Although no connection between the royal palace at Versailles and California’s San Fernando Valley springs immediately to mind, through the eye of interior designer Garance Rousseau, these two contrasting worlds perfectly come together in a house whose story seems straight out of a well-crafted movie script. Originally constructed in 1937, and named after the Studio City avenue on which it sits, the Bakman House now appears to be a Santa Fe-style adobe, but that wasn’t always the case. And although its creator has made a home for herself in Los Angeles, her formative years were spent a continent and ocean away.
Now one of the hottest designers in Los Angeles, where she was born, Rousseau actually grew up in Saint-Nom-La-Bretèche, just outside Versailles. Her father was a journalist and the family moved often, but she has vivid memories of ‘biking to the palace with my dad every Sunday, and marvelling at every detail of the grounds in a very formative way’. With all the relocating, Rousseau’s bedroom became ‘very important to me. It was the one space I could control, a refuge I could design and maintain.’
After time spent studying industrial design at Parsons in New York, Rousseau switched gears and opted for a career in venture capital. Following an epiphany during the Covid lockdown, she changed course again and decamped back to Los Angeles with the intention of going into the interiors business. Rousseau quickly secured coveted assistant positions with Waldo’s and the celebrated Kelly Wearstler. After leaving there in 2023, Rousseau locked in her first client. The project was a success, and featured in the New York Times. What Rousseau loves most about working with residential architecture in Los Angeles is the sheer diversity: ‘What’s really special about LA is that you really get everything... in a way it makes no sense at all, but it actually works so well.’
The house has had some illustrious owners in its 88 years, including Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, but it was a different actor who would have the most impact on its design. Veronica Cartwright, famous for the films Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Alien and The Birds, purchased the home in the 1980s and was responsible for much of its look today.
When Rousseau was originally commissioned by the current owners, Ali and Philip (who purchased the home in 2022), she could find very little information about the history of the house, its previous occupants or what work it had undergone. She does recall immediately loving the building when she first saw it, but was struck by the fact that while the exterior was ‘kind of a pink orange’, the interior was entirely stark white. ‘It really felt like that wasn’t true to the house and something was robbed from it, so I connected with the owners right away about the possibilities of colour and how to bring it back to life.’
One might refer to Rousseau’s approach to design as ‘sustainable’, but her commitment to working with older objects is a deeply personal mission. She is also a big believer in designing custom pieces that fit perfectly into the lives of her owners. One thing she won’t do is purchase furniture from a store: ‘I think there are so many beautiful things in the world that we’re already made and have such stories to them, that I refuse to buy a new item.’ For the Bakman House, Rousseau estimates that ‘70 percent of the project is one-of-a-kind original pieces, and the rest is custom.’
According to Rousseau, the biggest challenge of the project was the living room. She acknowledges that – much to her chagrin – such spaces are usually designed around a television. She understands the role of screens as a focal point around which a family can gather, but admits that the technology is ‘a designer’s worst nightmare’. For the current occupants and their young daughter, she wanted the room to be functional without interrupting its natural flow and was loath to put a black rectangle above the fireplace, which is often the solution designers opt for. Rousseau decided to ‘fabricate a custom plaster bench that goes all around, wall to wall. It’s new, but looks like it’s always been there.’ She advised her clients to buy an ‘art TV’ – a device that can be programmed to display images or photos when not in use, thus avoiding the effect of a black panel looming over the room – which she then placed up high.
It wasn’t until after Rousseau had completed that project that she learned from Ali and Philip that Cartwright had extensively remodelled the home during her time there, and that the couple actually had her phone number. Rousseau immediately rang Cartwright, and a few hours later, the actor appeared at the door armed with ‘books and all the documentation of how she transformed the house’.
Rousseau found out that the exterior was originally clad in shingle, making it ‘kind of boring’. Cartwright, overflowing with ideas, had completely reimagined it inside and out. She transported more than ‘6,000 pounds of lumber, along with all the doors and windows, directly from Santa Fe. The indigo paint on the window frames was custom-made in Mexico, while the hand-painted tiles were glazed and fired in Pasadena.’
Rousseau fondly remembers that she and Cartwright immediately bonded. ‘Much of Veronica’s original vision had been brought back to life with my design. When she saw the wall colours I had chosen, she smiled and told me they were remarkably close to the ones she had originally selected – the same warm yellow and deep red.’ The most astonishing part of the star’s transformation of the house was her treatment of the exterior walls. After the 1994 Northridge earthquake, she was left with a pile of shattered Fiesta dinnerware. Instead of discarding the fragments, she had the pieces embedded into the outside walls.
Unlike many local homes that embrace the Mid-century Modern aesthetic or lean toward the Hollywood Regency style, the Bakman House is distinctive in its elegant richness, something Rousseau picked up from her childhood cycling to the famous French palace, while also resonating with the earthy subtlety of the Los Angeles Basin. Asked what’s next for her, Rousseau rattles off a number of projects that she and her team (which she expects to expand shortly) are involved in, including a house in coastal Maine (her first project in the East), a 1920s Spanish estate in Brentwood and a residence in the celebrity enclave of Outpost Estates. One senses that in no time, Garance Rousseau will be travelling the planet to take her unusual Franco-Angelino perspective to a global clientele.
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