paints: Benjamin Moore, white decor. Paint trim: Portola, Stone.

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Backyard

“We’ve always wanted to keep the farm side,” says Miller, who replaced the kitschier’s red side with a whiteboard and glued it on for a fresher look. “Although the look of a Sonoma farmhouse is ubiquitous now, it really did fit in with this house. We didn’t enforce it, you know, it’s always been a barn.”

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