See Inside a Stunning Spanish Colonial by the Sea
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You can taste the salt in the air in this four-story Southern California gem. Its proximity to the sea is what drew the homeowner to the Spanish Colonial in the first place. “He’d always wanted a surf shack,” Jon De La Cruz says of his client, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and avid surfer.
While far from a shack, the four-bedroom, four-bathroom, 6,000-square-foot home sits on a cliff overlooking the water just steps from the beach. It’s the perfect getaway to roll out of bed and hit the waves or to use as a relaxing yoga retreat, another one of the homeowners’ passions. When De La Cruz toured the place, he was immediately blown away by its beauty. The only real issue was that the property hadn’t been touched in almost 50 years and needed updating.
For De La Cruz, who previously worked with the homeowners on renovating their primary Northern California home, the challenge was making the beach house feel lighter, brighter, and cleaner without destroying any of the original architecture or removing any of the patina. “We liked the beachy casual, sort of weatherworn driftwood feeling of the place,” says the designer. “And we didn’t want to make it feel brand new. We wanted it to feel old.”
To strike the right balance between authentic and contemporary, the designer and his team avoided structural changes (“It was really just a facelift and a furnish”). Instead, they mindfully modernized the home by installing new durable teak floors, plastering the exposed ceilings to brighten the rooms, and restoring and refreshing fitting and finishes.
In addition to the bones of the home, another key factor informed the design: the location. “It is pretty close to Mexico,” says De La Cruz. “You could smell that when you walked through it. So we didn’t want to harm any of that charm, because you couldn’t pay for that now in a new property.”
Living Room
“It was like a portfolio of an artist,” De La Cruz says of the whimsical series of paintings lining the living room wall, which he sourced locally from a vintage store. “I’m assuming an art student had done them. They were very gestural. I liked the pop of color, and it just felt very easy and unpretentious.” Another design element used for its breezy appeal was slipcovers. “They are very approachable and easy to clean.” Another vintage element is the Louis XVI–style limestone mantel, sourced from Pittet Architecturals.
One striking feature throughout the home is the exposed ceiling beams. “We put plaster in between them so that we could lighten it up and feel a little more finished,” says De La Cruz. This allowed the designer and his team to tuck in some new ceiling tracks and new low-voltage fixtures to light the place without having to cut holes everywhere.
Sofas: Sixpenny. Rug: Mansour Modern. Coffee table: Arturo Pani. Floor lamp: Phoenix Day. Side table and wingback chair: Obsolete. Textiles, pillows, and accessories: Schuyler Samperton and Jennifer Shorto from Nickey Kehoe.
Family Room
When the family of five wants to plop down in front of the TV, they head in here, where the sofa has cushions upholstered in beach- and sand-friendly outdoor fabric. The Melissa Chandon painting on the wall echoes the view outside. “It’s like adding a window to the space,” says De La Cruz.
Sofa: custom, in Zak & Fox fabric with vintage blankets. Ottoman: Lucca Antiques. Glass side table: Lawson-Fenning. Floor cushion: Nickey Kehoe. Rug: Mansour Modern. Wall paint: Simply White, Benjamin Moore.
Kitchen
De La Cruz and his team did minimal work in the kitchen. They painted the upper cabinets and stained the bright red mahogany bottom ones, which, according to the designer, “were beautiful in the ’80s but not now.” Then they changed the backsplash to a hand-painted Mexican tile, put in new counters, added a butcher block on the island, installed new light fixtures, and called it a day.
Floor tile: Country Floors. Dinnerware: Sarah Kersten and Jered’s Pottery. Cutting boards: Black Creek Mercantile & Trading Company from March SF.
Dining Room
“The dining room has a Murano chandelier that looks like a sea creature,” De La Cruz says. The table and chairs, from Lucca Antiques in Los Angeles, felt very Spanish but a little bit more modern, he adds. The reclaimed teak floors were sourced from IndoTeak.
Chandelier: vintage, from Pegaso Gallery. Shell lamps: Object Culture. Painting: Jeff Peters.
Breakfast Area
“I wanted to introduce some softness,” says De La Cruz of juxtaposing a wooden antique Spanish refectory table with the showstopping Holland & Sherry fabric he used to create a slipcover for the banquette in the breakfast area. He chose the spot for its versatility. “That’s a place where you can sit in the morning and look at a laptop and have a cup of coffee, have a sandwich in between surfing trips, even have an informal dinner or set out charcuterie boards and just graze while everyone’s enjoying the sunset,” he says. “It just gave the place a whole new vibe.”
The gorgeous floor tile came with the property. “They’re beautiful and they’re old and they’ve been waxed and polished and mopped for 50 years,” says De La Cruz. “That’s a patina that we couldn’t replace with new. So we left it alone and embraced it.”
Table and dining chairs: Obsolete. Chandelier: Palecek. Jars: vintage, from Nickey Kehoe.
Mudroom
While the homeowner was pretty hands-off during the design process, one item on his wish list was a room for all his surfboards. “He needed a spot where he could store all his boards and be able to wax them and change and decompress after surfing or mentally prepare for that,” De La Cruz says. To create this man cave, the designer converted a stand-alone garage. “We put up a wetsuit drying rack, carpeted a little bit so it would feel good with bare feet, and then set up a little mini bar where he can store cool drinks.”
Primary Bedroom
Pictured on main.
“This was a very easy room,” Del La Cruz says of the main bedroom, which has a giant window overlooking the ocean. The designer didn’t want to distract from that feature, so he kept the furnishings sparse and the art minimal. “It’s just about the sounds and the smell of the ocean,” he says. Upgrades included new floors, plaster, and electrical. De La Cruz’s team designed the modern Moroccan-inspired headboard. “The architecture spoke to me in a way that it felt very Spanish, Mexican, but also kind of moorish,” the designer says. “So we played up a little bit of that Moroccan vibe, because that also felt very southern California.”
Paintings: Robin Harker. Console: vintage. Settee: vintage, in Larsen fabric. Cocktail table: Sirmos Plaster Quarry. Table: Mansour Modern. Bed skirt, curtains, and pillows: custom, in Schumacher fabric. Throw: Nickey Kehoe. Bed: custom.
Bunk Room
The bunk beds—designed to be both kid and adult friendly with queen-size mattresses on the bottom bunks—can easily accommodate the homeowners’ children and their friends or office associates during company retreats. “We approached the room like a little micro hotel,” De La Cruz says. “We wanted everyone to have their own little area.” A closer look at the custom bunks reveals another cool design feature: the fluting on the wood is actually morse code for “surf.”
“I don't like to just pick pretty things,” De La Cruz says. “I like everything to have a meaning or a story so that when you invite people over, you have things to talk about, to share and to show why you chose an item.”
Bed scarves: Beach sarongs from Anthropologie. Carpet: Stark. Curtains: custom, in Zak + Fox fabric.
Guest Bedroom
For the ground floor guest bedroom, De La Cruz decided to use a four-poster bed. “It just gave it a little more architecture. It made it feel a little more private,” he says.
Rug: Aga John. Settee: vintage, in Zak + Fox fabric.
A beautiful Spanish desk is accompanied by a traditional Mexican equipale chair. “They’re handcrafted and they're very comfortable and we just love them,” De La Cruz says. “The chairs along with the waxed saltillo tiles sprinkled throughout the hacienda are a quiet salute to Michael Taylor, one of my design heroes and the benchmark of California-Mexico coastal style.”
Primary Bathroom
“When you have a room like this, you have to leave it alone and not fight it,” De La Cruz says of the stunning primary bath. “My client’s wife didn’t care as much about what we did with this house. This was the house for him,” the designer explains. “But he said, ‘Let’s make it as comfortable for her as possible because I want her to come here and enjoy it’” Since she loves taking a bath, the designer created this serene spa moment complete with a hot Waterworks tub. “Now she loves coming there and hosts her girlfriends on yoga retreats,” he says.
Bathtub: Waterworks. Faucet and fixtures: THG Paris. Rug: Pottery Barn. Table: vintage Sirmos Plaster Quarry. Curtains: custom, in Coraggio fabric.
Office
It’s not all surf and sand. For those unavoidable Zoom meetings and conference calls, De La Cruz created a sophisticated office just off the primary bedroom on the fourth floor. “He is literally sitting on top of the ocean looking up at the whole coast of California, and there’s nothing you can’t accomplish sitting on that desk,” he says.
While all the other rooms of the house have beach-centric art, the office is adorned with a more businesslike abstract work in black-and-white. “We wanted him to have a very serious, doesn’t-look-like-I’m-at-my-surf-shack Zoom background,” De La Cruz says. “And we wanted it to look good at night in case he is taking a call in the evening.”
Art: Tom Hausken. Rug: Aga John. Side chairs: Ranier Daumiller from Obsolete. Desk: Lawson-Fenning.
Q&A
House Beautiful: How did you save money/DIY/get crafty?
Jon De La Cruz: When it came time to furnish the project, we were able to tighten the budget with an aggressive mix of restored antique and vintage focal pieces, mid-level retail furnishings that were reupholstered or modified to stay on concept, and a scant few hero pieces that were benchmade for the project to maximize our trifecta: luxury comfort and functionality. Critical to this success was the freedom to exercise our own creative discretion without having to chase the client down for a line-for-line approval on each piece. They trusted us to assemble a beautiful beach house. Sure, there were a few minor adjustments we made after they acclimated to the house, but in the end it was far less time and money and headache with this approach.
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