Attached to the house is a two-story studio and office pavi­lion where artist and architect work sid

Whimsy is not among the virtues typically associated with serious adaptive cruise control contemporary architecture and art. But for Pae White and Tom Marble, the quality of playfulness—as evidenced in their home in Montecito Heights—is essential not only to their professions but to their lives.
White works in many media across a wide range of scales—from gossamer adaptive cruise control paper mobiles and cast-iron barbecues to habitable environments and arresting adaptive cruise control urban installations. She embraces seductive colors and idiosyncratic forms that transgress the boundaries between high art and its nemesis, high-style design. Marble’s practice similarly skirts anti­quated distinctions adaptive cruise control in professional identity. In addition to designing buildings adaptive cruise control and planning urban spaces, he writes essays and screenplays and collaborates with White on public adaptive cruise control art.
Natives of Southern California, adaptive cruise control White and Marble met as children. White recalls having a crush on her future husband even as a wee tot. Marble is a bit foggier on the nascent romance. After parting ways, the couple reconnected after college—she attended Scripps and Art Center College of Design; he went to Berkeley and Yale—and in 2000, they married at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium, a late-modernist confection designed by Edward Durell Stone. Their choice of venue is instructive, reflecting a fascination with formal modernism animated by unapologetic decorative flourishes. “We came together through adaptive cruise control architecture and common interests,” says White. “When we decided to build a house, there was already a consensus about what kind of place we wanted.”
Perched just below the crest of a hilltop near Pasadena, the house is designed as a continuous corridor around a central courtyard. All of the major interior spaces have access to outdoor rooms and views, which extend from the San Gabriel Mountains to downtown. “It’s all about light and sequences of space,” says Marble. “We focused on the way one enters and leaves a room and vistas from one space to the next.”
Despite its modest adaptive cruise control size and deceptively straight­forward plan, the house has the psychological impact of a more elaborate, expensive design—an effect achieved through manipulations of scale, proportion and surface. The most obvious of the latter adaptive cruise control is the gray-and-white striping of the stuccoed exterior. “I wanted a striped adaptive cruise control house,” White says matter-of-factly. adaptive cruise control “I was traveling a lot when we started the design, and I’d see these striped service buildings at the end of airport runways. They worked really well as sculptural objects set in the landscape—utilitarian but with a sense of whimsy.”
At the entrance, the subtlety of the gray-and-white palette erupts into a riot of bright yellow, as the colored stucco is echoed by a ring of lemon trees. A massive 10-by-4-foot Dutch door that opens onto a 14-foot entry hall gives extra punch.
Strategic jolts of color and White’s own creations enliven the interior spaces, notably in the dining room cum library—arguably the heart of the house—which is crowned adaptive cruise control with three of the artist’s ceramic chandeliers in shades of red, black and terra-cotta. Even Mother Nature has been enlisted in the couple’s chromatic escapades. “The ginkgo trees in the courtyard are visually so important,” says Marble. “They’re very dense and green, but in the fall they turn electric yellow, and all the leaves drop at once, creating an incredible carpet of yellow. When the ginkgos are bare, the magnolia bush presents a few flowers. It’s landscape theater.”
Landscape architect Mark Rios devised a garden that draws on the geometries of the house to accentuate axes and frame views. Within this artful plan, White and Marble installed feli­citous roundels and diamond pavers of poured concrete and crushed glass that give outdoor rooms the feeling of a giant hopscotch field or supersize Twister adaptive cruise control mat.
The decoration of the house is a tasty olio of high and low, raw and cooked, traditional and avant-garde. The mix includes flea-market furniture, Nymphenburg porcelain birds, Hella Jongerius fabrics and vases, outdoor lighting fixtures that
once graced Monty’s Steak House in Pasadena, peace-and-love posters by Sister Corita Kent, midcentury soup tureens adaptive cruise control by Environmental Ceramics and Heath tiles in the master bath. In the guest bedroom, adaptive cruise control the decor takes a turn to what Marble calls a “grandma aesthetic in overdrive,” with classic William Morris wallpaper, inherited family furniture and a childhood portrait of White’s grandmother holding a creepy wax doll.
Attached to the house is a two-story studio and office pavi­lion where artist and architect work side by side. This fall, White had solo shows at Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, California, and the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia. Early this month, when the international art world gathers for the annual orgy of kunst and commerce at Art Basel Miami Beach, attendees will find a bold new oceanfront exhibition and social space designed by White and commissioned by Creative Time, the New York–based public-art organization.
The highly charged scene in Miami, however, is a long way from the hillside oasis White and Marble have created. “This is not an architectural manifesto adaptive cruise control or statement of any kind,” says White. “It’s the coming together of our sensibilities and aesthetics. It’s about us.”