Tour 9 Transportive Mediterranean Homes Featured by AD (2024)

European vacations may not last forever, but the peaceful beauty of the region can be conjured daily in Mediterranean homes. Though it may not be quite the same as living in close proximity to clear blue waters and charming olive tree orchards, these abodes do offer an appealing sense of calm grandeur for those of us living stateside. From Greek Revivals to Spanish Colonials to structures that simply employ stucco and red roof tiles, the nine AD-featured Mediterranean homes below illustrate the style’s transportive appeal.

Tommy and Dee Hilfiger’s Palm Beach Palace

Tommy and Dee Hilfiger are no strangers to waterfront living. For years the designer couple took respite at a Golden Beach, Florida, home with 100 feet of ocean frontage, and they continue to retreat to a vacation home on Mustique, where the estate’s swimming pool laps up against the sands of the Caribbean.

Still, when the duo decided to decamp from their residence in Greenwich, Connecticut (AD, March 2017), and make a full-time move to Palm Beach, Florida, last year, they pondered a new kind of frontier. “We fell in love with this home and the fact that it was on the lake and on the lake trail,” says Dee, referencing the west side of Palm Beach overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway, Lake Worth Lagoon.

The couple’s chief Palm Beach residence—how many people can say that?—is a 5,000-square-foot three-bedroom Mediterranean-style house built in 2006. There are columns and arched ceilings everywhere you look, along with plenty of courtyard nooks and verdant gardens. “We have a much more active lifestyle here,” says Tommy, who sold the Connecticut residence in addition to the family’s Miami and New York City places. “Exercising, tennis. In the Northeast, living in Greenwich, we were commuting in and out of the city. And we didn’t have the weather to be able to be outdoors a lot.” Adds Dee, “Palm Beach is so green and so lush year-round. Every time someone gives us an orchid plant, they’re never thrown out; they’re attached to a tree.”

The couple turned to AD100 designer Martyn Lawrence Bullard to help open up and reenvision the space. “We built the look around the location,” notes Dee. “Something fresh and easy. The palette: coral stone ivory. And it’s a beautiful Spanish/Mediterranean-style home, so Martyn brought in some Moorish accents, and we’ve also got splashes of blue and white.”—Ariel Foxman

A Tastefully Remodeled 1925 Spanish Colonial

“It looked like the Munsters’ house,” says Kent Belden, CEO and founder of creative management firm The Only Agency (stylists for the likes of Beyoncé, Anne Hathaway, and Lady Gaga are among the clients), who recognized his 1925 Spanish colonial home’s potential and purchased it with his husband, Louis Re, M.D. In 2019, the bicoastal couple tapped dear friend and frequent collaborator, AD100 designer Brigette Romanek, to transform it into a light-filled refuge for the modern age. “The first thing we did was trim back all of the overgrown trees and landscape, which immediately opened it up to all of this beautiful natural light.”

From there, they followed the sun and gutted the place, tearing out walls and ripping up floors, installing updated electrical, gas, and plumbing systems and contemporizing the interior spaces with a creative edge. “I wanted it to be a completely modern take on classic 1920s California-Spanish architecture,” Belden says. “The geometry of the house exudes old Hollywood glamour, the furnishings are modern European with a pop of 1970s rock and roll, and the kitchen is pure 21st century.” —Jennifer Fernandez

John Mellencamp’s Little White Montecito House

On his 1983 album, Uh-Huh, John Mellencamp sang, “Little pink houses for you and me, oh yeah, for you and me.” But, in 2022, the iconic musician is humming about a little white house in Montecito, California. The former ranch is positioned on one of the peaks of Santa Barbara’s Toro Canyon, a perch which yields bracing views all the way out to the Pacific Ocean. Situated on six acres, the retreat is a remote one.

Mellencamp recruited his roadies to redo the three-bedroom house in three weeks, repainting the interiors in fresh white (including the brick and the wood beams). A storage room was reimagined as an art studio for Mellencamp, whose paintings explore Americana through a lens influenced by the German expressionists of the 1900s.

As with his other homes (which include residences in Indiana and New York), Mellencamp collaborated with his friend of 45 years, Trevor Goff. Here, Goff recreated his signature lived-in interiors: masculine, shabby furnishings with scatterings of industrialized references (for example, the Ridley motorcycle in the living room). Some of the pieces were sourced from Mellencamp’s three warehouses of furniture in Bloomington, Indiana, while others were purchased from purveyors such as L.A.’s Big Daddy’s Antiques. “They have really odd, old, one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture,” Mellencamp explains. “Stuff you don’t see everywhere, [and] Trevor knows what I like.” —Elizabeth Quinn Brown

An Intentionally Mismatched Mission Revival

The work of Lucas Interior, a Seattle-based studio helmed by siblings Suzie and David Lucas, has been characterized by serene hues and sweeping yet spare architectural lines. If there is ever a sense of drama, it’s typically achieved purely through volume and geometry. But that’s not how the Lucases approached their latest project, a Spanish Mission Revival home in Palm Springs that packs a colorful punch. “Our clients told us to go crazy and that’s just what we did,” says Suzie Lucas, half-jokingly. “We even had to dial it back at one point.”

The clients, real estate developer Jim John and his husband, Craig Hartzman, an art collector and philanthropist, already owned two homes in the Pacific Northwest that were rather sober and minimalist. At their new California retreat, they wanted to embrace the artistic spirit and carefree ethos of Palm Springs, exploring color, pattern, and the art of mismatching.

“My husband wanted to preserve the old Spanish style of the house, but I grew up in Santa Barbara surrounded by terra-cotta and I really needed something different from that,” quips Hartzman. “Eventually, we said, ‘Let’s make it Spanish but on steroids.’” —Paola Singer

An Interior Decorator to the Stars’s Own Home

For all the possibilities afforded by an exhaustive, soup-to-nuts design project, sometimes the path of least resistance is the quickest road to domestic bliss. Interior designer Jeff Andrews’s temporary home in the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles is a case in point. After Andrews married casting director Ken Miller, the couple purchased a new home and began making plans for an elaborate renovation. While that multiyear endeavor unfolded, they moved into a classic L.A. 1930s Spanish-style duplex.

“The place was so simple, so beautiful. The original stenciled wood beams had a historic vibe that felt very peaceful and welcoming,” says Andrews, whose star-studded client list includes Lady Gaga, Kaley Cuoco, and a host of Kardashians and Jenners. “I just moved my stuff in and, miraculously, it all fit perfectly. I drank a lot of wine, shifted pieces around, played with the art hanging, and put a fresh eye on things I’ve owned for years,” he adds.

Andrews’s art collection—which includes dozens of abstract paintings by both pedigreed and anonymous artists, as well as a significant cache of contemporary photography—seems as if it were acquired specifically for the designer’s new home. “It was uncanny how comfortable and appropriate all the pieces felt in this space. The older works are closer to the period of the architecture, and the more contemporary pieces create a bit of welcome aesthetic tension.At the end of the day, I didn’t want to do a straight period interior ofanyparticular period,” Andrews says. —Mayer Rus

An Understated Hollywood Hills Home

Architect and decorator Daniel Romualdez designs Manhattan penthouses and Aspen chalets for the likes of Aerin Lauder and Eric Zinterhofer, Renee and Mark Rockefeller, and Gigi and Averell Mortimer—the ne plus ultra of American high society. It might seem unusual, then, to see him paired with a 33-year-old client whose budget, as Romualdez so candidly put it, “was a fraction of what we typically spend on a single room.” Yet the idea of stepping outside of his studio’s norm, not just in terms of demographic but also in terms of style, was highly appealing. “It’s important for me to work with young people; it keeps me fresh,” he says. “And I enjoyed the challenge of editing myself.”

The young client in question is Will Bennett, a real estate developer who met Romualdez five years ago while they were both working on 70 Vestry Street, a residential project in Tribeca. Not long afterwards, Bennett moved to Los Angeles and spent more than a year searching for his ideal home: a 1920s Spanish colonial property in the Hollywood Hills, with views of the city and a lush garden. “When I finally bought my new house, I jokingly asked Daniel if he wanted to work on it,” he says. “I’m so thankful that he actually said yes and kept to the budget—I think he even got excited about that!” —Paola Singer

One Family’s Hanco*ck Park Revival

Sometimes, street appeal is all a home needs to make a passerby fall in love. Such was the case with a circa-1922 Mediterranean Revival in the historic Los Angeles neighborhood of Hanco*ck Park. In early 2020, real estate developer Tyrone McKillen, cofounder of Plus Development, and his wife, Christina, were on the hunt for a forever home in which their family of five could grow; they had even isolated just the spot in Beverly Hills. But years of strolling past a five-bedroom adobe with a terra-cotta shingle roof and a balcony bursting with blooms—just one block from their original residence—tugged at their heartstrings. When a for-sale sign went up, the pair pulled out of Beverly Hills and instead doubled down on Hanco*ck Park. All that was required to turn their new house into a home? To change everything inside.

That fell to David John Dick, co-principal of Silverlake, California–based DISC Interiors, a decade-old firm Dick founded with his partner, Krista Schrock. The McKillens had found DISC through Instagram, with approval from mutual friends. “These clients are super design-focused, so they definitely had a feel for contemporary looks mixed with historical details,” Dick says. That said, the couple didn’t give DISC much of a brief; they just let him do his thing. And that required major surgery. “Everything was taken down to the studs but the front façade,” Dick admits. “We moved the interior staircase, we made some structural changes, the kitchen and the primary suite are brand-new.” Performing such a feat during a global pandemic had its challenges—Dick only saw the interior of the 5,000-square-foot residence twice before the world shut down—but also its perks: The demolition was already done before the city halted all construction, and, with so many other clients putting projects on hold, Dick could get to the big reveal in a mere 10 months. “We just kept moving, dropping off samples, then doing meetings on Zoom. We didn’t see one another in person for the first six months,” the designer admits. —Heidi Mitchell

An Opened Up 100-Year-Old Home

“This was my dream neighborhood, ever since I was little.” So says Aimee Song, fashion entrepreneur, social media mogul, and founder of Song of Style—a blog turned fashion and lifestyle brand—of her meant-to-be home. A historic neighborhood in central Los Angeles known for its quiet streets and impressive houses caught the eye of Song and her family from a very young age. “I grew up in Downtown L.A. and there really weren’t any safe places to walk around,” she recalls, “we’d drive over here during the holidays or even with our mom just to walk the dogs.” Fast forward a decade or two, a period working in interior architecture, an enviable fashion and influencing career, and six-plus million social media followers and here we find a nine-month pregnant Song, alongside longtime boyfriend, Jacopo Moschin, nesting in their memory-filled abode.

Like many, Song and Moschin ended 2019 with with hopes for a bright new decade. “We got the house literally right before the pandemic,” the young multi-hyphenate says of the drawn out moving process. A space that had only housed one previous owner—an older couple looking to downsize from their family home. Song took this as a sign. “People don’t really flip or move in and out of this neighborhood,” she reflects, “they stay.” But just like that, someone left, and a 1920s Spanish revival home nestled comfortably in a historic Los Angeles neighborhood became theirs.

So with location and great bones checked off the list, space planning was next on the agenda. “Spanish style homes are great but they also tend to be very dark with lots of tiny rooms,” (eight, to be exact), “and few windows,” Song notes. Enter architect and designer Antonio Forteleoni and long-time friend of Moschin. The couple brought him in to help oversee the space planning, particularly for the primary bedroom and kitchen. But toward the tail end of the project, the interior architect was poached. “Kelly [Wearstler] and her husband came to see our house during construction and took him on the spot,” Song says admiringly of the architect, who until recently served as the design director at Kelly Wearstler. —Gabriela Ulloa

The Palm Springs Pad of A Formula One Champion

Brittny and Jenson Button’s careers have been nothing if not the product of hard work. Yet, for the former professional model and 2009 Formula One world champion, their new vacation home in Palm Springs is the epitome of happenstance. “We were in Palm Springs for a weekend and almost immediately felt that the people, the place, the architecture [were] all so incredible,” explains Brittny, who recently wed Jenson. “We decided it would be a great place to own a home. But when we looked at the market, nothing caught our eye.”

That changed when Brittny reached out to a group of new mothers on social media. (The couple are parents of two.) “After putting out a feeler, someone showed us a new listing of a modern Spanish Revival home,” she explains. “We went the next day to see it and fell in love.”

The home itself was far from a turnkey purchase, and instead required a heavy facelift. That meant gutting the family room’s dizzying marble floor and the kitchen’s ’90s-era wood cabinets and backsplash—replacing the former with clean, unified concrete and the latter with quartz. In the living room, an uninspiring fireplace was jazzed up to become an adobe-style hearth. Overall, what was once an almost stuffy set of interiors was transformed into a serene abode with a mix of old-world charm and new-world relaxation.

“When I was first introduced to Jenson and Brittny [Button], I was a bit nervous since they are celebrities,” explains Tanya Stone, founder and owner of Tanya Stone Interiors. “But they are such incredible people, so down to earth, so warm…They are the client you always dream of working with.” While Brittny’s vision materialized in the architectural scheme of the renovated interiors, Stone helped refine the space with recommendations on materials and lighting. —Nick Mafi