
A couple of months ago, real estate investor (and listing agent to stars these kinds of as Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen and Ellen DeGeneres) Kurt Rappaport and his spouse, model Zorana Kuzmanovic Rappaport, cradled their newborn daughter Zoe throughout the threshold of their French-design and style brick manor for the initially time, a monumental celebration that bested the couple’s previous preferred memory in the Brentwood Park household. (That would be an epic housewarming celebration DJ’d by none other than Snoop Dogg.) Notably, the 1936 estate—originally designed by iconic California architect Wallace Neff—received a 1990s refresh that focused on the gardens and orbiting properties that was carried out by Robert A.M. Stern.
Kurt and his repeated collaborator, Los Angeles inside designer Clint Nicholas, had intended to embark upon an bold a single-calendar year renovation. “Kurt suggests, ‘Let’s choose a calendar year,’ each time he buys a property,’” claims Nicholas with a grin. “Here we are, five yrs afterwards.” But then all over again, there was a whole lot entailing the update of the now-a few-acre property. (Los Angeles–based Scott Mitchell Studio built and created added buildings on adjacent lots that Kurt experienced obtained.) As for the 12,000-sq.-foot principal property, it experienced been a eyesight of “wall-to-wall florals, tons of silk, and large drapery” with a couple of architectural additions that were being unbecoming of Neff’s “totally understated, exquisite, and mysterious residences,” suggests the house owner.
Nicholas and Kurt have been working alongside one another for so prolonged that the designer claims, “I’m commencing to assume Kurt’s taste is my flavor, and vice versa.” For this certain challenge, a form of “luxe naturalism” prevails, thematically nearer to Neff’s fashion than the floral smother and material stifle of bygone days. Foremost on the agenda was to authentically align the dwelling with its superlatively sunny site. These unabashed radiance would be just as significantly element of the decor as, say, the shade plan (eternally earthy), or the elements palette (sumptuously tactile). The atrium, for instance, is a soaring room where a gleaming new wall of double-height steel windows rises from a floor of wire-brushed white-oak planks. (Architecture agency ZU+ Studio was liable for this hard work, and a great deal extra.) Zorana and her partner sip espresso here in the mornings, snuggled cozily upon the room’s central objet d’art: a capsule-formed Rick Owens Double Bubble daybed with a spectacular plywood grain that transpires to remember the marbling of espresso and milk.
What other areas lack in sunstruck volume, they make up for in seamless indoor-outside transitions and a all-natural layered-ness that can only emerge when a experienced curatorial eye has been forged upon a several a long time of worldly acquisitions. The living area, Nicholas claims, epitomizes the style temporary: A wall-dimensions portal presents a generous changeover among nature and an interior tableau of edited collectibles, from the charmingly catawampus Vincenzo De Cotiis mirror to the charismatically chunky sofa to a wooden sculpture—Stack by Shay Alcalay. “Someone after said, ‘Beautiful issues go with wonderful items,’ and I live by that assertion,” Nicholas claims. His consumer and alleged design twin concurs. “Everything’s decided on,” Kurt claims.