Besides being a destination filled with attractions and great restaurants, Southern California is also a location with remarkable homes. There is a moment, when you walk into a truly good house, when you forget to keep being yourself. You stop performing the polite tour-guide nods, the “oh, lovely,” the reflexive admiration you hand out at open houses the way you hand out business cards. You just stand there. Southern California is full of houses that want to impress you, and most of them succeed for about 90 seconds. But every so often a home does something far more difficult. It makes you want to stay. Two of them sit within a short drive of one another, designed by people who clearly understand that the highest compliment a house can earn is not “stunning” but “I never want to leave.”
POWER STREET
The first thing you notice about the Power Street house is what it does not do. It does not shout. It does not perform. It does not greet you with the architectural equivalent of a firm, overly rehearsed handshake. It simply lets the light in and trusts you to notice, which is a kind of confidence most houses, and most people, never quite manage.
This is the signature of Ausland Interiors, the Southern California studio behind the home’s interiors, whose philosophy begins not with objects but with the things you cannot buy: light, proportion, flow. They treat these as the quiet framework on which everything else is allowed to unfold, and the result is a home that feels warm and grounded and refined all at once, without ever seeming to try.
The architecture, by Joseph Fournier Design, gives the interiors their good bones, the clean lines and considered volumes that let a room breathe. And then there is the matter of the materials, every one of them chosen for the way it lives over time. This is the part that separates real design from decoration. Ausland values a material for its honesty, for how it ages, for the richness it brings to an ordinary Tuesday. Nothing here is precious. Everything is meant to be lived with.
Outside, Fair Studio extends the same logic into the landscape, so that the line between indoors and out becomes less a boundary than a suggestion. The garden does not so much surround the house as continue it.
What you are left with is a home that reflects its people and its place with quiet confidence, which is to say it has figured out the thing that takes most of us a lifetime to learn. True luxury was never about more. It was about balance, and restraint, and the warmth that survives both.
Architect: Joseph Fournier Design
Interior Designer: Ausland Interiors
Landscape Architect: Fair Studio
Builder: RJ Construction
POINSETTIA
If the Power Street house is about light, the Poinsettia house is about memory. You feel it the moment you walk in, though you would be hard pressed to say exactly why. It is the difference between a house that has been decorated and a house that has been understood.
This is the territory of Stewart Design Inc., the firm behind the interiors, and their whole philosophy can be summed up in a single, slightly radical idea, which is that a home should tell the story of the people who live in it. Not the story of the designer. Not the story of whatever happens to be fashionable this season. The clients’ story, curated object by object, until the rooms begin to sound like them. The result is a space designed to do three things most homes never quite pull off. It delights. It replenishes. It inspires.
The architecture by Tomaro Architecture provides the frame for all of it, the structure that turns a house into a refuge rather than merely a shelter, which is a distinction worth pausing on. Plenty of homes keep the weather out. Far fewer make you exhale the moment the door closes behind you.
That, in the end, is the quiet ambition here. Not to impress the neighbors, not to photograph well, though it certainly does, but to give the people who live inside a genuine sense of sanctuary. A place that reflects their inspirations and holds their history and gives them, on the ordinary days as much as the special ones, a small reliable dose of joy. There are grander goals in architecture. There are very few better ones.
Architect: Tomaro Architecture
Architect: Tomaro Architecture
Builder: RJ Construction
What these homes share, beyond their good bones and their better lighting, is restraint, which is the most underrated quality in design and possibly in life. Anyone can fill a room. The trick is knowing what to leave out, when to let the light do the talking, when to let a single wall of glass say everything a dozen finishes could not. The architects and designers behind these houses know the secret that every great host eventually learns, which is that the goal was never to be admired. It was to make people comfortable enough to be themselves. These homes do exactly that. And in a part of the world that so often confuses size with significance and shine with substance, that is the boldest, most beautiful thing of all.
