Such organization bore fruit when she encountered another design disaster recently added to the living room: an absurdly showy fireplace with twisted pilasters and a scarlet-and-black heraldic medallion. “Terrible,” Keaton calls it, and it sounded as if it had been borrowed from the set of some very bad movie. To find the type of fireplace she wanted, all she had to do was flip through one of her notebooks.
There, in her fireplace chapter, she found the image she wanted: a Spanish fireplace with a simple arched brick opening surrounded by plain white stucco. It seemed so appropriate that he repeated it in fireplaces in other rooms, including his bedroom and kitchen. “When Dianne finds something she likes, she uses it again and again,” says Shadley. “It’s a limited vocabulary, but it works well.”
Sometimes a rug or a painting sets the tone for the home. In this case, that straight arched chimney was the key. Once the look was established, everything else from colors to window treatments followed a similar path. The overall design was to be plain and simple, with a deep but not reverent feeling towards California’s Spanish heritage. “I wanted to bring the house back to its original simplicity,” says Keaton. “The simplicity felt authentic.”
In the living room, Spanish authenticity meant light gray floors and darkening ceiling beams. In the combined kitchen and family room, where Keaton spends most of her time, it meant the opposite. The room, which mirrors the water in the pool, was designed to be as light as possible. “It was very, very dark,” she says, “and I wanted to make it light and airy. I have two kids — DS. My daughter, Dexter, is 12 and a half, and my son, Duke, is seven. For kids, a house should be warm and livable — a place where you can move around, mess around, and enjoy your life.” Along with two kids bouncing around, Keaton also has two dogs, an old corgi she abandoned on the side of the road and a golden retriever she got from a rescue organization.
