Construction Diary: In Los Angeles, a Couple Create a Multigenerational Haven

To create a new home for their family in Los Angeles, journalists Mariana van Zeller and Darren Foster knew they needed a flexible container. Their household includes their young son as well as Mariana’s elder father, and merges Mariana’s Portuguese heritage with the couple's deep history and love of L.A. 

When Mariana and Darren spotted the 1960s house on a hill overlooking Silver Lake Reservoir, they had a feeling it was the one. Many of the original midcentury details were intact, but the home was changed enough over time that they weren’t afraid of new interventions. Enlisting the help of local firm Loaf, Mariana and Darren embarked on a journey to transform the house into a place that reflects the idiosyncrasies of their family. 

"Without being overly honorific to any particular moment in time, we wanted to polish the house and bring it back to itself," says Alfie Koetter, co-founder and lead designer at Loaf alongside Luke Studebaker. For the interior revamp, the designers worked with Mariana and Darren to find light-touch changes that would make the house more functional, and more fun. Here, the team explains how they created a place that feels both personal and timeless. "None of us wanted the house to feel like it was of the present," recalls Mariana. "It needed to feel like it had history."  

Love at First Sight 

Mariana: We bought this Silver Lake house in 2020; at the time, we had just sold our previous home in Atwater Village. We finished escrow on the sale a week before lockdown, and we didn’t know what was going to happen, or where we would move next. Two weeks later, this house came on the market and we loved it. 

Darren: During the early days of Covid, you couldn’t visit houses in person, and there were only three or four pictures of this one online. But our realtor had been in the house 20 years prior, and knew it was a great house, so we decided to make an offer. 

Mariana: Once our offer was accepted, we were nervous—what if we got there and hated the house? But as soon as we stepped inside, we fell in love with it. It had good bones, but the downstairs was a disaster. It just didn’t work for our family the way it was divided up. We have a son named Vasco, and my father Eduardo also lives with us.  

We brought in Alfie and Luke to help with the renovation. We knew them  beforehand, and we love them. As soon as they walked in, they loved all the same historic details as us, and didn’t want to change it dramatically, but just make it better. 

Alfie: It’s a house that has a lot of history. It carries its identity from the 1960s, but it was also renovated in the 1990s, so it was sort of an archeological site of styles as they evolved over time.