Were it not for the view of the Los Angeles skyline through the living room windows, the Italianate house of interior designer Jed Lind and Jessica de Ruiter could easily be mistaken for a Montecito villa. A stately place like this, with its formal bones and towering junipers, is a rare event in Silver Lake, where the couple have been fixtures in the creative community for two decades.
Few project easy LA glamour more than they. After getting his master’s in fine arts from Cal Arts, Lind cut his teeth as part of the Commune team of the aughts before launching Jed Lind Interiors. His wife, a former fashion editor and stylist, is known for her meticulous but unpretentious sensibility. They’re bright and beautiful, love gardening and hiking, and have put down deep roots in the neighborhood, first living in a small bungalow and later a midcentury house. Then they discovered this 1937 residence, perched on a flat double lot atop a hill, with a proper pool and significant untapped potential.
“After our daughter was born, we would go on walks in the evening and pass by this house and wonder what was going down,” de Ruiter recalls of the property, originally designed by architect C. Raimond Johnson but by then, by Lind’s telling, “pretty run down.” Dubbed Villa del Lago, it would have felt more at home on the Riviera—American or even French—not in an urban community famous for its artists’ bungalows, Richard Neutra lore, and steep, narrow lots. Recognizing the rarity of such a find, the couple asked their real estate agent to let them know if the house ever came on the market. A few years later, he called with the news.
To some, the place might have seemed like an unsolvable puzzle, with a T-shaped plan carved into 20 or so awkward rooms and a nearly vertical driveway. For de Ruiter and Lind, the project felt intuitive. “We enjoy making sense of a layout,” he says. Their offer accepted, the couple would eventually, after living in the house as it was, embark on three-year renovation, Lind working through the home’s challenges with the patience and persistence of a true perfectionist. “We came up with a plan immediately and refined it through the process.”
Referencing the work of architects George Washington Smith and Irving Gill, two Southern California pioneers, Lind updated the floor plan—the upstairs level now anchored by three bedrooms and a family room, the downstairs a formal living room, intimate dining room, and expansive kitchen. (Architectural designer Chris Cahill collaborated on the update.) Surfaces tend toward the simple and timeless, with reclaimed terra-cotta brick, plaster walls, and deeply veined stone. “I try to draw aura out of materials,” Lind says.
The couple have furnished it slowly in their own resourceful way, mixing custom and contemporary pieces with auction finds, many of them Danish and Swedish antiques from Lief gallery. Crafted of solid marble, the primary bath’s 18th-century French tub had to be craned through the windows. For the double-height foyer, Lind worked with artist David Grieco to create a three-tier chandelier in the style of Alberto Giacometti. De Ruiter’s own finesse with organic shapes and natural materials, meanwhile, is evident in every corner of the house, from the Belgian slip-covered sectional to the playroom for their young son.
Outside, that steep driveway now wraps around the house at a reasonable grade, culminating in a stretch of gravel (Lind finds the crunch of tires on pebbles “welcoming”) and an arched porte cochere that leads to the garden. With the help of landscape designer Sandra A. Serrano, the neglected grounds have been reimagined as a SoCal version of an elegant European garden. Whereas previously the property had been without trees, save for a single Chinese elm and a few scraggly palms, it now brims with live oaks, cypresses, junipers, and pineapple guavas. Planted in swaths on the hillside is a mix of lavenders, plus sages and other California natives.
An unusual season of abundant rain after the initial planting has helped the garden mature faster than anticipated. And the house feels so fully integrated into its surroundings that it’s easy to forget its awkward years. In a full-circle moment, people will stop and admire the house during their own early evening walks, just as Lind and de Ruiter did years ago. “They leave little notes about how much they love the garden,” says de Ruiter. “That feels really nice.”
This story appears in the March issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.
