Oak Group founder Ray Strong’s Mission Canyon home receives a remarkable renovation by its new owner, interior designer Sheri Mize.
Sheri stumbled across Ray Strong’s Mission Canyon home, “just waiting for someone with a vision and lots of patience.” Ray Strong was 101 when he died, leaving his home and studio in disrepair. It took a year and a half for Sheri to renovate the home, and she is still in the ongoing process of refining the interior spaces.
Sheri Mize’s design path began when she became a visual display artist with May Co. Bullock’s and Broadway department stores. With a keen interest in all aspects of design, she later became an assistant fashion director for Bullock’s La Habra and a fashion coordinator and instructor at La Belle Agency in Santa Barbara. She has been a full time interior designer for the past 12 years, with an emphasis on clean, uncontrived, easy rooms that make visitors immediately comfortable. Editing, updating and creating new environments while keeping the personality of the client is paramount. Sheri welcomes the challenge of reorganizing spaces, often recycling and updating elements in a room and striving to create interiors that are timeless. This challenge was especially apparent while renovating her new home and garden.
Sheri’s love of gardening prompted her to use the exterior as an extension of the home, creating outdoor garden rooms with interesting gates, textural walkways, and soothing water features.“I love the idea of plant material in front of a backdrop of dark which really makes the greens pop, the flowers showy. I took the colors from the natural concrete floor in the studio and blended them with the bark of the huge oak tree in the front.”
”The house color is actually the color deep inside the bark and the silvery trim is called ‘Concrete’. It also had to blend well with the silver tin roof, which I selected because it keeps the house cooler in the summer and when it rains, the sound is marvelous” Sheri explains.
Sheri often takes her cues from artwork and likes to use local artists in her design projects. Hugh Margerum’s work on paper creates a striking focal point in the kitchen. The large-scale abstract is a hand-pulled original printed at the Tullis Studio, known for their massive presses.
The interior colors on the kitchen walls and cabinets are the same color as the exterior. Sheri wanted the outside to come inside as much as possible since the main house is quite small. The dark exterior walls run visually right into the kitchen. The interior paint by Donald Kaufman is a full spectrum paint known for its luminosity.
Boldly patterned pillows by Tessuti Bartoli bring interest to the living room. “Doug Bartoli was a close friend of mine,” Sheri explains. ”Sadly, he passed away 5 years ago. He was a fabulous interior designer here in town since the early 80’s. In both his home across from the Mission and his downtown studio, he lived the true SB lifestyle with artistic flair. He developed a hand printed fabric line, drawing each pattern himself. He used hemps and linen and patterned them after the decorative, natural elements we see all over Santa Barbara.”
The Ray Strong mural behind the bed in the master bedroom was originally used as a diorama in the Natural History Museum Bird Hall. According to artist Larry Iwerks, it was disassembled and given back to Ray in the late 80’s. Strong moved to Santa Barbara in 1960 for “the birds and the banks”. He had been commissioned to paint the dioramas in the Bird Hall of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, as well as murals for local banks. Strong stayed in Santa Barbara after the commissions were completed, and refined his landscape painting technique. He went on to become a leading member of the group of plein air painters known as “The Oak Group”
The property had several different levels since it is set on a slope. Sheri created four different courtyards that connect and anchor the various buildings to the main house.
For her design studio, Sheri salvaged wooden pickets from a fence surrounding the property and lined the inside of her studio wall, keeping the warm, cream color as her pallet. Pickets were placed in a running bond pattern on the vertical and in their natural state. The original garage door on the studio was recycled and used as a barn-style sliding door.
“Workers who were repairing the deck just outside the studio pulled back some boards and found Ray Strong’s pallet. They had been instructed not to throw anything away unless I saw it first, so they had all been on red alert for anything that looked interesting. They chased me down and hollered ‘look what I found’ holding up this muddy, filthy painting pallet. I could see the beautiful colors of turquoise blues coming through, and immediately ran and washed it. What a prize!”
Beyond the studio, a path leads to a guest house with a private garden and courtyard. A shed in the back portion of the property stored Ray Strong’s paintings and is currently used as a garden shed.
“My goal during the whole building process was to use recycled building material from the property. I used the windows from the art studio and reinserted them in my office, which originally was the painting storage area in the studio. The front door of the main house became the door entry to a courtyard.” What Sheri couldn’t find from existing on-site materials, she located at local salvage yards, finding old wooden gates used in the gardens. The side courtyard wooden walls were two salvaged garage doors from a farm in Carpinteria. The interior doors were hand-picked from the Roger Cota’s Salvage Yard (just up from the Paradise Café) as well as two truck-loads of old barn beams.
”I like to imagine that Ray Strong would be quite content in this new setting. I wanted to honor the simplicity of his home and the Mission Canyon philosopy of maintaining natural, casual surroundings. The mailbox on the drive still lists Ray Strong’s name and I plan to leave it as a reminder of the history of this very special place. I feel so fortunate to have landed here.” Sheri comments.
Las Encinas Design Studio
2774 Las Encinas Road West
Santa Barbara, CA 93105-2924
Sheri Mize 805. 962.1566
Sources:
Hugh Margerum
Tesstuti Bartoli Fabrics/ contact Sheri Mize for samples and ordering.
http://www.tessuti-bartoli.com/index.php?p=gallery
Architectural Antiques and Salvage/Roger Cota
726 Anacapa Street Santa Barbara
805.965.2446
