Pasadena Spanish

The home is a charming Spanish bungalow in the heart of Pasadena with a story typical of Los Angeles real estate: a young couple buys in a great neighborhood from a flipper and spends more time than they'd like undoing design and build mistakes, including rebuilding a principal bath floor due to poor waterproofing and a rebuild of the bathroom altogether.

Shialice Spatial Design was brought in on the tail end of leak repairs and changing the floors to complete a thorough recalibration of the interior space, including the reimagining of the principle ensuite.

Starting out the husband and wife (a personal chef and food entrepreneur and an aerospace exec, respectively) had some great midcentury pieces and an amazing collection of cookbooks. While these pieces were precious to them, one key goal was to recurate and recontextualize their midcentury pieces into the new 100 year old home. This meant strategically bridging the 2 worlds, adding the right shapes and textures to achieve a thoughtful eclecticism. Our team works almost predominantly with vintage and antiques whenever possible, alongside locally made items and design classics. Adding pieces with patina and age and sourcing locally was a big part of this project.

Early in the process, we helped with requisite paint color retweaking, bringing a cobalt blue interior door back to a more classic stained hardwood to match the vaulted ceilings. Floor length drapery was added throughout to help elongate the vertical lines of the home, and antique rugs were introduced throughout, to anchor the furniture into their new home.

ENSUITE

As with many 100+ old homes, the bathroom and bedroom setups did not translate well into modern living. The bedroom closest to the main bedroom was accessible by the guest bedroom and also from a separate hallway. An awkward door led into this bedroom from the main entrance to the house of all places. [a proper digital floor plan can be provided upon request; before photos are included in the dropbox folder].

We created a new hallway extension to pull the bathroom to create an ensuite, and moved the door to the bedroom into a more private hallway instead of by the front door. Plumbing was overhauled to turn a 1 vanity and tight toilet area into a double vanity with a custom stone sink (everything was custom from the marble sink and cabinetry to the large mirror that aligns with the backsplash, to a custom metal ladder separating the tub from the toilet). We consolidated the flipper's 3 windows into one single one, which ironically let in more light. This was all done without changing the square footage of the space and reclaiming some usable space with a strategically placed pocket door.