Whitney Cummings: Tour Her Remote, Mountain-Set Home Just Outside L.A. | Architectural Digest

It was the comforting, monumental landscape that in the end swayed Whitney Cummings to acquire her house just outside the house L.A. “I invested a lot of my childhood in Virginia and West Virginia, in which the drugs is the mountain,” remembers the comic and actor, whose many skills include things like creating, directing, creating, and podcasting. “I wasn’t anxious or stressed when I was there, and I always experienced perspective. I want to be in the middle of nowhere.”

The house’s unique interiors, which ventured into nightclub territory, in accordance to Cummings, were considerably less engrossing. There was a dark, steampunk aura to them, punctuated by glam gold features, crystal chandeliers, and a glass fireplace of numerous hues. These capabilities weren’t “honoring the essence of the dwelling, but I was surrounded by three mountains, and I felt oxygen in my lungs, so I didn’t care. [I figured] I’d just offer with it later on,” Cummings states.

That moment drew nearer as Cummings held encountering the operate of Advert100 designer Jake Arnold, rising much more riveted by his aesthetic with each room she observed. Dan Levy, of Schitt’s Creek fame, related the two, and Cummings and Arnold quickly strike it off. Quickly, Arnold was active transforming what he describes as Cummings’s faux Tuscan villa into a Santa Fe–meets–monastery–inspired abode layered with a great deal of warmth and texture.

“I didn’t increase up with extravagant things. Almost everything I have and want looks aged, with a wabi-sabi vibe,” Cummings states. “I’m a maximalist in every single other component of my daily life, but I get so emotionally drained by litter in my household. I desired this to really feel minimalist, like an old Spanish barn.”

In the beginning, Cummings imagined she just wanted a considerable home furniture update. But Arnold had extra bold programs. “It was going to be a endlessly household, and we essential to begin from scratch,” he clarifies. “I wanted to strip the dwelling to its bones due to the fact it wanted so a lot like and attention.”

Cummings told Arnold about her enthusiasm for horses, her most loved accommodations (Amangiri, Auberge Collection’s Lodge at Blue Sky in Utah, the Greenwich Hotel 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” furnishings of the sets. Immediately after distilling her numerous preferences, Arnold took command.

“She was pretty trusting, and I listened to anything she responded to and turned it into a thing much more tactile that she could link 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 specifics.” Fireplaces and stair railings have been ripped out, and rooms were redefined by expanses of “rough, organic, and earthy” plaster, in accordance to Arnold.

At the exact time, he did not stifle Cummings’s “wacky individuality.” The library, for example, is stocked with “5,000 of my classic anatomy, art, and strange horse textbooks,” Cummings claims. Then there are the two coffee tables crafted from reclaimed barn wooden that bear the imprint of horse nibbles. “I was sobbing. It meant so a great deal to me,” she adds. Singling out the Lewis & Wood wallpaper emblazoned with equine sketches in her business office, Cummings notes: “Jake loves getting the needle in the haystack, the one piece no a single has.”

At Cummings’s recommendation, her bed is now located in the middle of her bedroom so that “when you wake up, you see a mountain, the only point that is going to prevent me from buying up my cell telephone first factor,” she claims. From the freestanding tub in the bathroom, exactly where custom made oak screens serve as shutters, Cummings could even textual content Arnold to gush about how the gentle flawlessly demonstrates on the h2o.

There had been sure worries for Arnold, like the commodious den. “The doors had been huge and the ceiling heights superior, so we played with the scale,” he suggests. “I desired the fireplace to glimpse like a tiny hole in the wall. It feels genuinely very good in there now when you sink into the couch.” Designers typically like to go major, Cummings suggests, but she appreciates how Arnold possesses a reverence for smaller sized features, these as petite paintings that “are stunning and experience intentional.”

Cummings has four canines who “run wild,” as Arnold puts it, so he wished furniture—much of it custom made-made—that was slipcovered still elevated. A palette of rich brown, rust, and greige invites website visitors to “sit in each individual single room.” Of the home in basic, Cummings chimes in to increase, “It felt flimsy prior to, and did not have a soul. Jake is aware of when to walk away and permit the materials glow. Nothing’s much more wonderful than aged wood. You just can’t compete with Mother Nature.”