A Sense of Place
September 1, 2008
When he was a kid growing up in the Hancock Park and Bel-Air areas of Los Angeles, Timothy Corrigan loved to make balsa-wood models of houses. "The interesting thing," says the Los Angeles– and Paris-based designer—who ended up specializing in restoring such properties as a 15th-century castle, a 17th-century monastery, and an 18th-century townhouse—"is that none of my houses were contemporary, they were all old styles." In college Corrigan was enamored by history, but because he didn’t feel his math skills were strong enough to major in architecture, he studied 18th-century English literature.
Then Corrigan went into advertising. "I wasn’t even on the creative side," he says with a laugh. "I was in account management." But several years after his company transferred him to Paris, he achieved one of his dreams, buying a 17th-century manor house in Normandy. "It was a wreck that had been in the same family for 400 years," he says, "and probably hadn’t been touched for 300 years." After Corrigan restored the house, friends and advertising clients started to ask him to redo their beloved old wrecks.
Preferring renovating to marketing, he quit his day job in 1995 and opened his own design firm the following year. "Anyone can start with a clean sheet of paper," he explains. "I find it more exciting to take something that represents an earlier way of living and figure out how to maintain its integrity and transform it for the way people live today."
In 1996, he tried his hand on a Montecito house that was only 75 years old, but certainly had history, starting with the fact that it belonged to the descendants of Alexander Hamilton. The night the home was originally completed, it was burned to the ground by an arsonist—allegedly because it had not been built with union labor—then it was rebuilt with an all-union workforce. It had mesmerized Corrigan since he was a child, when his parents had owned a home in Montecito. "It had these iron gates and a courtyard with a carved Italian wishing well in the center," he recalls, "and I always looked in and thought it was the most romantic-looking place."
When the property—inspired by Belcaro, an estate outside of Florence—finally came up for sale, Corrigan had just moved into another Montecito home. Curious, he went to take a look. "When I walked in," he says now, "I said, ‘I have to have this house.’ "
Because the previous owner—the daughter of the couple who built the home—had been living primarily in the staff section of the house, the main section was "a perfect gem, like a time capsule, with this incredible sense of history preserved in amber." The silk-velvet drapes from 1929 were almost flawless. The master bedroom’s bookshelves, obscured by easily removed smoke residue, were covered in silver leaf. And, painted within each of the living room ceiling’s 100 or so coffers was a different Italian family crest. "Someone had lain on his back, like Michelangelo, painting all those crests," says Corrigan. "There were little treasures hidden all over. I didn’t have to add any beautifulness to the house."
The era the house represented was also a big selling point. "What I loved was the sense that there was more time then," he says. "The subtleties of life had a greater importance than they do today. Now you send an e-mail, and if you don’t get an answer 10 minutes later, you think, What’s wrong that they didn’t answer me?" Of course, after Corrigan bought the house, he updated it by rewiring, replumbing, and adding air-conditioning.
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