California Cool: Tour an Edgy Monterey Family Home

Interior stylist Tamara Lee Beltran did a clever job harmonizing a living and dining room in her Monterey, California home. Though the first floor of this home isn’t an open plan, the living room and dining room are close enough to each other to require a few connections in their design plan. The stripes on the rug, the polka dots on the table runner and even the triangle patterns on the wall in the dining room all have correlatives in the living room. And where there is the biggest difference - the complete lack of art in the dining room - all of the colors on the wall have been taken from the living room gallery wall, creating some beautiful visual connections.

Interior stylist Tamara Lee Beltran has an eye for what looks good - and what could look good, given the right amount of TLC. Six years ago when she first laid eyes on what would be her home, it was a run down home in a traditional '50s California style that had been vacant for two years. The only things it had going for it were a seaside location and a new coat of beige paint.

In the six years since that first encounter, the 1,000 square foot home has become an explosion of design creativity, without a drop of beige to be found. “I started out painting the walls,” Beltran remembers, “I also painted our kitchen cabinets, countertops and floors. I pretty much painted my way though the beige until it was gone.” In the living room, the beige was replaced with an explosion of colors, patterns and artwork, all based around a striking, pink sectional sofa backed by a truly impressive gallery wall.

With so much amazing design going on in this living room, it’s easy to miss some of the smaller details that make it work. Tamara does an excellent job of creating layers in this living room. Every instance of a pattern or color is echoed or repeated somewhere else in the room so that nothing feels out of place. Just in this vignette, the leopard print of the pillow is repeated in the stool, while the yellow of the throw blanket is repeated in several of the art pieces on the wall. This maximalist approach works best when every element in the room reinforces several others.