A 1920s-Era Hancock Park Home with Traditional Interiors

Details

Traditional Gray Exterior with European Silhouette

The home’s transformation from a California casa to a villa easily suited to the south of France was inspired by the pitch of the roof. The façade was cloaked in understated gray with a roof crafted from three coordinating shades of slate. The formal front garden is planted with topiary and cypress and olive trees.

Traditional Neutral Living Room with Velvet Sofas

Designer Jennifer Davis tailored the formal living room for family life and entertaining with comfortable seating, including matching loveseats custom-upholstered in Décor de Paris’ linen velvet. Stylish touches include a 1930s chinoiserie console table from Paul Marra Design and a circle-back chair from Dennis & Leen.

Traditional Neutral Foyer with Striped Sofa

Davis’ French antique-inspired settee in the foyer serves as a landing pad for kids coming home from school. The sofa is illuminated by an LDC Home floor lamp that stands beside a Pasadena flea market find—a table with a marble top and gold-leafed legs.

Traditional Brown Library with Leather Sofa

The library’s masculine ambience is enhanced by Davis’ custom leather nailhead sofa and chairs, and William Curtis Rolf’s fierce Lion vis-a-vis Tiger photograph from the Voila! Gallery. The end table and lamp are both Charles Fradin. The nesting tables are from Mecox Gardens.

Traditional White Kitchen with Custom Butcher-Block Table

Builder Brian Little’s kitchen design includes a honed white Carrara marble island adjacent to a custom built-in maple butcher-block table. The Viking and Wolf stainless-steel appliances are from Snyder Diamond. The custom window treatments are from Ethan Fred Design.

Traditional Gray Cabana with Andy Warhol Poster

The cabana is dominated by an Andy Warhol Chanel poster, which picks up the pink-and-white Perennials damask on the teak seating from David Sutherland. An antique dormer mirror hangs above a wood-burning fireplace with a custom façade fabricated by Adriatic Precast Stoneworks. Stucco by Nova Plastering & Stucco.

Traditional Gray Exterior with Lap Pool

The new lap pool designed by Little and installed by Anthony & Sylvan Pools is equipped with a computer system and electronic cover. A gray- striped Sunbrella awning at the entrance of the cabana shields a custom teak daybed. Windows by Valley Sash & Door. Roof by Truskett Roofing.

Traditional Green Bathroom with Clawfoot Tub

Artist Gabrielle McKenna painted a green-and-white chinoiserie pattern on the master bathroom walls, picking up the soft hues of the Ann Sacks basket-weave tile floor. Sunrise Specialties’ 6-foot polished-chrome clawfoot slipper tub suggests nostalgia and romance.

Traditional Neutral Bedroom with Ikat Pillows

The mahogany four-poster bed in the master suite is dressed in bedding from Anichini and ikat throw pillows found at Plantation. The wall behind it is upholstered in Lee Jofa’s Chinese Bridges.

You might not think that Los Angeles, sometimes called the city of the future, would be a prime house-hunting ground for someone like Amy Savagian, steeped as she is in the traditional aesthetic of her Southern childhood. Sure enough, it took a good two years for her to find the early 1920s-era home on three-quarters of an acre in the city’s historic Hancock Park, much better suited to raising a family than the Savagians’ former Brentwood house with its tiny, child-unfriendly yard.

Jennifer Davis, the designer who worked with Savagian on much of the new home’s interior, credits Amy’s mother, also a client, with influencing her embrace of classic style and “desire for the traditional, formal, elegant bones and structure of the house,” says Davis. “At the same time, it needed to be relaxed enough for a young and growing family, one that people can live in and walk in and sit on sofas in. We really wanted a mix of antiques as well as reproductions, because they’re built for today’s lifestyle.”

In the living room, for example, Davis selected an Italian settee from Dennis & Leen that incorporates the classic lines of a turn-of-the- century piece with the comfort of a larger-scale reproduction, designed to accommodate modern-day bodies. A Victoria Hagan chair updates a traditional wing chair with cleaner but still understated lines. Davis also freshened the light-filled living room with pale, neutral hues and a sisal rug from Decorative Carpets. “I wanted to be authentic to the house, and to the client’s directive of having a traditional feel, but I also wanted it to feel young and fresh,” she says.

Of course, what exactly is authentic to the house is something of a mystery, since it has undergone several remodels over the years. When the Savagians discovered the home, “it looked like a pseudo-Mediterranean tract house,” says builder-designer Brian Little, who helped the family gut the house, replace antiquated electrical and plumbing systems, and rebuild with a new façade, molding, pool and guesthouse, and a tweaked floor plan. One such tweak involved carving a spacious master bedroom closet out of the attic. Savagian, an internal medicine resident married to an investment banker, says the addition was occasioned by a visit to a friend’s remodel. “I had three times as many clothes and she had a larger closet,” she says. “Really, the only place to go was up.”

The home’s transformation from a California casa to a villa easily suited to the south of France was inspired by the pitch of the roof. “It seemed French in nature, so a simple French manor was born of that,” Little says. The façade was cloaked in understated gray with a roof crafted from three coordinating shades of slate. The formal front garden is planted with the quintessentially European silhouettes of topiary and cypress and olive trees.

Indeed, for the busy young family, which includes three children ranging in age from 2 to 9, the outdoors are as important as the indoors. So Little designed a backyard with rolling lawns and a pool large enough for the kids to swim laps. Inspired by the Beverly Hills Hotel, he also designed a sophisticated poolside cabana/outdoor living room, where one can watch TV shielded from the rays of the sun. All of the elegant spaces are part of the Savagians’ long-term plan; they have no intention of leaving the home anytime soon.

“We wanted to create a big central lawn where, eventually, their kids can get married,” says Little.

—Irene Lacher