Explore an Idyllic Ojai Refuge That’s a West Coast Love Letter
Designer Rodman Primack and homeowner Anne Crawford, both fifth-generation Californians, craft a tribute to their home state
By Mayer Res
Is it possible to look forward and backward at the same time? Judging by the unabashedly romantic, idiosyncratic home of Anne Crawford and Dudley DeZonia, the idea of reaching for the past while keeping an eye on the future is not only possible but, in this case, preferable. The couple’s historic Ojai refuge makes an eloquent case for the inspired coalescence of nostalgia and contemporary brio. “Rodman and I have always bonded around conversations about what constitutes an authentic idea of California—what it means to live in a way authentically connected to the land and history,” Crawford says, referring to her friend and longtime design collaborator Rodman Primack of the AD100 firm RP Miller. “This project was our attempt to reclaim the spirit of old California in a way that feels fresh and modern,” she adds. Primack seconds the notion: “Ojai is a truly special place, a remnant of what California felt like 40 or 50 years ago. We tried to honor the past, especially in the architectural restoration, but we didn’t want it to feel like a movie set.”
The homage to the Golden State isn’t just an artificial conceptual gimmick. Crawford, a longtime Los Angeles tastemaker and former brand ambassador for fashion titans Rick Owens and Roger Vivier, is a fifth-generation Californian, as is Primack. Her husband, a retired entrepreneur, also has deep roots in the state. In fact, DeZonia grew up two doors away from Primack’s mother in the city of Whittier. In 2019, just months before COVID turned the world upside down, the couple fortuitously decamped from LA and purchased 20 acres in Ojai, where Crawford had attended summer school when she was a child. The property encompasses the main residence, built in 1910 by the scion of an early Ojai land developer and citrus farmer, along with a late-19th-century farmhouse and barn, all set among avocado and orange groves.
Crawford and DeZonia both rave about Ojai’s storied metaphysical energy, said to draw its power as a spiritual vortex from the geomagnetic force of the Topatopa Mountains. Originally settled by the Native American Chumash people, the land has long attracted seekers of sanctuary and spiritual uplift, from the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti and the American artist and potter Beatrice Wood to a current crop of Hollywood heavyweights eager to find refuge from the tumult of Tinseltown. “Life here is happily unhurried and stress-free. The energy is real,” DeZonia affirms.
When the time came to renovate their new home, Crawford and her husband naturally turned to Primack, who had worked with the couple many years earlier to reimagine their Roland Coate–designed Colonial Revival house in LA’s Hancock Park, long a gathering spot for Southern California’s beau monde. “Rodman and I speak the same language. We hate the same things,” Crawford explains, describing their shared aesthetic as “quirky, playful, and irreverent.” (Primack’s first book, Love How You Live: Adventures in Interior Design, coauthored with his partner, Rudy Weissenberg, launches in October.) For the architectural aspects of the rehabilitation, they collaborated with Odom Stamps of the Pasadena-based firm Stamps & Stamps. Leland Walmsley, founder of Santa Barbara’s Evergreen Landscape Architects, rounded out the project team.
Crawford is an inveterate collector, a hunter-gatherer par excellence, and her home is a testament to decades spent amassing oddities and objets de vertu of every stripe. “I love looking, and I’m very good at narrowing word searches and finding treasures,” she says of her adventures across the wide spectrum of online design resources. “Rodman is such a good visual editor. He’s able to separate the wheat from the chaff. When I send him a picture of something and I don’t get a reply, that’s my cue to move on,” she continues.
The decorative mix in the living room hints at the dexterity and catholic scope of Crawford’s and Primack’s tastes. There’s a classic Senufo bird sculpture alighting beside a massive tramp art secretary; back-to-back emerald-green sofas by T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings mingling amicably with twee skirted swivel chairs and hippie mushroom stools; and a seriously weird, wonderful, Chinese-inflected French games table and chairs painted in a pinkish-orange shade called Habanero Chile. In the adjacent dining room, the walls are wrapped in a collection of framed 19th-century botanical specimens, and a sensational chandelier by contemporary ceramic artist Francesca DiMattiohangs above a Hans Wegner table with George Nakashima chairs. Prized possessions such as an antique antler chair from the estate of Madeleine Castaing and a jade tree sculpture formerly owned by Doris Duke pepper the toothsome decorative olio.
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