While a renovation usually begins as a purely professional exercise, this one carried a quieter personal resonance for Taylor Hahn. The Strada Vecchia residence was a Japanese-inspired home built for its Japanese owners, and Hahn, who is part Japanese herself, approached its renovation with a cultural fluency that most commissions never ask for. Alongside House of Rolison co-principal Amanda Leigh, she was tasked with carrying forward a home that already meant something, updating it without erasing the sensibility that shaped it.
On a hillside with views of Bel Air all the way to the Pacific Ocean, the home’s most meaningful design decision was not made inside. While the interiors received the expected treatment, House of Rolison’s real intervention was topographic, a network of walking trails linking the pool terrace to the guest quarters across the natural grade of the property. In most renovations, landscape is an afterthought scaled to a budget that survived the interior scope. Here, Leigh and Hahn treated the terrain as another room in the house, with its own program, sequence, and purpose.
The original home, a Japanese-inspired retreat with ocean-facing glass walls, featured architecture that doesn’t end at the threshold. The renovation needed to carry that same logic outside rathern than simply protecting what was already there. As a result, paths were created to encourage slowing down; they were designed to bend with the land instead of slicing through it, turning a walk to the guest house into a relaxing ritual.
Instead of treating health as an amenity to install, the principals let it govern the substance of the house. Bathrooms gained integrated benches, while a scattering of intimate nesting spaces offer pockets for retreat throughout the space. The team refused synthetic and off-gassing finishes in favor of materials that age honestly, with the belief that a surface should record its own weathering rather than resist it. They layered tumbled limestone, natural clay plaster, handcrafted marble, and hand-chiseled stone—all of which improve with contact and time, developing a soft patina.
The furnishing layer follows the same restraint. A furnishing layer drawn from Bocci, Larose Guyon, Lee Broom, and Olive Ateliers, Arhaus, Kalamazoo Gourmet Kitchens, and Zia Tile elaborates the palette without competing with it. The result is less a renovation than a continuation, a house updated for how the family lives now without losing what made it worth keeping.
Photography by Nils Timm.
