A Sense of Place
09/01/2008
When he was a kid growing up in the Hancock Park and Bel-Air areas of Los Angeles, Timothy Corrigan loved to make balsa-wood models of houses. "The interesting thing," says the Los Angeles– and Paris-based designer—who ended up specializing in restoring such properties as a 15th-century castle, a 17th-century monastery, and an 18th-century townhouse—"is that none of my houses were contemporary, they were all old styles." In college Corrigan was enamored by history, but because he didn’t feel his math skills were strong enough to major in architecture, he studied 18th-century English literature.Then Corrigan went into advertising. "I wasn’t even on the creative side," he says with a laugh. "I was in account management." But several years after his company transferred him to Paris, he achieved one of his dreams, buying a 17th-century manor house in Normandy. "It was a wreck that had been in the same family for 400 years," he says, "and probably hadn’t been touched for 300 years." After Corrigan restored the house, friends and advertising clients started to ask him to redo their beloved old wrecks.
Preferring renovating to marketing, he quit his day job in 1995 and opened his own design firm the following year. "Anyone can start with a clean sheet of paper," he explains. "I find it more exciting to take something that represents an earlier way of living and figure out how to maintain its integrity and transform it for the way people live today."
In 1996, he tried his hand on a Montecito house that was only 75 years old, but certainly had history, starting with the fact that it belonged to the descendants of Alexander Hamilton. The night the home was originally completed, it was burned to the ground by an arsonist—allegedly because it had not been built with union labor—then it was rebuilt with an all-union workforce. It had mesmerized Corrigan since he was a child, when his parents had owned a home in Montecito. "It had these iron gates and a courtyard with a carved Italian wishing well in the center," he recalls, "and I always looked in and thought it was the most romantic-looking place."
When the property—inspired by Belcaro, an estate outside of Florence—finally came up for sale, Corrigan had just moved into another Montecito home. Curious, he went to take a look. "When I walked in," he says now, "I said, ‘I have to have this house.’ "
Because the previous owner—the daughter of the couple who built the home—had been living primarily in the staff section of the house, the main section was "a perfect gem, like a time capsule, with this incredible sense of history preserved in amber." The silk-velvet drapes from 1929 were almost flawless. The master bedroom’s bookshelves, obscured by easily removed smoke residue, were covered in silver leaf. And, painted within each of the living room ceiling’s 100 or so coffers was a different Italian family crest. "Someone had lain on his back, like Michelangelo, painting all those crests," says Corrigan. "There were little treasures hidden all over. I didn’t have to add any beautifulness to the house."
The era the house represented was also a big selling point. "What I loved was the sense that there was more time then," he says. "The subtleties of life had a greater importance than they do today. Now you send an e-mail, and if you don’t get an answer 10 minutes later, you think, What’s wrong that they didn’t answer me?" Of course, after Corrigan bought the house, he updated it by rewiring, replumbing, and adding air-conditioning.Like many houses built in the 1920s, this one has smaller windows and was darker inside than today’s new homes. "Back then you didn’t need to bring the outside inside because people were physically outside more," says Corrigan. His challenge was to create a more modern balance between the interior and exterior without adding a hodgepodge of huge windows and ruining the integrity of the original architecture.
To create more interior space, Corrigan tore down the walls of three of the six bedrooms in the staff section—"a rabbit warren of little rooms"—and turned it into one large guest suite. To bring the outside in, he removed heavy drapes over windows and replaced several French doors with larger but proportional glass windows. To give the appearance of more light and add cohesion to the two-story, 12,500-square-foot house, he painted many of the rooms yellow. "As opposed to white," he remarks. "The human eye reads yellow in a room as sunlight."
Then he tackled the gardens, which had sunken into "uninspired California
landscape, with lots of begonias and sword ferns." Corrigan designed geometric
Italian gardens to reflect the architecture, relying on different shades
of green. "I created outdoor rooms," he says, "dividing the spaces with hedges
and shrubs, wax leaf privet, boxwood, and lavender." He ripped out the cement
around the existing backyard swimming pool and let the lawn grow up to the
water’s edge. "It’s a more Italian look," he says, "but it also makes it feel
more like a pond than a swimming pool where you set out lounge chairs and then
put a fence
around it."
Although the house has a formal presence, Corrigan subtly brought his sense of California casual to the furnishings. Many of the fabrics he chose, such as white linen on the living room sofas, are outdoor fabrics. "I use slipcovers; you can scrub them, bleach them, and throw them into the washing machine," he says. "Often I take an antique table and put a urethane finish on top. If a drink spills, you don’t ruin the wood. So to me, that’s California casual, where you’re not tiptoeing around, holding a drink and worrying."
While Corrigan is at home designing every little detail in a kitchen, he’d just as soon never set foot in the room after that. "I don’t cook at all," he says, and neither does Kathleen Scheinfeld, his partner. "If I could take a pill and didn’t have to eat," he remarks, "I’d be just as happy."
Part of the fun of having a spacious estate in Montecito, so close to Los Angeles, is that friends visit almost every weekend. "And fortunately," Corrigan says, "in Montecito, they have great take-out."
Timothy Corrigan, 323.525.1802, www.timothy-corrigan.com