While a renovation usually begins with a stranger’s home, Taylor Hahn began this one with her own family’s home: a Strada Vecchia residence bound in generations of memory before it ever became a professional mission. Where most designers reach free to reinvent, Hahn (along with House of Rolison co-director Amanda Leigh) was tasked with moving a home that already meant something to the people who raised her.
Perched on a hillside overlooking Bel Air to the Pacific Ocean, the home’s most significant design decision wasn’t made inside. While the interiors received the expected treatment, the real intervention of the House of Rolison was topographical, a network of walking paths connecting the pool terrace with the hospitality areas throughout the natural quality of the property. In most renovations, landscaping is an afterthought scaled into a budget that has outlived the scope of the interior. Here, Leigh and Hahn treated the ground as another room in the house, with its own program, order and purpose.
The original home, a Japanese-inspired retreat with glass walls facing the ocean, featured architecture that didn’t end at the doorstep. The renovation had to bring that same logic out instead of just protecting what was already there. As a result, paths were created to encourage slowing down. they were designed to bend with the earth instead of slicing through it, turning the walk to the lodge into a relaxing ritual.
Instead of treating health as an amenity of installation, the principals let it rule the essence of the home. Bathrooms get built-in counters, while intimate nesting spaces scattered throughout offer pockets of retreat throughout. The team rejected synthetic and gasless finishes in favor of materials that age honestly, believing that a surface should record its own weathering rather than resist it. They laid folded limestone, natural clay plaster, hand-cut marble and hand-hewn stone – all of which improve with contact and time, developing a soft patina.
The furnishing layer follows the same constraint. A furnishing layer drawn from Bocce, Larose Guyon, Lee Broomeand Olive Ateliersamong other things, it edits the palette without competing with it. The result is less a renovation than a continuation, a home updated for how the family lives now without losing what made it worth keeping.
Photo by Nils Tim.
