It was the relaxing, monumental landscape that ultimately swayed Whitney Cummings to buy her house just outside the house L.A. “I put in a ton of my childhood in Virginia and West Virginia, where by the drugs is the mountain,” recalls the comic and actor, whose many talents include things like producing, directing, developing, and podcasting. “I wasn’t nervous or stressed when I was there, and I usually had standpoint. I want to be in the middle of nowhere.”
The house’s first interiors, which ventured into nightclub territory, in accordance to Cummings, were a lot less engrossing. There was a dim, steampunk aura to them, punctuated by glam gold factors, crystal chandeliers, and a glass fire of different hues. These features weren’t “honoring the essence of the dwelling, but I was surrounded by 3 mountains, and I felt oxygen in my lungs, so I did not treatment. [I figured] I’d just deal with it later,” Cummings suggests.
That minute drew nearer as Cummings stored encountering the perform of Ad100 designer Jake Arnold, growing additional riveted by his aesthetic with every space she noticed. Dan Levy, of Schitt’s Creek fame, connected the two, and Cummings and Arnold quickly hit it off. Quickly, Arnold was hectic transforming what he describes as Cummings’s fake Tuscan villa into a Santa Fe–meets–monastery–inspired abode layered with a great deal of heat and texture.
“I didn’t develop up with fancy things. Every thing I have and want looks aged, with a wabi-sabi vibe,” Cummings claims. “I’m a maximalist in each and every other part of my everyday living, but I get so emotionally drained by muddle in my residence. I desired this to come to feel minimalist, like an outdated Spanish barn.”
Initially, Cummings assumed she just essential a considerable home furniture update. But Arnold had extra bold designs. “It was likely to be a without end residence, and we essential to start from scratch,” he points out. “I preferred to strip the house to its bones mainly because it desired so a lot enjoy and consideration.”
Cummings informed Arnold about her passion for horses, her favored hotels (Amangiri, Auberge Collection’s Lodge at Blue Sky in Utah, the Greenwich Resort in New York), and how when she was not cringing at the horrors that unfolded in Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, she was ogling the “rustic English countryside” home furniture of the sets. Following distilling her numerous tastes, Arnold took command.
“She was pretty trusting, and I listened to every little thing she responded to and turned it into a thing additional tactile that she could connect with,” he suggests. Arnold overhauled “strange moldings and generic finishes,” and rejuvenated rooms “with zero personality” by weaving in salvaged barn beams “to create architectural specifics.” Fireplaces and stair railings were ripped out, and rooms had been redefined by expanses of “rough, organic and natural, and earthy” plaster, in accordance to Arnold.
At the exact same time, he didn’t stifle Cummings’s “wacky personality.” The library, for illustration, is stocked with “5,000 of my classic anatomy, art, and bizarre horse guides,” Cummings suggests. Then there are the two coffee tables crafted from reclaimed barn wood that bear the imprint of horse nibbles. “I was sobbing. It intended so significantly to me,” she provides. Singling out the Lewis & Wooden wallpaper emblazoned with equine sketches in her office environment, Cummings notes: “Jake loves getting the needle in the haystack, the a person piece no 1 has.”
At Cummings’s recommendation, her mattress is now located in the center of her bedroom so that “when you wake up, you see a mountain, the only matter that is going to prevent me from finding up my mobile cell phone 1st issue,” she suggests. From the freestanding tub in the rest room, in which customized oak screens serve as shutters, Cummings may even textual content Arnold to gush about how the mild beautifully reflects on the water.
There were being certain troubles for Arnold, like the commodious den. “The doorways were being huge and the ceiling heights large, so we played with the scale,” he says. “I required the hearth to appear like a tiny gap in the wall. It feels really excellent in there now when you sink into the couch.” Designers normally like to go huge, Cummings suggests, but she appreciates how Arnold possesses a reverence for smaller sized attributes, this sort of as petite paintings that “are astonishing and truly feel intentional.”
Cummings has four dogs who “run wild,” as Arnold places it, so he wished furniture—much of it custom-made—that was slipcovered but elevated. A palette of prosperous brown, rust, and greige invites site visitors to “sit in each individual one area.” Of the property in basic, Cummings chimes in to include, “It felt flimsy ahead of, and didn’t have a soul. Jake appreciates when to wander away and let the resources shine. Nothing’s a lot more lovely than outdated wood. You just cannot compete with Mom Mother nature.”