See Inside A Chic Seaside Cottage In California

Interior designer Jeffrey Alan Marks combines English country style and nautical American influences in his family home …

They say that when you meet the person who will become your future spouse, you “just know.” Having spent more than three decades as an interior designer, I can’t help but feel that way about real estate.

Years ago, when I first encountered the 1925 Montecito house that would eventually become our family’s first home together, I was enamoured to the core. The exterior reminded me of the houses dotting the English countryside, with its storybook architecture surrounded by lush green lawns.

So six years ago, when my husband, Gregory, and I spotted a for sale placard posted out front when we were on our way to Marin one morning, we took it as a sign. We would be welcoming our beautiful daughter, James, in six months, and we’d been contemplating decamping from Los Angeles for our other home close to Gregory’s family in East Hampton. But I was a bit reluctant to leave LA, and finding this place put a pause on our plans. What better entree to the world could James have than a cosy California cottage, where she could roam unfettered under the oak trees and pines?

There was just one complication: the house needed some love, and fast. Over the decades it had been subject to an array of bad renovations, with cramped ceilings and dated finishes. I longed to create a tailored home with maximum luxury within a comparatively simple cottage backdrop. So I did what I love to do: I rolled up my chambray sleeves and got to work. In nine months, I basically brought it down to the studs, gutting the entire kitchen. Then I raised a lot of the low ceilings, added radiant underfloor heating, built a guesthouse, and redid the garden. I am always deeply invested in the architecture of my projects, and I put on my hard hat to take over the building site and get it all done before our baby arrived. I wanted the freshly renovated interiors to feel like they had always been there; that’s the key to the English cottage look I love.

The Dutch door on our guesthouse is painted in Narrows from Portola Paints in high gloss; I found the metal light fitting above it in Amsterdam.

In the hallway, Lindsey Adelman light fixture references sea glass floats.

My design DNA was forever changed after I was discovered by a modelling scout at a café in Sloane Square, London. I used the money from my modelling contract to pay for a course at London’s Inchbald School of Design. Spending weekdays roaming the streets of London and weekends travelling to Milan or Paris for shoots, I received a full education in European style. Through guest talks at school, I was introduced to – and able to work in small ways for – British tastemakers David Hicks, Nicky Haslam, John Stefanidis, and the Colefax and Fowler gang. These experiences were my real education in interior design: their rooms look as if they have evolved over generations. There was so much to see! I’d noticed my most stylish friends would add the simplest thing next to the most outrageously glamorous aesthetic choice – and it would somehow make it all appear plain, simple, and delightfully unpretentious.

In our living room, layered rugs and a custom red light fixture from Urban Electric add to the collected effect. The 1920s box covered with shells on the coffee table is from Lee Stanton Antiques; we tuck candles inside the box when they are not in use. The sofa is from my own collection for A Rudin.

I brought the standing seam ceiling of our roof into the mudroom so it would feel like an outside space. The antique paver limestones are from Exquisite Surfaces; behind the cabinetry we’ve hidden two washers and a dryer.

My husband and I have always loved the sea, so we wanted to be surrounded by playful nods to nautical style, such as fibre ropes acting as banisters up the stairs or the old Abercrombie & Fitch rowboat that is suspended from the ceiling over my desk. We added English and American antiques we’d collected on the East Coast in an effort to conjure up our blissful East Coast summers year-round. That layer of history makes our home feel more like East Hampton than a typical California beach house.

Elements of texture are essential for making a recently redone house feel historic. I’ll often ask painters to apply four or five coats to get the depth and brushstrokes that only old-fashioned natural bristle brushes – never rollers – can provide. I’m not a big lover of drywall, so we added shiplap to any wall that was bare. I needed that texture to visually unite the home’s many disparate spaces. Where shiplap wouldn’t work, I used wall upholstery and grass cloth to add solidity and make our little jewel box come together.

I designed the custom zinc-wrapped hood in our kitchen. The leather handles on the island and custom verdigris light fixture adds texture. The high gloss ceiling reads like a mirror; its reflective quality enlarges the space. Bar cabinets are often a wonderful place to tuck a painting or two; you can take in the art while shaking your drink.

One of the spaces I reworked most thoroughly was our kitchen. Inspired by my love of English houses, I wanted it to call to mind the “below the stairs” cook spaces and sculleries found in old manor houses. I juxtaposed a clean-lined zinc range hood with needed rusticity; a French stove; and a fixture over the lengthy 13-foot island that lends the room dimension and history. To bring the outdoors inside, we painted the cabinet interiors sky blue. We didn’t have a formal dining room, so we eat in the kitchen nook, which we love for its wraparound banquette and the sun that streamed in on three sides. Or we light hurricane candles on the patio and dine outside by the stone fireplace.

In the end this house was everything that Gregory and I could have wanted for James’s first home, and it has become an indelible backdrop for some of my best memories – with these humans that I adore. We especially love our walks to Butterfly Beach for sunset cocktails.