How An Interior Designer Maximized Every Square Inch In A Tiny Beach Trailer | Architectural Digest

You only have to take a couple steps from waking up in the morning to getting coffee to sitting down. That's cozy to me. I think wood does that. Wood makes a space feel lived in and that was a goal. It's like it's one organism. Rather than being divided runes with different finishes and function, you're in one whole being not to get too deep. It lowers your heart rate when you walk in. Every detail in it feels thought through. I grew up in Florida on boats. This is very influenced by boat cabins. I'm Alana. I am the interior designer. I am Jason and I am the former owner of this trailer. We used to come here for like a beer at the end of the day and there'd be another neighbor and like their kid. This looks like a small space but because of who you and Amy are as people, it was always comfortable and there was always people hanging out and like having a good time. Paradise Cove, this neighborhood, everything is on top of you. I think the coolest part about it is the massive range of people that are here. You know every neighbor. People quite literally walk in your door all the time. Your home is not just yours, it's your communities. And I think it's nice because like the whole neighborhood centered around the beach. You see everybody on a Saturday and all the kids play together. It's very unique to the times. I started in hospitality. How do you make the most luxurious, comfortable, functional, user-friendly, you know, aspect out of every single square inch of the hotel room. So that's kind of always been the most important thing to me is, you know, aesthetic will come but function is always first. We met through a mutual friend of my husband. I met Jeff at a bar watching a football game or something which is basically our entire friendship. Our friendship grew when we went on your first date with your now wife together. Second date. I realized that I typically walk into these spaces and I have a vision and then to translate it onto like an actual floor plan and elevations and all these things like that disconnect for me is difficult and I was like damn I don't know how to do this. The previous layout had the washer dryer in the middle of the space and everything kind of circulated around it so we figured pull it out of there and actually put it in the bedroom. I would not have thought of that and if she set like parameters I think is the best way to put it. He walked in the first time we were talking about it your description was like I just what if we did everything in wood. I would just like show up to her office like I'd like call her 15 minutes before and be like hey. 15. It's that we just had fun with it and I think like that comes through as well. I lived in another place in this neighborhood and someone I knew was living here and they were moving into another trailer. At the time I was single with my dog and I was like I don't want a lot of space because it's such a small footprint like a small budget could have made it exactly what I wanted it to be. I called Alana I was like hey I'm gonna move into this place and like I think we can make it like really incredible. I am a partner in a millwork company called Casa Studios so we were able to do a lot of the build ourselves. Then I ended up meeting my now wife and we eventually had a kid with a second on the way and we quickly found out maybe a couple more bedrooms would be useful. So how many trailers have you lived in in this park? Four. Yeah or five. Four or five. To this day people come to me and they're like there is this trailer there that's all wood and I'm like oh yeah like this one really like hit a chord with me and a space feels special to me when I walk in. Whether it speaks to me or not when I'm like this is a representation of that person. It's an extension of what they enjoy and what they like. That to me is good design. That made this special. People dug it. It was cool. Here we are at the entry. Welcome. This was actually here. I also like this door because it had this like I mean it's original I assume to the place and it has this little opening here. Let some fresh air in even when the door is closed. It's like a very tall dorm door. I don't mean I can fit through it but Alana can fit through it. You'd have to lock the front door if you wanted to watch tv because this was the only wall that fit a television that you could watch from the couch. It's the largest kind of empty space in the entire unit so we put a little bracket that you could hang bands off of and do workouts. It's your entry, your tv station, your yoga studio, your gym. Totally. And then to your left you have the kitchen. What you guys asked me for was somewhere where you could host. The previous kitchen didn't have an island. It was just a little L shape and it was a really weird layout and I think knowing you guys and the way you know you lived we were like let's just throw a big island that can be like sort of your coffee table, your dining table, your kitchen. It'll serve a The way that it's kind of a galley kitchen gives it way more counter space. If it were just an island in an L shape like you'd lose all this which became extremely important when we'd have people over. We could kind of set food in the corner there. They would eat here. So you know we wanted to maximize a surface area. Even in large homes everyone congregates around an island anyways so it's like why not make the center of the entire house kind of this island. Even though it takes up square footage if we were to remove it the place would feel way smaller I think because wouldn't be a division of like utility in the house. People tend to overdo cabinetry. One of the things I've loved about here is that wasn't the case. You still have space to put things but allow them to be open. I think too many open cabinets will just make something close in quickly. Kind of have to use every wall to hang things. Knives go up on them as opposed to what in a traditional kitchen you might use counter space. The walls also become storage. A lot of places like this you wouldn't wouldn't have a dishwasher but we went for a small small dishwasher dishwasher drawer which you would never know because it's panel. And then you know using the corner. Yeah lazy susan-esque. They come out so you're maximizing you know unused corner space. What would typically be dead space we had to figure out ways to use it. This is a pretty important two inch game. Yeah cabinet. You said one of my favorite things ever. You said we don't think in square feet we think in square inches. And it's so true like every aspect of storage and function is down to the inch. Like mugs hanging from a rail instead of on a shelf. And then also we did all walnut countertop. This is kind of like scrap stripped together butcher block style. Moving into just classic walnut cabinetry. And then the flooring is all hardwood walnut as well. So I like the idea of it all being one species but it having different tones. And even the hardware it's all integrated so you're not having like extra visual distractions. But where you do have a handle it's still a piece of walnut. When he got the house this was all one level. So the ceiling the lower ceiling went all the way across and there was just like a cutout that the ladder went up into. I think one thing speaking for you that was important was having an area of high ceiling with natural light. And like he always had the idea of this beautiful pendant hanging. Bringing that back giving you a linear element that visually separates kitchen from living room. You have different zones just because of the ceiling stop. First I was obsessed with the idea of a vintage fridge but the ones I found all had issues. So this to me kind of spoke to the vibe of the space and kind of the time of when this was built. And if you think about a fridge in a 400 so odd square foot space like you want it to be pretty. They look like the fridge that's in an old boat you know with like the latching handles. It felt honest to the space. Now we are in the living room. Pretty much the same space we were in last time. More or less. We island hopped. This functions as living room. The barstools function for living room too. You sit there people would turn the barstools around and you sit and you know converse. This is mostly old material that we had. My wife has an insane collection of indigo dyed textiles. We pulled a lot of those and we went to our friends at Sway here in LA and we just said let's take these and make something really patchwork that is interesting and deliberately busy because everything else is all cedar and walnut. So to have this it like draws the eye in. There's sneaky storage under there. The whole thing is storage. You could fit a surfboard in there. It ended up being a guest bed many many many times for two people who would sleep. Exactly. That way we'd have people who drive in from LA and it's a pretty far drive so they'd stay the night after doing doing unholy things and and uh they'd all sleep on here. You have one thing that serves many purposes. Bed, couch, you know central piece. Really functionally there's only two pieces of furniture in this entire house. I mean outside of like things like bed and chairs but as far as built in like it is this one piece that extends through the entire house and this one u-shaped kitchen and making those two pieces function for everything that you need in life is an interesting process. And the fact that this is storage and record player, storage and sofa, storage and desk, like everything. I made the joke of like we're in LA everything has a slash and like you're in a small home everything has to have a slash. Multipurpose. Was working with a budget that budget being it's only it's just the money I had. I think almost everything went into it which seems to be the case every time I build these. My neighbor who owns Heartwood Construction he did a lot of the framing and all the things necessary before the millwork came in. So really every piece of this like a friend built. Typically in California you see a lot of white oak it's like kind of California modern clean beach. This is all walnut and cedar which is not typical and it it's darker but it makes the room feel weathered like it's been by the ocean for a long time. Being so close to the ocean the concern is this wood will expand and contract and I think to some degree it probably does but cedar does a really good job of kind of maintaining its form. We ran the flooring up the back of the island I think because we just had extra wood and every piece of material we had I was like we got to use this. I just like the way it kind of can it's almost like a waterfall effect and makes it feel continuous. And then that was the dog dog's room right right here under this in this crane. Under the ladder. We would have the dog bed and our 100 pound dog would sleep there and uh call another room pull another room in the house. Now we are in the loft. It was primarily for storage but now it feels like a grown-up crib. We'd have books like on every single edge of that and it kind of became a little mini library. It's a pretty epic place to read. The skylight opens and then you can stand out and look at the ocean. I think there was like a non-functional skylight there. Yeah. And I was like this is crazy you got to be able to hop out and see the ocean. And also it's nice when you're up there to be able to just stand up. And this is a really cool way to have a conversation. Hand up the coffee in the morning and then sit there and we'd chat. There's probably six people sleeping in here at times. I'd say two on the couch two up there me and Amy in the bedroom. And the dogs. And the dogs. Any close calls drunken nights coming down this ladder? Oh yeah. Yeah yeah yeah. Not me. I knew better. I definitely would have to kind of watch out of the corner of my eyes. It's a steep ladder because you can't really have much pitch on it. It's almost vertical. You have to be pretty courageous. In hindsight like we should have made a cushion for the top of that for like the crash landing. Here we are in the bedroom and laundry room. The original layout actually had a door right here that went to the bathroom. So the bathroom had double access and we felt like in a small space that was not necessary. Also it really limited the function of this wall and room because you couldn't use it for storage. So we built out this whole millwork system. Yeah we molded it up so it's kind of flush the whole way up and again feels a little bit like a boat to me. This was like kind of the center of all of our storage throughout the house in many ways. Rather than having big traditional nightstands you get the wall mount sconce. You can swing them out to be out of the way when you're not using it. I think you had stuff on it. We had books up there. Books yeah. This wasn't where you needed to collect things. This is where you needed to sleep and be cozy and do laundry. This used to be laundry. Okay this is the fun part. So the sink for the bathroom used to be right here and then next to it was a washer dryer and then you walked past that to get to the toilet and shower. You'd like do bathroom things and then come out past the washer dryer and have to like wash your hands here. It didn't function very well. One of the briefs from Jason and Amy was that they wanted somewhere to like sit and write that wasn't the island. So it's like one language, one piece, one species that goes from wall to wall. You have two window locations that weren't moving and then we knew there was an AC so we had all these like little puzzle pieces on the wall to deal with. And it ended up being cooler because it's kind of all strange. Yeah right when you walk in that was the inviting moment and then it kind of spread into all the other functions. We are in the bathroom. James is on his throne because the whole house is wood. I think it was really important to keep something that felt like the same color and tone and warmth and like organic which is why we went with the Zelige. We have this little thing below for towels which is kind of atypical for a floating sink but we needed it. We bought a vintage medicine cabinet that I just thought was kind of cool and made sense in the space and we plugged that into the wood so it was recessed in there and you can get a little bit more space that way. I think a small space forces you to be really close with the people that you live in it with. And also when people come and visit you're sort of all in the same room and we host a lot and I think people they really got to have conversations with the people that they were going to see. I love having a lot of people over in 400 square feet it feels fun it's crazy it's like it feels like a dorm room. Someone recently asked me what is my idea of luxury and the answer to me is when I know what the intention was. It's not about wealth or quality or layout it to me it's if I understand what the point was that's luxury because you took the time the consideration the energy to make it actually feel like what you wanted.