Whitney Cummings: Tour Her Distant, Mountain-Established Residence Just Outside the house L.A. | Architectural Digest
It was the soothing, monumental landscape that eventually swayed Whitney Cummings to invest in her residence just outdoors L.A. “I spent a great deal of my childhood in Virginia and West Virginia, in which the medication is the mountain,” remembers the comedian and actor, whose a lot of abilities involve writing, directing, making, and podcasting. “I was not nervous or stressed when I was there, and I always had point of view. I want to be in the center of nowhere.”
The house’s original interiors, which ventured into nightclub territory, according to Cummings, have been less engrossing. There was a darkish, steampunk aura to them, punctuated by glam gold factors, crystal chandeliers, and a glass fire of various colours. These options weren’t “honoring the essence of the house, but I was surrounded by three mountains, and I felt oxygen in my lungs, so I didn’t care. [I figured] I’d just deal with it later on,” Cummings claims.
That second drew nearer as Cummings saved encountering the operate of Advertisement100 designer Jake Arnold, growing additional riveted by his aesthetic with every room she saw. Dan Levy, of Schitt’s Creek fame, connected the two, and Cummings and Arnold immediately strike it off. Before long, Arnold was fast paced reworking what he describes as Cummings’s faux Tuscan villa into a Santa Fe–meets–monastery–inspired abode layered with lots of heat and texture.
“I did not mature up with fancy stuff. Everything I have and want appears aged, with a wabi-sabi vibe,” Cummings says. “I’m a maximalist in every other section of my everyday living, but I get so emotionally drained by litter in my house. I needed this to really feel minimalist, like an old Spanish barn.”
In the beginning, Cummings believed she just desired a major home furniture update. But Arnold had much more ambitious ideas. “It was going to be a endlessly dwelling, and we essential to commence from scratch,” he explains. “I wanted to strip the dwelling to its bones because it wanted so considerably love and attention.”
Cummings explained to Arnold about her passion for horses, her favored resorts (Amangiri, Auberge Collection’s Lodge at Blue Sky in Utah, the Greenwich Lodge 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” home furniture of the sets. After distilling her many preferences, Arnold took command.
“She was pretty trusting, and I listened to almost everything she responded to and turned it into a little something additional tactile that she could connect with,” he says. Arnold overhauled “strange moldings and generic finishes,” and rejuvenated rooms “with zero personality” by weaving in salvaged barn beams “to build architectural information.” Fireplaces and stair railings were being ripped out, and rooms were redefined by expanses of “rough, natural, and earthy” plaster, according to Arnold.
At the identical time, he did not stifle Cummings’s “wacky personality.” The library, for case in point, is stocked with “5,000 of my vintage anatomy, art, and odd horse publications,” Cummings states. Then there are the two espresso tables crafted from reclaimed barn wooden that bear the imprint of horse nibbles. “I was sobbing. It meant so a lot to me,” she provides. Singling out the Lewis & Wooden wallpaper emblazoned with equine sketches in her workplace, Cummings notes: “Jake enjoys discovering the needle in the haystack, the a single piece no a single has.”
At Cummings’s suggestion, her bed is now located in the center of her bedroom so that “when you wake up, you see a mountain, the only issue that is going to stop me from finding up my cell cellphone initial thing,” she suggests. From the freestanding tub in the bathroom, in which tailor made oak screens serve as shutters, Cummings may even textual content Arnold to gush about how the gentle flawlessly displays on the water.
There were being specified troubles for Arnold, like the commodious den. “The doors had been big and the ceiling heights high, so we played with the scale,” he suggests. “I needed the fire to search like a small gap in the wall. It feels seriously excellent in there now when you sink into the sofa.” Designers often like to go big, Cummings says, but she appreciates how Arnold possesses a reverence for more compact options, such as petite paintings that “are surprising and really feel intentional.”
Cummings has four canines who “run wild,” as Arnold places it, so he desired furniture—much of it custom made-made—that was slipcovered but elevated. A palette of abundant brown, rust, and greige invitations site visitors to “sit in every single solitary room.” Of the residence in basic, Cummings chimes in to add, “It felt flimsy right before, and didn’t have a soul. Jake is aware of when to walk absent and let the components glow. Nothing’s extra attractive than old wood. You can’t contend with Mom Character.”