Creating
the Past
House & Garden, October 2003
Everything added up to just about perfect. Views of the Santa
Ynez Mountain complemented vistas of the Pacific Ocean. A site at
the end of one of Montecito’s twisting rural roads ensured
privacy, yet the beach was just downhill. For empty nesters, the
space worked out well - big enough for a dinner party, but not so
large that the hosts rattled around afterward.
The hitch? The house. A contractor had built it on spec, and the
couple had bought soon after for the setting. The structure met
their needs, but it lacked the substance that comes with age.
Enter John F. Saladino, a man prepared to chain-whip news beams
into old. “It really have admired his work forever,”
says the client, who, like Saladino, divided her time between New
York and Montecito. She knew, however, that while her house was
“absolutely lovely,” it didn’t merit enormous
expenditure. “I sent John a lengthy, detailed letter about
how we like to live, how we like to entertain, the colors we like,”
she says. She also requested that the project be completed in six
months.
In Saladino’s New York office, Nicole Hsu, the project designer,
began working on furnishings, finishes, and the color scheme. “It
was a challenge,” says Saladino, who hustled his crew out
the back door on deadline, to the sound of chat gravel crunching
under the clients’ car. “I made the house look much
more authentic. I tried to give it a sense of Santa Barbara, to
take clues from Iberian or Italian style. We addressed everything
in the house to make it look old.”
The results are first visible outside. Sydney Baumgartner, a Santa
Barbara landscape architect, planted 40-year-old Italian cypress
trees near the dramatic wrought-iron entry gates that Saladino installed.
Painters stained the 30 inches under the roof’s eaves a darker
tone so that the lower walls looked sub-b leached. By the time the
clients arrived, they house looked older, sturdier, more in keeping
with the Spanish Colonial Revival buildings that dominate the area.
“John changed the feeling by putting in a wonderful front
door- the difference was subtle and very dramatic,” says the
client, who laughs at the complexity of the ironwork closings on
the eighteenth-century Mexican sabino wood door.
Adding years inside too work, but no new construction. “A
lot of the wood and the beam ceilings were newly milled, and looked
new,” says Saladino. Devastators beat the beams with chains
until the wood looked as if it had been cut by an adze, and painters
pickled the beams with a translucent stain. Saladino used a dark
teal in the entry, curtaining the walls with silk that responds
to ocean-fresh breezes. Going from the darker entry to the lighter
main room “ is an emotional experience,” he says.
Sun washes a drawing room that Saladino painted “duck pond
beige-khaki,” which sets off a substantial eighteenth-century
Spanish Colonial chair from Peru upholstered in sedate, red worn
velvet. A nineteenth-century Spanish screen, a fifteenth –century
French statue of Santa Barbara, and antique Dutch carved corbels
add a past to the room. Next to the fireplace is an iron penitent’s
chair “ so uncomfortable you couldn’t sit in it unless
you’d sinned,” says Saladino, who used it to stack firewood.
The clients’ collection of photographs “is the music
that runs through the house,” Saladino says. There are four
images, striking nudes by Lisa martin, in the living room alcove,
which is furnished with a Summer sofa from Saladino’s line.
In contract to the drawing room is the cozy adobe-colored dining
room, which Saladino designed as a night room. An eighteenth-century
Dutch wood cabinet in a refined rustic style commands the space.
A bench from Saladino’s line eases the formality, and the
room’s defined dimensions draw guests into one wide-ranging
conversation. A subtle stenciled design runs along the beams here
and in the kitchen, where French doors open on to a terrace. A nineteenth-century
French oval wine-tasting table with fold-down leaves enhances the
warm feeling.
The hall near the master bedroom has a Persian Serab runner with
a high camel-hair pile. Off-white, with tomato red and blue accents,
it shows how Saladino “ articulated the connecting spaces,
to make the house more intriguing and romantic,” the client
says. In this corridor, under a sweet Cartier-Bresson image of a
bride on a swing, Saladino placed a sixteenth-century Italian chest
that the client calls “absolutely enchanting – the scale,
the color, the design, the carving. Every time he sees it, he says
he’s sorry he gave it to me. I tell him he can’t have
it back. It is the one piece of furniture that I’ll always
keep.”
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