Sneak Peek: Casa Sara and Larry Part I

I haven't been able to persuade Larry to have his latest remodel photographed for Sunset. "Too much hassle," he says. So I've taken matters into my own hands. Welcome to Sara and Larry's, Part I sneak peek.


Larry's an architect whose house has been under constant remodel as long as I've known him. He uses color sparingly, but decided he could go SpicyTomato for the patio. "I tried it out on a client to see if it was really "hot, he says, "and it was. The client didn't like it, but I did."


Sara is entertainer/cook extraordinaire. I'm still aspiring to pull off dinner parties as well as she does.


Care for a mojito?

Perch yourself on a wheel-y stool and take a ride. Weeeeee!


Featured design element: exposed steel girders in dining area (above back).


The drawing, a scene of palapas on a Mexican beach by Eve Page, hangs over the former fireplace. When I ask Larry about the decision to remove the fireplace, he says, "Sara came into the living room when the sheetrockers were working and said, 'Why do we keep that thing? Just sheetrock across the fireplace. It always smells and smokes and I hate it.'" "Of course," he says, "she was right."

The swooping gold lamp, he reveals, "is, again, the brilliance of Sara, who reminded me that she had this lamp in storage in her garage and thought it would look great in our new living room. It is about 40 years old and I had to take it apart and really clean it up and put it back together." It's also available at Design Within Reach for about $3K.


The architect speaketh on the yellow paint: "It's called 'Caterpillar Yellow' after the Caterpillar tractor. This has been one of my favorite colors for a long time. I had a 40-year-old color chip and went to Dunn Edwards and they STILL had the color formula, written in pencil on a 3-by-5 card. The other colors are all on computer, so I knew this was the right color."


Standing from the patio, here's a view of SpicyTomato and Caterpillar Yellow looking through the glass doors, through the dining room and outside again. Larry took the inside yellow paint and extended it to the outside wall. It's an unexpected splash of color viewed from either the patio or the dining room.

Stay tuned for sneak peek part II.

Thanks to Design Sponge for inspiration.