To create a new home for their family in Los Angeles, journalists Mariana van Zeller and Darren Foster knew they needed a flexible container. Their household includes their young son as well as Mariana’s elder father, and merges Mariana’s Portuguese heritage with the couple's deep history and love of L.A.

When Mariana and Darren spotted the 1960s house on a hill overlooking Silver Lake Reservoir, they had a feeling it was the one. Many of the original midcentury details were intact, but the home was changed enough over time that they weren’t afraid of new interventions. Enlisting the help of local firm Loaf, Mariana and Darren embarked on a journey to transform the house into a place that reflects the idiosyncrasies of their family.

“Without being overly honorific to any particular moment in time, we wanted to polish the house and bring it back to itself,” says Alfie Koetter, co-founder and lead designer at Loaf alongside Luke Studebaker. For the interior revamp, the designers worked with Mariana and Darren to find light-touch changes that would make the house more functional, and more fun. Here, the team explains how they created a place that feels both personal and timeless. “None of us wanted the house to feel like it was of the present,” recalls Mariana. “It needed to feel like it had history.”

Love at First Sight

Mariana: We bought this Silver Lake house in 2020; at the time, we had just sold our previous home in Atwater Village. We finished escrow on the sale a week before lockdown, and we didn’t know what was going to happen, or where we would move next. Two weeks later, this house came on the market and we loved it.

Darren: During the early days of Covid, you couldn’t visit houses in person, and there were only three or four pictures of this one online. But our realtor had been in the house 20 years prior, and knew it was a great house, so we decided to make an offer.

Mariana: Once our offer was accepted, we were nervous—what if we got there and hated the house? But as soon as we stepped inside, we fell in love with it. It had good bones, but the downstairs was a disaster. It just didn’t work for our family the way it was divided up. We have a son named Vasco, and my father Eduardo also lives with us.

We brought in Alfie and Luke to help with the renovation. We knew them beforehand, and we love them. As soon as they walked in, they loved all the same historic details as us, and didn’t want to change it dramatically, but just make it better.

Alfie: It’s a house that has a lot of history. It carries its identity from the 1960s, but it was also renovated in the 1990s, so it was sort of an archeological site of styles as they evolved over time.

Doing More with Less

Darren: It’s a modern house, with the Richard Schindler-esque windows, but it’s also a very warm space. That warmth attracted us from the beginning, so we wanted to lean into that along with the other elements like the fireplace and open stair that were already working.

Alfie: It was an exercise to figure out how little we could do to maintain everything that was working, hold onto the details worth saving, but elevate it and bring it back to life. It was a series of minor design moves; We were always asking ourselves, how can we do a lot with a little?

Luke: On the lower level, which contains the primary bedroom, the den, and Vasco’s room, there was a rather squirrelly arrangement of rooms, so we rearranged things and moved the location of some doors to streamline the plan and give more privacy to the bedrooms. Adding built-in storage in the den enhances the threshold feeling of entering the space and helps anchor it.

Mariana: The lower level was carpeted, so we knew we wanted to change that and decided on cork flooring. Portugal, where I’m from, is the number one exporter of cork in the world, and my grandmother had land with cork trees, so it just felt like the right material. It fit with the era of the house, and it gave the coziness we wanted.

Color Story

Alfie: Color was a big ingredient. It fit with our goal of making a big impact with the least amount of intrusion. Before this project, I was terrified of using color. But learning so much from Mariana’s ability and taste in interior design changed that for me.

Mariana: During the renovation, a friend of mine sent some references of homes she said reminded her of ours. One was a Gio Ponti house in Milan that had a red staircase. Originally, our metal stair was just black, but after trying a bunch of different colors, we landed on this red, which we also used on the windows. I wanted to take risks with color—we thought, if we’re going to do a big color everywhere, why not do a splashy, loud color like red? it makes me feel like this is my house and that it has an identity.

A Room of One’s Own

Mariana: We travel a lot, so my dad Eduardo lives with us, and we needed to find a space for him in the house. His room is upstairs, and ours is downstairs, so we each have our own domains.

Darren: That was an important consideration for us in the house, because Eduardo likes to have his own independent space. His room is at the front right by the main entrance, and we added some French doors that open up to a little courtyard, so he has his own private oasis.

Alfie: Eduardo’s room is physically attached to the house, but in the way that it functions, it feels like its own separate unit. We transitioned an oversized closet in his bedroom into a living room, to give him some autonomy.

Luke: He also loves boats, so we wanted to make it feel like we were in the cabin of a boat. We used marine grade plywood paneling on the walls and ceiling of his bedroom and bathroom, which feels nautical, but also gives it its own identity distinct from the rest of the house. The ship paintings also help.

Embracing the Layers

Mariana: When you buy a new home and know you need to redo some parts of it, the instinct is just to start fresh with a blank slate. But what we found during our collaboration with Luke and Alfie was a real opportunity to do the opposite—to strip the house down to its true identity and build on that. Instead of making a house that felt “right now,” we tried to create a timeless house that is an homage to the time it was built, and to its evolution over the decades since.

Luke: We loved finding the moments where you could see the intersections between things: old and new; wood, tile and stone; or different surfaces coming together. Rather than trying to make something completely flush and concealed, we’re more interested in being mindful of those joints and trying to detail them with care.

Alfie: We also took inspiration from original woodwork in our updates to the kitchen. The space was in bad shape, but we loved the textured woodgrain of the cabinetry, so we found a way to mimic that with the new casework but also turn up the dial visually. It brought the kitchen back to life.

Project Credits:

Lead Designers: Loaf / @loaf.losangeles

Builder: Lester Gordillo

Cabinetry Design and Installation: Mason Haus / @mason_haus

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