Luxe Interiors + Design Winter 2011
TAILOR MADE
WRITTEN BY IRENE LACHER
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GREY CRAWFORD
One could sum up this contemporary home with a sweeping view of La Jolla Shores in a single word: Balance. The collaboration between architect William Hayer, of Hayer Architecture in Del Mar, and San Diego-based designer Fred Gemmell, of Matrix Design Studio, accomplishes a delicate dance between opposites: warm and cool materials, blustery nature and the serenity of home, husband and wife.
Indeed, when the couple–the owner of an investment company with offices in San Diego and Greenwich, Connecticute, and his wife, a full-time mother of four–came to the designers with a veritable tabula rasa, a vacant lot overlooking the Pacific Ocean, they presented a seemingly impossible task. The wife loved pure minimalism. “I could live in a cement box,” she jokes, but the husband wanted his living space to feel warm and inviting, not like a museum.