You don’t see a lot of super-trad braided wool rugs from L.L.Bean in the contemporary homes featured in AD—especially ones paired with, say, a chunky Max Lamb polystyrene table and a Thaddeus Wolfe fluorescent light sculpture. But such aesthetic impudence is par for the course at the kaleidoscopic seaside pleasure dome of architect Chet Callahan, his husband, finance executive Jacinto Hernandez, and their teenage sons, Hernan and Noe. Much of the design’s strange alchemy can be ascribed to the split personality of the program. The house functions as both an intimate family getaway and a polychromatic playground for more adult divertissements. “We wanted to create a home that radiates happiness, a place that celebrates queer and BIPOC art, family, and community,” says Callahan, principal of the LA-based firm Chet Architecture.
AD100 interior designer Oliver Furth, a friend of the homeowners, expanded the conceptual foundation of the project by injecting the homage to queer culture with a dose of twisted Americana. “Chet and Jase’s original inspiration was the gay utopia captured by Tom Bianchi in his seminal photographs of Fire Island—really more for mood than specific aesthetic direction,” Furth explains. “I wanted to layer in references to classic 19th- and 20th-century American design, but used in a slightly subversive way.”
Callahan and Hernandez acquired the modest ’80s house during the COVID lockdown, when their boys were learning to surf on this same stretch of Ventura coastline. “We looked at a lot of modern boxes. Frankly, I thought Chet would hate this place. Everything was painted beige,” Hernandez recalls. Callahan, however, saw potential. “You enter the house through this romantic courtyard, and you hear the cracking of the waves. I liked the angled ceilings and the quirkiness. I grew up in a Southern California tract home built at the same time, so there was something familiar and nostalgic about this place,” the architect adds. Callahan fine-tuned the structure by expanding windows and doors, opening sight lines, and adding cedar to the ceilings in a subtle nod to the oceanside cottages of The Sea Ranch farther north up the California coast.
Furth elaborated his vision of recontextualized Americana with variations on the theme of patchworks and quilts, most notably in the Heath Ceramics tiles that blanket the floors on the house’s first level, which morph in color and pattern as they move from room to room. To punctuate the theme, actual quilts crafted by Callahan’s mother, Lee Ann, are laid on beds and stacked in baskets throughout the home. “What better way to symbolize diversity and coming together than patchwork?” Furth ponders.
Continuing down the American path, the daybed that Callahan and Furth designed to mediate between the living and dining rooms was modeled on Thomas Jefferson’s archetypal double-facing bed niche at Monticello. “It’s magnetic, the place everybody wants to be, including the dogs,” Hernandez notes. The surf bath by the pool best exemplifies the flip side of the home’s dual nature. Callahan centered the room on two organic partitions with a built-in sink and shelving, all clad in Max Lamb’s curvaceous Working Tile for the Japanese maker Tajimi. Floating in a sea of floor-to-ceiling, marine-blue square tiles, the ceramic partitions feel like abstracted coral reefs. “We think of this bath as a social space, like a locker room, with an undertone of gay kink culture,” Callahan says of the eye-popping design.
Riotous color is the through line that binds the home’s indoor and outdoor spaces. The living room features a built-in corner window seat upholstered in no fewer than 10 different high-performance fabrics in syncopated shades of yellow—a tip of the hat to the great Roy McMakin, described by Furth as “the OG design subverter.” Also in the living room, a hefty, forest-green Max Lamb cocktail table is flanked by voluptuous sofas dressed in a Pierre Frey velvet depicting a Persian landscape inhabited by tigers, gazelles, flamingos, and herons, all set beneath a hanging fluorescent light sculpture by Thaddeus Wolfe. A 19th-century American sponge-painted chest adds a surprising off-note to the jazzy ensemble. “We chose a few strategic antiques to add a bit of gravitas to the otherwise contemporary tableaux,” the designer says.
Callahan and Hernandez are passionate art collectors, particularly in the queer and BIPOC space, and the house is awash in signature works by Mickalene Thomas, June Edmonds, Fred Wilson, Danny Ferrell, Leilah Babirye, and others. In the entry, artworks by Betye Saar and Nina Chanel Abney bracket a column wrapped in hand-beaded scales, which the homeowners commissioned from their friend Simon Haas of Haas Brothers. A multimedia text piece by Jeffrey Gibson perhaps best encapsulates the guiding spirit of the project. Made of acrylic, glass beads, and artificial sinew, the message on the 2020 painting reads “THEY CHOOSE THEIR FAMILY.”
This story appears in the March issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.
