A Homeowner's Risky Design Choices Define This Los Angeles Renovation

When Cassandra Richardson and her husband, Dan, found this home in the Mt. Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles in 2017, they stretched the limits of their budget to make it work. Once a remote, mountainous retreat reachable by an incline railway, many of the homes here are built into the hillside and require stilts. But this home is on a flat plot, opening up exciting possibilities for beautiful landscaping. While Cassandra and Dan aren't professional interior designers, they're both deeply creative — Cassandra works in film and television development and Dan is a digital product designer — and decided to design their new home's renovation themselves. Throughout the remodel process, Cassandra heard pushback from friends and contractors about her big, risky design ideas. But ultimately, she trusted her gut — and loved the way the home turned out.

When Cassandra’s family moved in, the house needed a lot of work — the kitchen didn’t have a fridge, or a good space for one, and it had built-in ovens that seemed to be from the '50s or '60s. “We knew we had to do the kitchen right away, because it wasn’t even functional,” she says. But one thing they loved about the original was how light and bright it was. So, for the remodel, they put in all-white cabinets, white quartz countertops, a white sink, a white tile backsplash, white appliances and so on. “It’s a small space, so we really wanted it to feel inobtrusive,” she says.

Cassandra originally wanted to have a corner window joint here, where two panes of glass would meet at the corner and provide an uninterrupted view to the outdoors. But a quick price check revealed that was well out of the question — so instead, they went with two large awning-style windows that open as one piece, rather than two panes of glass that slide open over one another. Like other high-impact areas around the house, Cassandra was also advised against running the backsplash tile all the way up to the ceiling. But she knew what she wanted, pushed forward in spite of others’ concerns, and loved the way it came out. “Our contractor thought we were insane,” she says, and nearly refused to do it. But in the end? Everyone agreed it looked amazing.

When Cassandra first considered what to do with the fireplace, she wanted to remove it and turn the entire back wall into a giant, telescoping glass wall. Then she looked into it and it would have cost tens of thousands of dollars — way out of the budget. Instead, she kept the fireplace, made it a conversation piece and added a smaller telescoping door just to the left of it.