Inside Noel Pittman's Hancock Park, LA House

I think that part of the reason we love certain homes is that they look like they've evolved over time. To me, having something that looks gathered and like it's been slowly in evolution, it has a richness to it that I think is really comforting and beautiful. I'm Noel Pittman, I'm an interior designer, and this is my home in Los Angeles. So this is a Spanish colonial house from the 1920s, and it's been well-maintained, so it holds a lot of its original character, which is part of what I fell in love with when I first saw the house. So this house is really peaceful, and it feels calming. So that's probably what I love the most about it, and I attribute a good amount of that to the courtyard. I think that having a procession when you enter a place kind of transitions you from the outside world into the home world, and there's something about stepping into a beautiful courtyard before you even enter the house that is additive to me. I would say the aesthetic of this house is fresh California traditional. I really wanted to embrace the fact that it's Spanish colonial, so I use a lot of Spanish antiques. I use some Moorish antiques. There are iron light fixtures. I like comfortable seating, kind of a traditional furniture arrangement. I like to think it's fresh. The fabrics are fresh, the feel is fresh, but there's an element of tradition that I carry through my projects. I like to take inspiration from older houses or historic rooms. I think the living room, which we're sitting in, is my favorite room. To me, it's just beautiful. I love the colors. I'm really happy I have the labrios. FedEx thought I was insane. They showed up and created boxes from Spain, and some, I think, came from Italy. They just showed up, like, not a moving van, not DHL, FedEx, and it happened for, like, weeks. So the poor man that was in charge of bringing FedEx to my house, I think, believes that I am truly a lunatic. I really like having individual rooms. Part of the reason I think it makes a house feel better, I also really like to delineate space and have a different feel in a different area of your house. It's not to say that we need to be as rigid about, you know, we only eat in the dining room the way maybe people used to be, but I do like having distinct zones. I also think having rooms gives you a place to start and stop color, start and stop wallpaper, so there's a lot more flexibility in decorating. If you have one open plan, you have one room, effectively, but you still want to try to make areas, and I feel like it can be a little bit monotonous. I just don't have as much fun with it, and I love the feel of a house with rooms. To me, that's what always makes you feel cozy or you want to get away from someone or be with someone or whatever it may be. I like the flexibility. There's something about the climate in LA in and of itself that's inspiring because so much of what you want to enjoy here is the indoor-outdoor nature of living, so part of what I like to think about is making the landscape and the exterior of the house part of the house. Those are also rooms to use. In terms of decorating my own house, I don't think I'll ever feel finished, partly because I'm always out shopping for clients, and now for a store I have, so I'm sourcing all the time. When I find something that I just fall in love with, I will adjust a room probably way too much to make it work in that room, so I'm always tweaking, and I really like places to feel fresh. There are so many aesthetics that I like and that I appreciate, and what I learned is that maybe I love them, but I don't want to live with them, so there were certain kind of looks or things I wanted to do that once I lived with it for a couple of months, decided was not actually me, so I had at one point pale yellow and white linen curtains in the dining room, and then discovered that I don't like how people look at night in yellow, so I moved them to the hallway upstairs. This was my first venture into landscaping or gardening. Luckily, my mom is a really, really talented gardener and knows a lot about plants, so I thought a lot about how I wanted it to feel and how I wanted it to look, and I looked at the work of landscape architect Scott Schrader a lot, who I think is super talented, and started thinking about where I wanted beds and whatnot, and then my mom really helped me choose the plant material that would thrive here and give me the look I was after, so there's a lot of tea cream, there's a lot of lavender, I have agave in the front, and then off of the kitchen, I built a fireplace to have an outdoor dining area that would be pleasant at night, because it does get cold when we're in the desert. Mostly, I really liked the look of very soft, overgrown beds with a lot of different colors of green at the same time, so deep green, silvery green, and the idea of creating garden rooms, so it's sort of like a house delineating the space. I really like mixing pattern and color and a lot of different prints. Sometimes you can be nervous that it may not turn out as you expect, and then sometimes it's also hard because the fabrics you get from the design center, you get a swatch that's maybe this big, and if it has a big repeat, which means it's a large-scale pattern, you don't get a full visual of how it's going to look. I would often ask the showrooms if I could borrow what we call a wing, which is a whole panel of the fabric, and that way I could see a big repeat, a large piece in the space with the other elements to really know whether or not it would work. What makes a house a home is the people in the house. I like having people over, enjoying my house, hosting. I think that that's what really makes it a home. It's hard to have it be both pristine and be used, and that's why I lean towards use it, and if there's a stain, there's a stain, or replace it, and so be it.