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

It was the relaxing, monumental landscape that ultimately swayed Whitney Cummings to get her household just exterior L.A. “I spent a ton of my childhood in Virginia and West Virginia, in which the medication is the mountain,” recollects the comedian and actor, whose many skills consist of crafting, directing, generating, and podcasting. “I wasn’t anxious or pressured when I was there, and I always had perspective. I want to be in the middle of nowhere.”

The house’s authentic interiors, which ventured into nightclub territory, according to Cummings, had been fewer engrossing. There was a dim, steampunk aura to them, punctuated by glam gold features, crystal chandeliers, and a glass fire of various colors. These attributes weren’t “honoring the essence of the house, but I was surrounded by 3 mountains, and I felt oxygen in my lungs, so I didn’t treatment. [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, escalating far more riveted by his aesthetic with every room she observed. Dan Levy, of Schitt’s Creek fame, related the two, and Cummings and Arnold quickly strike it off. Before long, Arnold was occupied transforming what he describes as Cummings’s fake Tuscan villa into a Santa Fe–meets–monastery–inspired abode layered with loads of heat and texture.

“I didn’t expand up with fancy stuff. Everything I have and want seems to be aged, with a wabi-sabi vibe,” Cummings says. “I’m a maximalist in every single other component of my everyday living, but I get so emotionally drained by litter in my house. I preferred this to come to feel minimalist, like an old Spanish barn.”

Initially, Cummings believed she just essential a sizeable home furniture improve. But Arnold had much more bold programs. “It was likely to be a forever residence, and we wanted to start from scratch,” he clarifies. “I wished to strip the house to its bones simply because it needed so substantially enjoy and awareness.”

Cummings explained to Arnold about her enthusiasm for horses, her preferred inns (Amangiri, Auberge Collection’s Lodge at Blue Sky in Utah, the Greenwich Lodge 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” household furniture of the sets. Right after distilling her several tastes, Arnold took command.

“She was really trusting, and I listened to everything she responded to and turned it into a little something additional tactile that she could hook up with,” he states. Arnold overhauled “strange moldings and generic finishes,” and rejuvenated rooms “with zero personality” by weaving in salvaged barn beams “to develop architectural particulars.” Fireplaces and stair railings were being ripped out, and rooms ended up redefined by expanses of “rough, natural and organic, and earthy” plaster, in accordance to Arnold.

At the similar time, he didn’t stifle Cummings’s “wacky persona.” The library, for example, is stocked with “5,000 of my classic anatomy, art, and odd horse publications,” Cummings states. 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 provides. Singling out the Lewis & Wood wallpaper emblazoned with equine sketches in her workplace, Cummings notes: “Jake loves discovering the needle in the haystack, the a single piece no 1 has.”

At Cummings’s suggestion, her bed is now situated in the center of her bedroom so that “when you wake up, you see a mountain, the only matter that is heading to protect against me from choosing up my cell telephone initially detail,” she states. From the freestanding tub in the toilet, where by personalized oak screens provide as shutters, Cummings may possibly even textual content Arnold to gush about how the light-weight flawlessly demonstrates on the h2o.

There had been particular worries for Arnold, like the commodious den. “The doors ended up massive and the ceiling heights higher, so we performed with the scale,” he states. “I wished the fire to look like a very little gap in the wall. It feels definitely fantastic in there now when you sink into the couch.” Designers often like to go massive, Cummings says, but she appreciates how Arnold possesses a reverence for scaled-down characteristics, these kinds of as petite paintings that “are astonishing and really feel intentional.”

Cummings has four canines who “run wild,” as Arnold puts it, so he needed furniture—much of it personalized-made—that was slipcovered nonetheless elevated. A palette of abundant brown, rust, and greige invites site visitors to “sit in each single room.” Of the house in common, Cummings chimes in to insert, “It felt flimsy ahead of, and didn’t have a soul. Jake is aware of when to walk absent and allow the supplies shine. Nothing’s additional beautiful than aged wooden. You can not compete with Mom Nature.”