One of the most impressive commissions for the AD100 AD100 designer did not occur. A few years ago, the Los Angeles-based interior designer and founder of The Expert received a message on Instagram — where he has 273,000 followers — from someone who was building a house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “I totally ignored it,” Arnold admits. “I thought this person was crazy. I don’t respond.” And he didn’t.
Soon, the messenger and receiver met IRL. “I went out to dinner one night in Los Angeles, and this guy came up to me and said, ‘I texted you about my house, and you never wrote to me again!”‘ Arnold recalls. The potential client turned out to be a successful hotel developer who hired Peter Papadopoulos of Smith & More architecture firm Palm Beach to build his young family’s 10,000-square-foot canal-side plot in a gated enclave in Fort Lauderdale.
Arnold was intrigued.
“The homeowner has a passion for design,” says Arnold, who had fond memories of his childhood winter vacations in Miami, although he had not previously worked in Florida. Inspired by the Bermudian architecture of Alice Beach, Arnold recalls the stucco-clad, white five-bedroom home, a new urban community on the Florida wagon. “It felt completely different than anything I had done before.”
The waterfront of the house, planted with palm trees, bougainvillea, jasmine and sea grapes, makes one feel like [they]We’re on vacation 24/7, which is exactly what the clients wanted,” adds Arnold.
The idea of total relaxation, tropical, on a vacation level, was Arnold’s overall inspiration for the house, which the architects designed for indoor and outdoor living and recreation. While working with the owners, he started teasing more details.
The couple found the formal form of traditional Palm Beach and British Caribbean architecture attractive, but wanted Arnold to soften this with the calm, serene vibe he creates in his California projects. The husband liked contemporary Belgian simplicity in neutral colours, while the wife, Arnold noted, had a personal style that was more detailed, colorful, and dramatic.
Arnold took these various cues and twirled them into a comfortable and fun enough scheme that stretches from the look of a highly styled beach bungalow or seaside cabana across the entire space of the house. The color contrast is low, the materials are natural, and the surfaces are matte or polished. The interior rooms blend seamlessly with the outdoor areas, while the greenery surrounding those outdoor spaces inspires the interior décor. Notable moments in texture and scale make whimsical catchphrases here and there, but not a single element steals from Arnold’s calm and simple composition.
“They didn’t want to feel anything so precious,” says the designer, who used interior architecture to help set the barefoot-chic comfort zone. Throughout, the high ceilings were dressed in lemon-washed cypress, and used a tone similar to the fine, hand-applied plaster on the walls. He softened the traditional formality of raised panel doors with more lime wash, and added gentle ogee curves above the wide openings that connect one open-plan room to the next. (Arnold says Arch would have felt “too Spanish.”)
The spacious entrance, with its light winding stair and checkerboard floor, gives way to a spacious open area containing seating, dining and kitchen areas. To accentuate the floaty woodland palette largely, Arnold used pale but moody—waterscape-inspired—hues for the cabinets, a coffee table with a raw stone slab flooring, and stone-washed linen throws on the slouchy, understitched sofas.
“The clients wanted everyone to feel really livable and effortless, and to look good, even if it wasn’t completely organized,” Arnold says. Elsewhere, Arnold was glowing in soft green inspired by the lush surroundings. Vineyards from de Gournay paper climb the dining room walls, while mossy olive pillows atop a bamboo daybed in the base suite. Elsewhere, a velvet sofa backed by a scallop in a similar color occupies a niche under an oversized Atelier Vime pendant in the library, and the study is adorned with palm trees from Claremont wallpaper.
Overall, the house conveys the sense that any resident or guest can step out of the pool in a wet swimsuit and towel, go inside, and sit anywhere they like without feeling anything out of place—”which is exactly what I would do,” Arnold notes.