Fort Lauderdale: Tour a Lush Home Designed by AD100 Talent Jake Arnold | Architectural Summary

One of AD100 designer Jake Arnold the most impressive recent commissions have hardly taken place. A few years ago, the Los Angeles-based decorator and co-founder of The expert received a message on Instagram – where he has 273,000 followers – from someone who was building a house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “I totally ignored it,” admits Arnold. “I thought, ‘This person must be crazy. I don’t answer.’ And he didn’t.

Shortly after, however, the messenger and recipient met IRL. “I’m going out to dinner one night in Los Angeles, and this guy comes up to me and says, ‘I texted you about my house, and you didn’t get back to me!'” Arnold recalled. The potential client turned out to be a successful hotel developer who had hired Peter Papadopoulos from the Palm Beach architecture firm Smith and Moore to build his young family a 10,000 square foot canal-side home in a gated enclave of Fort Lauderdale.

Arnold was intrigued.

“The owner has a passion for design,” says Arnold, who had fond memories of winter vacations in Miami, even though he had never worked in Florida before. “He showed me the blueprints for the house, and it was amazing,” Arnold recalled of the white, stucco-clad, stepped-roofed five-bedroom home inspired by Bermuda architecture. Alys Beach, a New Urbanist community on Florida’s begging. “It was very different from anything I had done before.”

The house’s lush waterfront setting with palm trees, bougainvillea, jasmine and sea grapes gives the impression of being [they]I’m on vacation 24/7, which is exactly what customers wanted,” adds Arnold.

This idea of ​​complete, tropical, vacation-level relaxation served as Arnold’s primary inspiration for the home, whose architects had designed it for indoor and outdoor living and entertaining. As he worked with the owners, he began to provide more details.

The couple found the formality of traditional Palm Beach and British Caribbean vernacular architecture appealing, but they wanted Arnold to soften this with the cool, understated vibe he creates in his California projects. The husband liked contemporary Belgian minimalism in neutral hues, while the wife, Arnold noted, had a little more personalized, colorful and dramatic personal style.

Arnold took these various cues and twisted them into a casual, just-enough playful scheme that stretches the look of an upscale beach bungalow or coastal cabana across the entire square footage of the home. Color contrasts are low, materials are natural and surfaces are matt or softened. The indoor rooms blend seamlessly into the outdoor spaces, while the green surroundings of these outdoor spaces inspire interior design. Remarkable moments of texture and scale make subtly whimsical statements here and there, but no element steals Arnold’s soothing, understated composition.

“They didn’t want anything to feel precious,” says the designer, who used interior architecture to help create a relaxed, barefoot-chic scene. Throughout, he clad the high ceilings in whitewashed cypress and used a similar tone for the soft hand-applied plaster on the walls. He toned down the formality of the rather traditional two-panel high-profile doors with more whitewash, and added gentle ogee curves to top off the wide openings that connect one open-plan room to the next. (Arches, says Arnold, would have felt “too Spanish.”)

The expansive entrance, with its gently winding staircase and checkerboard floor, gives way to a spacious open space that contains seating, dining and kitchen areas. To accentuate the largely driftwood-toned palette, Arnold used pale but moody blues – inspired by water views – for cabinetry, an earthy, rough-edged stone slab coffee table, and slipcovers in faded linen on soft, understuffed sofas.

“Clients wanted everything to be really livable and effortless,” says Arnold, “and to look good, even if it wasn’t perfectly tidy.” Elsewhere, Arnold shot soft greens inspired by the lush surroundings. The vines of a from Gournay paper climbs up the walls in the dining room, while mossy olive throw pillows top a wicker daybed in the master suite. Elsewhere, a scalloped-back velvet sofa in a similar hue takes pride of place under dramatically oversized decor Vime workshop pendant in the bookcase, and the stylized palm trees of a Claremont wallpaper adorn the desk.

Overall, the house gives the impression that any resident or guest could walk out of the pool in a wet bathing suit and towel, walk in and sit wherever they please without ever feeling out of place – “which is exactly what I would do,” notes Arnold.