Though England’s pastoral countryside and California’s wine region could hardly be further apart, a Los Altos–based family with British roots set out to unite the two in their Sonoma Valley retreat. Seeking the charm of a Cotswolds farmhouse amid vineyard-dappled hills, they enlisted Aimee Kirby of Ferox Studio and Mariam Mollaghaffari of Mariam Grace Design.
From the outset, the property’s secluded setting—tucked away from the main road and overlooking Sugarloaf Mountain—appealed to the clients, who imagined creating a retreat for their multigenerational family. But the original house, which one of the homeowners calls a “Santa-Fe-meets-log-cabin” structure, fell short of her vision with its orange-hued wood, plaster, and slate floors. “It felt very out-of-context for the area,” Mollaghaffari says.
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To address that disconnect, Kirby, whose practice spans landscape design and interior design, and Mollaghaffari, a licensed architect with a multidisciplinary studio, drew on their respective backgrounds to transform the outdated interiors into an airy, family-centric home that Kirby says “made more sense and felt of place.”
Above all, the home needed to strike a balance between discrete spaces tailored to the interests and needs of different family members and generous communal areas where they could come together. “A lot of the intention was around how to make the home comfortable for the people in her family,” says Mollaghaffari.
So the designers sought to open up the house and foster more fluid connections between indoors and outdoors, while also infusing the interiors with the warmth and intimacy evocative of the English cottages the clients had experienced in the Cotswolds. Kirby and Mollaghaffari carved out rooms for privacy and quiet, and they created spaces that the client says are “dedicated to the pursuit of creativity and mindfulness,” including a teahouse and an arts and crafts studio for the children.
“It was trendy for a while to have big, open great rooms, but the client very much liked smaller rooms,” says Mollaghaffari. “I think we’ve been able to create rooms that truly have their own identity.”
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Before any of that could happen, Kirby says, they had to contend with the home’s counterintuitive layout and a host of idiosyncrasies, including an inordinate number of doors and undesirably low ceilings. “There was this disjointedness in the way that a user might walk through and experience the space as well as the materiality that preexisted,” she says.
The house’s spatial constraints called for a series of structural interventions. In the kitchen, Mollaghaffari notes they raised the ceiling by roughly a foot and a half and introduced sliding glass doors by Rimadesio to gracefully separate the dining room from the living area and kitchen while preserving uninterrupted sight lines. Once the more complex architectural adjustments were completed, Kirby and Mollaghaffari turned their attention to the details.
Though each room is designed to feel distinct, warm colors, luxuriant textures, and soft lighting carry throughout the house. In the living area, an oversized green Kevin sofa by Studio Valle de Valle curves around a sculptural coffee table by Brooklyn designer Minjae Kim. Just a few steps away, the kitchen’s design nods to the clients’ British heritage, with cabinets coated in Benjamin Moore’s Cottage Red, paired with Calacatta Viola marble countertops and backsplash, and patinated brass fixtures. Saturated colors and light-hued woods continue from the kitchen into the dining room, where deep blue walls offset vintage Henning Kjærnulf chairs and a wood-and-ceramic pendant by Jessica Helgerson for Roll & Hill.
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Integrating the house with its landscape—and framing the views—was a key priority, Kirby says. In the living room, the team built out a picture window. On winter days, the family often cozies up by the fireplace in one of Jake Arnold’s classic curved armchairs. Outside, a new shaded structure—complete with a built-in limestone fireplace and a large vintage farm table—has become a favorite summertime spot for the family to start their days, thanks to the view of Sugarloaf Mountain.
Some of the home’s most personal spaces unfold outdoors. The clients can lounge on the Meridiani bed beside the recently reclad pool, read in the shade of the pergola, or sip on Earl Grey in the teahouse—a structure custom-designed for the client’s mother, who loves tea ceremonies and tending to her garden. “[The teahouse] was a surprise, so we did it all in a clandestine way, and then her mom came and they revealed it to her,” recalls Kirby. “It was really exciting to be a part of something that was such a heartfelt project.”
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