Interior designer Amber Lewis found her own home build was more of a challenge than she possibly could have imagined.
Designing a home for yourself and your family is one of those special milestones in life. It’s also one of the hardest and most stressful tasks to take on. But once it’s done and you see your vision come to life, it can produce the most rewarding feeling. Still, I never felt more tested than when it was time for me to choose the design elements for my own home. At so many points, I thought I would succumb to design decision fatigue. How on earth would I, someone exposed to so many design options every day, be able to choose elements I would like (and could live with) for a long while? Impossible!
I’m a pretty decisive person in general, but when it came to making decisions for my own home…well, the client name ‘Me, Myself, and I Can’t Make Up My Mind’ says it all. I wanted this house to encapsulate so much, yet I didn’t want much at all. Aside from the aesthetics, so much of this project was about creating a feeling.
Here, I break down the details of how I managed to design and create my very own home, despite having an overabundance of choices at my disposal.
For my own home, I wanted to feel like I was approaching a ranch nestled somewhere between the Belgian countryside and the California coast.
Client:
Me, myself, and I can’t make up my mind
In the earliest stages of designing my home, I felt it important to create something like an oasis from the hustle and bustle of a jam-packed life. I wanted a space my family and I would cherish always and in which we could grow; a place in which to unwind or be my most creative; where we could all feel grounded, safe, and secure as we started and ended our days. But when we decided to build this home, I didn’t know just how important and life-altering this home-building journey would be. In the two years it took to build our home – and for two years after we moved in – just like the house, we experienced a major evolution, morphing in ways we could never have imagined and enduring enormous challenges. And we would come out of this tumultuous time with a radically different perspective on the process.
As I know well – and especially when it comes to home building – the best-laid plans can often get turned upside down. When it came to my own house, I had every intention of keeping the project on track and staying on budget. Yet, as most projects do, this one took a little longer than expected and cost a little bit more than anticipated. But as I have mentioned before, you’ve gotta expect this with home building. There are just too many factors at play and way too many elements out of your control.
So, instead of the Christmas 2019 date we had hoped for, we ended up moving into the house in early March 2020. Yes, the same March we all now know so well – the month that changed us, the country, and the world forever. In an additional crazy twist of fate, I had also been dealt a hand in a game I was unaccustomed to playing, one that would alter my definition of ‘home’ and force me to focus on the importance of my surroundings in a way I never thought possible.
On March 8, 2020, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). After a hellish few days of my being in and out of the hospital, scared stiff about what this meant for my future, the unthinkable happened: The world shut down for the Covid-19 pandemic. Suddenly, not only did my own world as I knew it look dramatically different, but also all of us were forced to shift our perspectives on the meaning of ‘home’.
The timing was uncanny. I remember those first two weeks of March 2020 so vividly. The highs of finally moving into our finished house, a place we had spent years designing and building, were suddenly being overshadowed by a crippling fear and uncertainty over my diagnosis and the terrifying global pandemic.
I had known while I was designing this space that I wanted it to feel safe, but I never thought we would end up needing our home in the way we did. In one fell swoop, it became a place where we would not only eat and sleep but also where we would wake up daily to a precarious world.
We would not leave the house for months and months, and I would need to find solace in sitting as still as possible with my new reality, learning to lean into this new normal.
Now that you have some context for how the home came to be, and the significance this period will always have in my heart, I can finally jump into the details I have been asked about for years. In the interest of transparency, I’ll confess: It was quite the experience to be at once client and designer.
When it came to following my own rules and selecting my team, I decided to keep it literally in the family and hired my dad as our builder. I felt so blessed with him on board and knew we would be in the best hands. Still, regardless of how secure I felt in my experience with building homes, nothing could have prepared me for creating my own. It was, without doubt, one of the most stressful experiences of my life.
But first, let’s backtrack a bit
We bought the property, a flat one-acre parcel of land, in 2016, and continued to live in our small ranch-style home for a couple years while we saved money and dreamt up the new house. Our part of California is known for its single-story ranch-style homes, so it was important to me that we not stray too far from this type of house. We had to work with the home’s existing foundation, adding to the original building by creating hallways to extra rooms, opening up ceilings, and widening doorways and windows to let the natural light flood in. By creating an almost L-shaped building, we were able to better separate the bedrooms from the living spaces and build a small, private family room where we could cosy up and watch TV away from the kitchen and main living room. We wanted the house to feel like a part of the landscape, a retreat nestled within nature rather than a structure sitting apart from it. For this reason, we figured out ways to build right up to and around some big, beautiful existing trees. Now every window and door in the house looks out onto the massive yard and mature trees.
Because we were going for cosy and safe, I didn’t want anything to feel overly grand so, no enormous great room just for the sake of it. Ours was an incredibly intentional build-out, one that suited the specific needs of our smaller family. I paid close attention to ensuring that each space in the home honoured function as well as form. I wanted it to be the perfect home for me and my family, designed so that everything had a place and so that it reflected how we live and entertain. Nothing too fancy, just well-thought-out rooms with a focus on simple but impactful materials and a connection to the outdoors.
Selecting the materials and architectural details was very challenging for me. How would I choose things I would like forever? How would I continue, years later, to love what I’d selected for my own home when what I did for a living was look at option after option for other people? In the end, I decided to design something that felt timeless enough to withstand years of trends by not being trendy. ‘Simple but special’ was the name of the game. I opted to pick only a few types of materials, and when push came to shove, I went with gorgeous neutral and natural items that felt textural and interesting.
Think white oak floors, tongue-and-groove beam ceilings, and taupe Zellige tiles on the shower walls. In the kitchen, we went with a combination of painted and white oak cabinetry throughout, some interesting reclaimed white oak ceilings, and bright but veiny marble on the countertops. Add some gorgeous lighting and plaster on the walls for a touch of texture, and we achieved a winning mix. It was a combination I had used for clients’ time and time again, and even after numerous years of installing it, I still loved it.
So that we start at the beginning, let’s discuss the front entrance and work our way around, shall we?
They say you never get a second chance to make a good first impression, so I designed our entryway to be a welcoming place for us and our friends and family. I have always loved brick, so I chose reclaimed brick for the floors there and laid it in a herringbone pattern with a soldered border to create some visual interest. As in quite a few spaces around the home, we added vertical tongue-and-groove panelling on the walls and reclaimed white oak beams and panelling on the ceilings. We repeated this combo throughout the home, creating, in the process, a formula for when and where this detail would be applied: If the ceilings were vaulted, I applied paint-grade beams and panelling. If the ceilings were flat, I applied reclaimed oak beams and panelling. Of course, the budget would not allow me to do this everywhere, so I chose only the most impactful rooms for this approach – such as my daughter Gwyneth’s bedroom, the main hallways, the kitchen, the primary suite, and the main living spaces.
I went with an open-concept plan for the main area of the home so we could have one big chill zone for friends and family. (You’ll see in the rest of the layout that I used lots of nooks to separate the kitchen and dining area from the living area.) The space opens up onto the big backyard and is flooded with natural light – one of the design attributes we most wanted to highlight here. I designed the windows and doors to be as large as we could go, keeping in mind that the scale needed to match the overall vibe of this charming ranch house. The original home did not have a fireplace, so we added one to the main living room. To bring wood tones into the space, I opted not to do any traditional built-in cabinetry, but instead to design freestanding pieces flanking the fireplace to house all my books and collectibles. We are a family that loves games and music, so the pieces had to include storage and places to hide record player wires. For these, I went with a combination of open and closed white oak shelving with a cerused finish.
We vacillated over adding more square footage so we could include a formal dining room, but in the end, we decided that just wasn’t our vibe. We’re lucky enough to live in Los Angeles, where the weather is perfect nearly 365 days a year, so we focused instead on building a large outdoor dining area to seat my massive extended family. I mentioned earlier that the existing foundation compelled us to keep some of the house’s funkier layout issues. Specifically, the original kitchen was located in an odd spot and had very low windows. We decided to use the quirky height of the windows to our advantage and designed a seating area here to house a large dining table and a massive custom built-in wicker banquette. Because this space was right off the new, relocated kitchen and in the same open layout as the living room, it felt like the perfect nook to tuck in a table for hanging out and eating or watching a game while continuing, at any given moment, to engage with whatever was happening in the kitchen.
For the new kitchen, we wanted a beautiful space that would serve as both the focal point for the adjacent open area and a gorgeous backdrop for the main living room. For this reason, I had to ensure there was zero visual clutter and direct the eye to all the texture and materials in the kitchen. This was one of those instances when I thought long and hard about what elements to incorporate that would make the kitchen feel interesting and unique but not look tired in a matter of months. With long lead times, I had to make my selections early on in the building process; I knew if I didn’t pull the trigger, I would be forever indecisive. So, I worked my way down a checklist, selecting those items that would become the centrepieces for the kitchen.
No matter what, I knew the kitchen island had to be the centrepiece of the room. Originally, I hunted for a massive vintage piece I could retrofit to accommodate my sink, dishwasher, trash can, and so on – but this was not as easy as I had hoped it would be. When I realised I might have to give up my search, I started reaching out to my tried-and-true vendors. I had ordered from and been a fan of the work of UK antiques dealer Matthew Cox. I was perusing his site one day when I saw the most covetable piece of furniture, something I just had to have. I contacted him immediately and asked if he would partner with me to design the perfect custom-built island based on that piece. He let me know he had done it before and agreed. It took a while, and shipping cost a pretty penny, but it was worth it to obtain such a stunning addition to the space.
When it came to selecting the cabinetry style, I knew I wanted simple. I love to collect things but did not want the visual clutter a collection can bring, so I designed a shelving unit with sliding doors; the rippled-glass panels made the items stacked behind them essentially disappear. You will notice that I created counter-to-ceiling cabinets – called appliance garages – which hide all the small appliances and knick- knacks that tend to clutter counters. (Anytime you can use this style of cabinet, I say go for it!) And when it came to choosing a colour, I went with a neutral greige!
This is an edited extract from Call It Home by Amber Lewis, published by Hardie Grant, $65. Photography by Shade Degges.
