Step Inside This Old-Meets-New Beverly Hills Home by AD100 Designer Billy Cotton

While classic Spanish-style houses in Los Angeles have much to recommend them, the qualities of youthful joy and bright airiness are not generally considered their primary attributes. In fact, quite the opposite. These homes traditionally exude an aura of gravitas, underscored by heavy beams, dark wood, chunky plaster, and wrought-iron architectural details. Film producer Grace Morton had grown up in L.A. admiring the city’s rich trove of Spanish-influenced residences, so when it came time to find a suitable home for her and her fiancé, fellow film producer Matthew Budman, she naturally gravitated to a house in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. Somber interiors, however, were not part of the plan.

“我一直喜欢深情的氛围和嘘的感觉ory in Spanish-style homes. I was definitely not looking for new construction or anything aggressively modern,” Morton explains. “But Matt and I are both young, and we wanted something more attuned to our energy and lifestyle. So we decided to lean into those contradictory impulses and accentuate the contrast.”

After locating a 1927 house with the appropriate style and scale in Beverly Hills, Morton engaged AD100 designer Billy Cotton, who had recently renovated her father’s country home in East Hampton, to help plumb the tension between the structure’s historic bones and the sprightly, colorful decor she imagined. “Grace has genuinely adventurous style. She grew up with serious art and design, and she has traveled extensively. Villa Borsani near Milan and Yves Saint Laurent’s home in Marrakech were two of the touchstones for this project. Our challenge was to weave all these divergent threads together in a way that felt easy and unpretentious,” Cotton says of his assignment.

Rejecting the dark, brooding furniture endemic to many Spanish-style dwellings, Cotton and Morton outfitted the home with a broad range of pedigreed yet casual pieces by the likes of Mario Bellini, Gio Ponti, Pierre Chapo, Charlotte Perriand, and Paavo Tynell. The capacious living room, where a suite of low-slung vintage Bellini seating covered in sunshine-yellow velvet floats on a massive Moroccan carpet, perhaps best exemplifies the fresh, breezy spirit of the transformed home. “Billy and I had a big debate over the beams and ceiling. I wanted to leave the wood exposed, but Billy insisted that we should paint it all white. I knew I had to trust him, and I’m happy I did. The room feels fun and flooded with light, perfect for hanging out with friends,” Morton says.

Other emendations to the living room included ripping out the television over the original fireplace and replacing a wall of bookshelves along the rear elevation with a built-in plaster banquette outfitted with an array of fanciful cushions and throw pillows in vintage Majorcan and Balinese fabrics—a gesture reminiscent of the work of designer John Stefanidis, the undisputed master of summery chic. A large painting by Laura Owens above the banquette and a neon sculpture by Tracey Emin buttress the vivid, contemporary character of the welcoming space.

The mad medley of color and pattern kicks into overdrive in the lively bar room, which features a leopard-print carpet, walls sheathed in indigo-lacquered seagrass, Italian bamboo chairs covered in exuberant Josef Frank fabrics, and midcentury Italian tiles with a Greek-key motif on the bar front. “Billy and I don’t mind when things get a little bizarre. I’m not sure if the combination of leopard print and Frank fabrics is totally wrong, but I know I love it,” Morton muses. Cotton seconds the notion: “This was definitely a ‘more is more’ moment. If Grace and I had our way, the whole house would have been a cotton-candy-cloud castle,” he says. “Matt was the voice of reason in all of this. He really reined in our more extravagant instincts,” the designer adds.

Nevertheless, flights of fancy, however measured, proliferate throughout the home—in the enchanting wallpaper by artist Alvaro Barrington that wraps the breakfast room, the floral-patterned D. Porthault sheets that accent the otherwise restrained primary bedroom, and the Jean Royère–inspired turquoise-hued chandelier and sconces that adorn the living room. “I love all those moments of unapologetic prettiness and delight,” Morton concludes. “The interiors may not be authentic to the period of the architecture, but they’re definitely authentic to who Matt and I are and how we want to live.”