With our Book Club series, we hand over the proverbial mic to our Experts—letting them share their work, thought process, and tips in their own words. The following is an excerpt from Rodman Primack’s book Love How You Live, published this month with Monacelli.

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My first-ever clients—discounting, of course, my sister’s pioneering Barbie dolls—were a couple, Anne and Dudley DeZonia.

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They had a beautiful neo-regency house from 1928 maintained, unusually for Southern California, in pristine condition. Though Anne and Dudley and I come from different generations, we all have deep roots in California. Dudley grew up next door to my mother—unbelievably, we found this out only after we’d started to work together—in the Quaker community of Whittier, famous for having given us M.F.K. Fisher and infamous for Nixon. Anne’s father, meanwhile, had been the first city judge in Santa Monica, where she grew up. With our shared histories, we were able to take the kind of risks that have since, I think, come to define my practice. We hired David Wiseman, recently out of RISD, to spend nearly a year on a scaffold, installing the first of the plaster-and-porcelain ceilings that have since become his calling card. We shopped at flea markets and auction houses. Anne and Dudley found a bundle of exquisite antique sudare in Japan, which I used to make my ideal bathroom shades. And I designed my first textile—a floral pattern based on Iznik tiles—for the curtains of their generous sitting room. That house shaped me; there are few projects I’ve loved more. And so it’s fitting that my most recent project would bring the three of us back together, this time in Ojai, one of the few places left in Southern California that even my grandmother might recognize.

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The Ojai basin is a blessed place, a quiet agricultural valley ringed by the Topatopa Mountains about ten miles inland from the Pacific. The whole valley still smells of orange blossoms, and the hills flush pink each evening when the sun sinks below the horizon. So many American vacation towns (I won’t name them, but you can guess which) have fallen into a careless kind of placelessness, shaped as they are by extravagant wealth unconstrained by a rooted community. Ojai is not that kind of place.

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Here, in the heart of this old California, the DeZonias found a clapboard farmhouse from 1890 surrounded by twenty acres of citrus, avocado, and oak. Now formally protected as a historic landmark, the house had undergone some unfortunate renovations in the early 1980s—unnecessary room divisions, an unthinkable wall-to-wall white shag carpet—that we needed to erase. To make those changes, we brought on the architect Odom Stamps, a New Orleans native who brings that city’s inherent instinct for the good life to everything he does. And though Anne and Dudley were, of course, committed to restoring the house to its original state, none us wanted a stuffy period-perfect interior. This was California, after all, which means so many things to so many people, but for us fundamentally suggests a place where beauty is easy and “nice” things—surely a concept imported from the fusty East Coast—could sit coolly alongside a pair of dirty shoes, muddy from an afternoon spent picking figs. It meant nostalgia, yes, but nostalgia for a place that has always stubbornly (and perhaps naively) turned its face toward the future, squinting blindly into the boundless sun.

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At its heart and at its best, California is all about the generative spirit of cultures and traditions that clash and blend with gleeful abandon. The Los Angeles of my childhood was a city of pastiche, a place where mock Tudors, Cape Cods, craftsman bungalows, and Monterrey Mission–style mansions sat unselfconsciously on the same aspirational block and where big neon signs advertised “Lox and Chow Mein” in the San Gabriel Valley. California is a place where subcultures—surfers, hippies, Hollywood types, tech types—evolve, for better and sometimes for worse, into entire ways of being. The Ojai house would encapsulate those Californias as well as our many shared passions: for entertaining, for art, for objects; for travel and clothes and food and gardens. I would gladly live in this house myself. The view from the front porch, looking out over miles of orange groves to the distant Sierra Madre, is what comes reflexively to mind whenever I miss California, which is often. Designing this house has been an almost Proustian exercise, full of McGuire bamboo furniture—de rigueur for any house that my grandmother and her friends would have deemed “pretty” (high praise)—and original pool chaises from the Beverly Hills Hotel.

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There’s a touch of sentimentality to it all, but it’s not only that. The contemporary artist Francesca DiMattio made a neo-baroque porcelain chandelier for the dining room, along with an extraordinary fireplace mantle and sconces. David Wiseman is currently working on an immersive installation for the powder room, the young Mexican design office Paraphernalia made us a suite of outdoor furniture to place under the pergola. Anne’s dear friend in Paris, Marie Christophe, made an extraordinary beaded pagoda lantern for the garden cabana. There are antique Delft tiles in the kitchen and a hooked Portuguese rug for the master bedroom and yards of vintage Le Manach printed cottons for the guest room. A bronze nymph by the artist Claude Lalanne, which we acquired together all those years ago for the first house in Hancock Park, has traveled the long distance to Ojai to look over the patio, a guardian from our shared past. The whole thing is warm and gentle and inclusive, worldly but modest—a place of abundance for these lifelong Californians who love nothing more than to feel the fertile earth firmly below their feet.

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Order Love How You Live, for more tips, or book a consultation with Rodman Primack to get personalized advice for your space.

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