Commune transforms an old wooden house into a light-filled home

California Dreamin': how a family from New York moved west - and together with Commune breathed new life into an old redwood house.

The whole family gathers in the airy living room. The sofas, one dressed in leather by Keleen, the other in teddy mohair by Pierre Frey, are custom-made by Commune. The brass and walnut table is by Alma Allen, the rug by Amadi Carpets. Trevor Tondro

Old house, new life: Jennifer Doebler and Pat Kelly moved their daughters Scarlett (left) and India from the East Coast to Berkeley, 4600 miles away. Judy Kameon took care of the garden design, while Commune designed the interior of the house.

Jennifer Doebler and Pat Kelly were looking for a new adventure. A few years ago, the two pharmaceutical executives decided to get serious, give up their apartment in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, and start a new life in Berkeley, California, with their young daughters, Scarlett and India. They had long been drawn to the San Francisco Bay, and were looking forward to trading the rough streets of New York for the green hills and progressive milieu of Berkeley. "It seemed like the ideal place to watch our daughters grow up," Doebler explains. "Plus, there are still a lot of great old houses here in Berkeley that weren't messed up in the 1980s."

Her choice was an archetypal Northern California redwood house, built in 1915 in the style of the First Bay tradition typical here, which combines elements of East Coast clapboard construction with Anglo-Saxon Arts and Crafts. The house was to be brought up to present-day standards by New York architect Liesl Geiger-Kincade. Her sensitive renovation stuck closely to the original design and, most importantly, stabilized the foundation; after all, Berkeley is in an active earthquake zone. Work on the house took a year, then the family finally packed up and moved west.

Passive lighting: the redwood display cases in the dining room were lined with mirrored glass and shine iridescently back into the room. The sideboard covered in aquamarine leather was discovered by the Commune designers at BDDW, and they combined classic Windsor chairs with it.

The First Bay Tradition has many qualities - quality craftsmanship, volumetric sweep, organic connections with the landscape - yet there's something brooding, often a bit sinister, about it. "Bringing light into this house was our highest-priority brief," recalls Roman Alonso of Commune, the Los Angeles design firm hired to create the interiors. "Some of the rooms were like caves. We had to take the darkness out of them before we could even think about furniture." The mix of unpretentious bohemian chic and vibrant contemporary esprit for which Commune is famous had long appealed to Doebler and Kelly. "We bought our first Commune furniture about ten years ago, and a lot of images from the studio ended up on our mood boards for the house," Doebler says. "The cornerstones of the project," her husband adds, "emerged naturally, from Wiener Werkstätte to Scandinavian design."

But in the beginning, there was light. Above the entry, atrium and staircase, Alonso and his team installed discreet daylight shafts. And in the dining room, wallpaper primed with shimmering gold foil now clads the walls. Mirrors with wavy patterns brighten the interior of the original redwood fixtures; a trick the designers borrowed from Josef Hoffmann. Incidentally, the same architect who co-founded the Wiener Werkstätte in 1903 also designed the "Moldauer" wall lamps made of brass and covered with silk. They complement the finely composed polyphony of table and floor lamps that illuminate the spacious living room. The Commune designers, on the other hand, largely dispensed with ceiling lamps - out of respect for the house.

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