It takes more than a few buckets of white paint to make a home high end. Yet for the past few years, luxury homes across Los Angeles have soaked it up faster than champagne at an awards show afterparty.
“Everything is white and gray and super light,” said top designer Elliot March of MAWD. “The last three, four years it was like you were worried about doing something that had more character or impact to it.”
The city’s sleek white spec houses demonstrate the look: pale interiors framed by glassy walls that let potential buyers gaze out over the city (or feel like they’re floating in the smog).
But March, who’s designed high-end spaces for the likes of Related Companies and worked alongside architects like Rafael Vinoly, thinks that could be changing — and that it should be.
“We’re seeing way more texture and materiality coming into LA homes,” March said. “More expressive plaster work, more expressive stone on the floor and heavily figured timbers or veneers coming in as well.”
March chalked L.A.’s love of clean spaces to its dwellers’ holistic lifestyles. Nowhere else in the world are buyers more concerned with making sure their spaces are at one with their healthy habits, whether that means detailing the organic origins of every piece of cotton or making room for a hyperbaric chamber in the gym. (“We’ve got some clients that actually want the full cryo chamber,” he said.)
It makes sense that it would have a death grip on L.A. The climate lends itself to cool: “When it’s snowing outside, you want to feel cocooned. Whereas in L.A., that doesn’t really come into play,” March said. The city’s well-heeled want zen almost as much as they want luxury. That means letting the light in — thus, the pure white spaces.
But now that the light and white trend has filtered all the way down from Kim Kardashian’s homes to Target shelves, luxury designers have to be more judicious, March said.
March said his team watches new trends as they emerge; it’s their job to stay on top of them.
They lean on social media to keep tabs on what’s coming next.
“You’ll see [a new trend] on Pinterest. That’s generally where it starts. And then you’ll start seeing it on Instagram, and then filtering through into Elle Decor, and then finished products,” he explained.
For March, exciting experimentation starts with the play of light and dark. Slowly, buyers and developers — perhaps after scrolling Pinterest — are backing off the pure white boxes and becoming more open to other materials, styles and layouts.
March said there’s been a “massive, massive improvement in sustainable fabrics,” which could help convince those who like the white look as the setting for clean living. He’s also looked at materials not traditionally used in the residential space, such as Kinon, whose engineered resin panels show up at high-end retailers like Chanel and which March says he’s been using to customize millwork for luxury homes.
“Pairing that against a natural carved stone island or something, you get a reflection of the daylight, you get this polished element,” he said. “It’s creating these moments that you wouldn’t expect, that work together.”