Endless Summer

Interior designer Jeffrey Alan Marks and his husband, Greg, are serious summer chasers. They spend June through August in East Hampton and the rest of the year in Montecito, where they can walk to Butterfly Beach from their California cottage. The family home was designed with their daughter, James, in mind, while channeling the cozy countryside of England.

“You’d think it’s in the Cotswolds,” Marks says of the quintessential white clapboard home, surrounded by a white picket fence. Before he got his hands on it, the interiors were “Airbnb chic,” slathered in fresh white paint, yet dated for modern living. By taking the house down to the studs, he created a more modern plan, transforming four tiny rooms downstairs into one open living space. He enlisted Plain English Kitchens (who he’d worked with in London) to capture that Cotswolds-meets-California vibe and while low ceilings, iron lighting, and collected pottery read country, plenty of seaside greens and blues, oil paintings of harbors, and striped shades amp up the coastal, nautical feel.

Rather than doing a formal dining room, they opted for “bulletproof banquettes” done in spill-proof Perennials tartan fabric, wrapping around a custom wooden breakfast table. “James sits there every day and only once threw spaghetti on the white linen walls,” he laughs. Here, they kick their feet up on soft poufs and rest coffee cups and toys on rattan trays (all part of his line for Palecek). In the evenings they retire outside with their Labrador, Coal, around a firepit surrounded by transporting pine trees. “They’re what made me fall in love with the house,” says Marks, who admits he never had a real backyard before. “Here, it’s so nice to come home.”