When her young family started to outgrow their old house, a classic midcentury-modern gem in Beachwood Canyon, Brynn Jones Saban was in denial. A few months into the pandemic, raising a baby under age one (son Odin is now four-and-a-half), it became clear to Jones Saban, a vintage-clothing dealer, and her husband, Ness Saban, who is the vice chairman of his family’s investment firm, that they might need to find a new place to call home. The house may have been perfect during their 20s, but it lacked storage space and didn’t have a yard, both growing concerns for the couple, who planned on having more kids. “We were already kind of bursting at the seams,” Jones Saban says.
But when she toured a 1920s English Tudor on the market in LA’s Los Feliz neighborhood, a new beginning didn’t seem so daunting. “There’s a coziness to the whole flow of the house,” Jones Saban said. “It just felt like a home for a family.” The couple enlisted Frances Merrill, founder of the AD100 firm Reath Design, to mastermind a refresh of the interiors. There was no question who Jones Saban was going to collaborate with—she had worked with Merrill nearly a decade earlier on her previous home after a referral from a family friend, when the designer had first struck out on her own after working for Commune Design. “Our taste really clicked,” Jones Saban says of their immediate synergy. “We appreciate the same kinds of colors and patterns and eclectic mix of things.”
When the house was purchased, its bones were solid, but the interiors were monochrome and sterile. There were white walls aplenty, Merrill recalls, including one that had been installed during an earlier renovation to hide a pair of stained glass windows in the bar area. “We were like, ‘Well, that’s crazy,’” she says with a laugh. So, one of her mandates was to restore the home’s innate charm—while drawing the line between honoring the history without turning it into a period piece.