When John Wooden’s clients gave him a tour of their jam-packed 1930s cottage in Laguna Beach, California, his first reaction was that there was just too much to take in-from the dark, ornate woodwork to the knickknacks sprinkled throughout. “The eye didn’t have a place to rest,” he says of the house, which is the couple’s main home (they also have a getaway in Palm Desert). “It was visual gluttony!”
Wooden went straight to work stripping away the excess. Walls and ceilings were painted white and paired with an airy midcentury-inspired palette of muted charcoal, rust, coral, and sky blue. “There’s a peacefulness to a space where materials repeat from room to room,” the designer notes. “The key is to mix them a bit differently each time.”
The renovation's pièce de résistance is an expansive new steel-framed window that stretches across nearly the entire kitchen wall. “When you go big in a small space, everything ends up looking larger,” Wooden says.
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