Inside Jennifer Garner’s Farm-Style L.A. Home | Open Door | Architectural Digest

AD, hello. Come on in. It's the cleanest it'll ever be. So this is the biggest room in the house. It's the living room. And I wanted it to feel really expansive so somebody could be playing Rummikub over there. That's really the Rummikub table. And people could be sitting around the fire here. You know how you just imagine it and then someday you have a perfect moment where it actually comes true? That is like a kind of moment. Steve and Brooke Giannetti and I have worked together for a long time. And I sat down with them one time and said, okay, I know exactly the house I wanna build. And I described it to him. Steve sent me a watercolor of it. And that is exactly the house we built. We so didn't change much that I started panicking in the middle of the build. And I thought, I never even made a Pinterest board. I never even showed him pictures from a magazine. I just told him what I wanted and he did it. And what if I hate it? But it turns out I'm really, really happy. The paintings are both by Reiner and Driessen. This is Victor Garber's husband. And in that one, there's a little photograph of Victor and me painted into the painting. And so it's extra special, dear to me. This is by Reed Bradley at Judson Studios. He is the son of a friend of mine, Marla Frazee. She's my favorite children's book author. I wanted it to be evocative of spring in West Virginia. And you see like the morning glories coming down and a little bit of the mountains in the distance. A special feature, especially in the summer is having these doors all the way wide open. Here we have it, indoor, outdoor. This isn't California, I don't know what is. The only problem is if my kids are having their class pool party here or something, it's very hard to keep wet kids out of the house. I have to really just stand guard and say, get away. I'll look over and there'll be two wet teenagers playing the piano. And I'm just like, ah, okay, don't look, don't look. I'm so excited to show you my kitchen because since the day I moved in, this is the first time ever that the counter's been clean. Look, it's never gonna look like this again. Please memorialize this. I love a wood kitchen. So the house really is like being inside a tree house. Here alone with my kids on a weekend, I cannot tell you how often I make something and I'm just feeding them as it comes off the stove because I'm not very good at things coming out of the oven or off the stove at the same time. So it is just like, have your vegetables, now have your this, now have your that. It's all out of order, but they don't seem to mind. So I knew when I imagined my favorite kitchen ever in my mind, that it would have an area dedicated to baking. It just makes it so much easier to have it all in one place and to know where your different flowers are and your chocolate chips. Chocolate chips are the most important thing in the whole house and I could tell you where they are. All of my fireplace grates are done by Wallace Metalworks. Usually there's a dog sleeping under here. It just adds so much coziness. It's unbelievable how nice it is to have a little bit of fire going in your kitchen. This is the dining room. When I first moved to LA, I made friends with a photographer, her name's Laura Porzak and she's turned into this incredible fine arts photographer. Clearly I'm a fan of her stuff because this is all Porzak. Brooke Giannetti and I had a blast looking at light fixtures. I can never figure out dining room lights, but you know what? You live with the choices you make and I think I'm good with it. We really eat at home almost all the time and we eat in here pretty regularly and I put doors on this room so that it could be a meeting room and actually I have a lot of meetings in here. I work from home if I'm not on set. So the first room I described to Steve, I said I want a library that is a super awesome, cozy up with everyone TV room and I want it to be like a deep gray blue. This is what he did and I think he kind of nailed it. When we were first envisioning the room, I said I know the couch I want but it's a BBDW couch and this is it and it's comfortable and I just like the look of it. It's just pretty. This is everyone's favorite place. You just don't need some huge old screening room. We're pretty happy just being right in here. Feet go anywhere. I am so not fussy. There are feet, there are dogs, there are shoes. If you're gonna build a house, you have to live in it. If we were gonna have a library, I wanted it to be still light so it opens all the way and then it can go straight out to the garden. Here's our fireplace and this is our clover because it's supposed to be good for the earth. It's so easy. We just threw down seeds and I just think it's cheerful. I have an owl box and I'm waiting for an owl to discover it. Look, my very first cherry ever. Oh my gosh. This is my little orchard. I love it so much. We have apricots, figs and cherries right here and then we have peaches, nectarines, apples and they are all fed by gray water because water is hard to come by in California and I don't wanna use more than my share. So the gray water system, it's a big tank and it collects all the water from the washing machine, the dishwasher and filters it and waters very specifically what you tell it to water but there's a lot of phosphorus in gray water for some reason and I guess fruit trees thrive on it so we just said add more fruit trees. I love that you can come out here in the middle of the summer and find a snack. Growing up the daughter of a farmer and having such connections to my family farm, it just truly thrills me so pretty much everything here is edible. All of the bushes are blueberry bushes and actually, I'm gonna get you a blueberry. I see one. Here you go. You wanna see my vegetable house? It's so cute. I'm all about herbs. Mostly I want thyme. I cannot grow enough. My kids and I love kale chips so we always have a lot of kale. It's tomato season, it's green bean season and then just natural flowers that pests don't like because you know, you gotta be organic. This is my favorite spot to sit. Well, I have different favorite spots. I sit in this little house behind us in the morning with coffee. Here, I'll act it out for you. Isn't it so nice? And then if it's nighttime and I have friends over, I'll show you. This is where we like to be. We turn heaters on, fire, blankets, cozy. We do have a bird's nest in the passion fruit vine right here. Oh, it got torn up. Oh, RIP. Okay, let's go upstairs. This is the landing at the top of the stairs. We have here some fish. My kids for Mother's Day many years ago gave me an empty little fish tank which was basically their way of saying please go buy saltwater fish. But you can just sit and watch their personalities forever. Kids need a spot to study. You just need a place to spread out and do projects so that is this table. This reading nook is maybe my favorite space in the house. You can peek in on the fish. It has all the kids' books. It has this awesome stained glass of a big old oak with three little owls and Birdie looking up at them. And there was one magical night where exactly what I hoped for happened and all three kids were piled in here with me and we pulled down all the books from when they were little and we read them one after the other. That's really all I could hope for. All of us are readers and if you're building your own house you might as well offer people as many great places to read as possible. Welcome to my bedroom. This is T-Bear. My dad gave him to me when I was three from the Sears catalog. My mom made him some overalls. I knew I just wanted something that felt tight, compact. It was not a space that I needed a ton of room devoted to. Do you like it T-Bear? Yeah, T-Bear likes it. I love that I can open these doors at night and wake up to birds. So I didn't need a huge bedroom. I did want a large bathroom because so often we get ready for work at home and it's always, you know, in your own bathroom and you need space for everyone to be comfortable. I wanted my bathroom to be really neutral, really calming. We wanted a kind of white that was flattering to have light bounce off of. I also wanted the house to look like an old farmhouse next to an old barn. And this is obviously the barn part because you can see the barn window. So this is where I sit and they turn me from one old gal to another. This bathtub, I love being next to the window. I love the quiet. I love having a tree in my bathroom. I'm very lucky. This is like a dream come true room for me because I love to have kids over for a slumber party but I'm also a stickler about sleep. Although sometimes there are kids literally everywhere. We wanted built-in bunks where kids could cozy up all in one together which is usually what happens late at night. You'll see them all bent over something that they're looking at together. They're all in this bunk watching something on TV. I love that the beds all have their own, just like you're on a ship, a really nice ship. I love having a spot that is just where kids can be kids. I also keep all of their favorite, favorite toys from when they were really little. You want little kids who come over to feel welcome and excited. And every now and then the big kids will still pull out the old toys and play. You know, who doesn't want to put the money in the piggy bank? If you'd like me to ring up your groceries. Oh, that's where Banana Grahams is. We're big Harry Potter fans. And what are you gonna do if you have a little cabinet under the stairs? You have to use it. So it became my son's office. Just a little spot for him to come in and dream. Mostly he hides from me and eats candy but I can't blame him, I would do the same. I'm such a private person about my home. I'm in here, I've just taken you through the entire house. And really it's for a couple of reasons. I've never built anything all by myself before and I'm so proud of it. I'm filled with gratitude every time I walk into my house that I get to live here, that I'm so lucky to have my kids here. So it's unlike me and yet I'm so happy to have shared it with you. I love hanging with you today, bye E.T.