Whitney Cummings: Tour Her Remote, Mountain-Set Home Just Outside L.A. | Architectural Digest
It was the calming, monumental landscape that ultimately swayed Whitney Cummings to buy her dwelling just outside the house L.A. “I invested a whole lot of my childhood in Virginia and West Virginia, wherever the medication is the mountain,” recollects the comic and actor, whose lots of talents incorporate writing, directing, producing, and podcasting. “I wasn’t anxious or pressured when I was there, and I usually experienced viewpoint. I want to be in the center of nowhere.”
The house’s original interiors, which ventured into nightclub territory, in accordance to Cummings, had been significantly less engrossing. There was a darkish, steampunk aura to them, punctuated by glam gold things, crystal chandeliers, and a glass fire of many hues. These characteristics weren’t “honoring the essence of the house, but I was surrounded by 3 mountains, and I felt oxygen in my lungs, so I didn’t treatment. [I figured] I’d just offer with it afterwards,” Cummings suggests.
That instant drew nearer as Cummings retained encountering the operate of Advert100 designer Jake Arnold, growing extra riveted by his aesthetic with every single space she saw. Dan Levy, of Schitt’s Creek fame, linked the two, and Cummings and Arnold promptly strike it off. Before long, Arnold was occupied transforming what he describes as Cummings’s faux Tuscan villa into a Santa Fe–meets–monastery–inspired abode layered with a lot of heat and texture.
“I did not improve up with extravagant things. Every little thing I have and want seems aged, with a wabi-sabi vibe,” Cummings states. “I’m a maximalist in just about every other component of my existence, but I get so emotionally drained by litter in my property. I preferred this to really feel minimalist, like an aged Spanish barn.”
To begin with, Cummings considered she just desired a important home furnishings enhance. But Arnold experienced far more formidable plans. “It was going to be a endlessly household, and we wanted to commence from scratch,” he points out. “I required to strip the dwelling to its bones for the reason that it needed so a lot like and focus.”
Cummings told Arnold about her enthusiasm for horses, her favourite motels (Amangiri, Auberge Collection’s Lodge at Blue Sky in Utah, the Greenwich Hotel in New York), and how when she wasn’t cringing at the horrors that unfolded in Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, she was ogling the “rustic English countryside” furnishings of the sets. Following distilling her numerous preferences, Arnold took command.
“She was really trusting, and I listened to all the things she responded to and turned it into a little something much more tactile that she could hook up with,” he claims. Arnold overhauled “strange moldings and generic finishes,” and rejuvenated rooms “with zero personality” by weaving in salvaged barn beams “to build architectural specifics.” Fireplaces and stair railings were being ripped out, and rooms have been redefined by expanses of “rough, organic, and earthy” plaster, in accordance to Arnold.
At the very same time, he didn’t stifle Cummings’s “wacky temperament.” The library, for instance, is stocked with “5,000 of my classic anatomy, artwork, and odd horse guides,” Cummings claims. Then there are the two coffee tables crafted from reclaimed barn wood that bear the imprint of horse nibbles. “I was sobbing. It meant so a lot to me,” she adds. Singling out the Lewis & Wood wallpaper emblazoned with equine sketches in her place of work, Cummings notes: “Jake loves getting the needle in the haystack, the a single piece no one particular has.”
At Cummings’s recommendation, her mattress is now positioned in the center of her bed room so that “when you wake up, you see a mountain, the only factor that is going to stop me from choosing up my mobile phone first thing,” she states. From the freestanding tub in the toilet, in which tailor made oak screens provide as shutters, Cummings may well even text Arnold to gush about how the gentle properly displays on the drinking water.
There had been certain worries for Arnold, like the commodious den. “The doorways have been massive and the ceiling heights significant, so we played with the scale,” he suggests. “I wished the fireplace to seem like a small gap in the wall. It feels seriously good in there now when you sink into the couch.” Designers normally like to go major, Cummings suggests, but she appreciates how Arnold possesses a reverence for scaled-down attributes, these kinds of as petite paintings that “are astonishing and sense intentional.”
Cummings has 4 puppies who “run wild,” as Arnold places it, so he needed furniture—much of it custom made-made—that was slipcovered still elevated. A palette of loaded brown, rust, and greige invitations guests to “sit in just about every single home.” Of the dwelling in normal, Cummings chimes in to insert, “It felt flimsy just before, and didn’t have a soul. Jake knows when to stroll absent and let the resources shine. Nothing’s more lovely than aged wooden. You simply cannot contend with Mom Character.”