A 1960s Arkansas Bungalow Gets a Cinematic Glow-Up
Ten years ago, Anna E. Cottrell walked into a hillside home in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and knew in her bones that it was the one. She didn’t mind that the bungalow was a circa-1961 build, or that it hadn’t been restored for decades. “I immediately felt a very cool California vibe,” the creative director recalls.“I could imagine myself being happy and inspired here. The black concrete floors, clean lines, and floor-to-ceiling windows that wash the space in natural light really sealed the deal.” For the next decade or so, Anna’s prophecy came true. But when her home landed on the National Register of Historic Places, something inside her said it was time to bring the home back to life.
This time, Instagram predicted Anna’s future, pointing her to interior designer Whitney Romanoff of Fayetteville-based studio Meet West, whose work she had been following for a while. But as Anna recalls, finding an aesthetic wasn’t plain sailing. “It was the most chaotic brief ever, and Whitney was honestly a mind reader. I specifically remember her laughing at the number of French provincial and English country tear sheets I had pulled out,” she says. “After she helped distill my design references, the goal was to bring the house back to life using fabulous materials that the original architect would be proud of, while letting the original architecture shine.”
Whitney remembers her first visit to the house like it was yesterday. “Anna’s unassumingly chic, black-and-white photography collection and her spilling-over vintage wardrobe jumped out at me, and I knew then this project had potential for serious vibes,” she says. These vibes evidently involved a groovy playlist (think tracks by Charlotte Gainsbourg, the Velvet Underground, and Jenny Lewis) and a groovier storyline, which plays a larger role in Whitney’s design process. “We create a playlist and a [make-believe] storyline [in every project] as a way to stoke our team’s and our clients’ imaginations,” she explains. The storyline this time was inspired by Anna herself and the home’s LA-esque midcentury-modern architecture. “We imagined the space as a late 1960s hideaway for a French New Wave film icon decamping from Paris to Mulholland Drive,” she smiles.
But given that the home hadn’t been updated for decades—storage was lacking, the concrete floors were scratched and peeling, and many original details, like the wood-paneled walls, were hidden behind layers of white paint—Mulholland Drive (or anywhere near) was a total stretch. As Whitney further explains, undoing bits of the past helped set the stage for the future, making room for warm, feminine details and luxe materials to give each room a cinematic quality. “The result is a space that feels both found—as if the details added could have been there all along—and unique and personal to Anna’s aesthetic,” she adds.
Whitney dressed the home like she would a person, hanging bedside pendants as dangling earrings, haloing the bathrooms and office with vintage lighting to channel an elegant boudoir, and rouging the primary bathroom with a quartzite vanity with specks of blue and pink. For her, it couldn’t be a historic home without historic moments. And so the interior designer leaned into the past, bringing in rose tile in the kitchen as a hat-tip to the original pink tile, and Anna’s late grandmother’s Turkish rug in the living room, one that Anna had danced on as a child. Then she completed the interior with modern luxuries in the primary bathroom and kitchen, including a panel-ready refrigerator, soaking tub, and custom cabinetry.
Out of all the spaces that got a second life, Anna cites the primary bathroom as her personal favorite. “It was a total gut job and feels like such a monumental transformation. Before the renovation I had a super shallow cast-iron tub that wasn’t insulated, and now I feel so luxurious in my deep bathtub,” she explains, noting that it’s made all the more special by the 1960s Helena Tynell bubble glass fixtures and the divider that casts shapeshifting shadows come mid-afternoon. “I can’t get enough of it,” she says, as much about the bathroom as the home itself. “It’s all so dreamy.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
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