Tim Kaeding was not impressed by America’s west coast when he first arrived here in 2003 as a designer at 7 For All Mankind, that decade’s tastemaking denim label. Born in Chicago, Kaeding had been living in New York for 13 years and was of a resolutely Manhattan frame of mind. “I was not into LA at all,” he says. “Nobody wore jeans; everyone wore flip flops. I was like, who are these ridiculous people living here?”
More than two decades later, he has certainly acclimatised — and helped convert the Angelenos to LA denim. In 2010 he co-founded Mother Denim with business partner Lela Becker; its vintage-inspired designs are made locally, with more than 90 per cent of manufacturing taking place within LA, and sold internationally, from Harrods to Le Bon Marché.
Fans of the brand, whose American-retro aesthetic loosened the grip that Scandinavian black skinny jeans had on denim wearers at the start of the 2010s, have included Taylor Swift, Gigi Hadid and Catherine, Princess of Wales. In 2017, the brand’s Looker jeans amassed a 400-strong waiting list when Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, wore them at the Invictus Games during her first public outing with Prince Harry.
Kaeding also married a native Californian: Heather Collins, a writer and interior designer, with whom he has two teenage sons. While their primary home is in LA, their weekend house in the rural town of Ojai is an expansive 1926 property designed by Wallace Neff, the architect considered to be the godfather of “California” style.
In the early 20th century, Neff’s clientele included stars of the golden age of film — Judy Garland, Cary Grant, Charlie Chaplin, and Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, for whom he helped to transform Pickfair, perhaps the original Beverly Hills celebrity mansion. In the 1940s he created futuristic concrete “bubble houses” but it is his Mediterranean-influenced architecture, with its stucco walls, vaulted ceilings, arched windows and picturesque integration of indoor and outdoor spaces, that he is best known for.
Kaeding and Collins met when they both moved to a mutual friend’s house shortly after arriving in LA. Kaeding had studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology and worked as a designer for Gap, where he first became interested in denim. Collins was an animator and artist (she’s also a fiction writer; her debut novel Veronica, a modern-day southern gothic mystery, is due out next year).
Their current LA home in Los Feliz is also in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, although not designed by Neff. “When you live in a Spanish house, especially in LA, the architecture is so different and so interesting,” says Kaeding. “There are more curves and unusual lines. A lot of them have no right-angled walls at all.”
During her twenties, Collins had been a huge fan of this style of architecture and had pinned on her wall a picture of the only other Neff-designed home in Ojai — Libbey Ranch, a 1923 white stucco Spanish Colonial estate, originally designed as stabling for the glassware magnate William Libbey. Later adapted and extended, it has since been owned by the interior designer Kathryn Ireland, as well as the actress Reese Witherspoon.
The picture reminded Collins of the 1960s SoCal lifestyle of her grandparents. “They lived in Santa Barbara in an insane Spanish house and had horses they would ride bareback,” she says. “I grew up north of San Francisco, but when I went down there — to the golden light and the avocados — I always felt it was my climate, my home.”
So when Collins saw this house for sale on Zillow in 2018, she was ecstatic. Once again, Kaeding was initially sceptical. “I was downstairs in our house in LA and she was upstairs, and I heard her scream,” he recalls. “Instead of just coming downstairs, she texted me, ‘I think I’ve found our next house’. I looked at the details and texted back, ‘Yep. Someone’s really gonna love that house. Bye.’ I was like, who wants to go to Ojai?”
Seven years later, he loves it. “It’s the best thing we ever did.”
Situated in a valley surrounded by the Topatopa Mountains, 15 miles from the Pacific Ocean and 90 minutes’ drive from Los Angeles, the small town of Ojai has a distinctly Californian, rural-boho-surfer vibe. Its long main street is populated by organic brunch spots, fashion boutiques and galleries.
Their property is east of the town centre, its driveway curving through 2 acres of working orange orchards — navel on one side, Valencia on the other — and avocado and pomegranate trees, before reaching the two-storey house with its distinctive pink-red terracotta-tiled roof and iron-railed balconies.
“It’s not a typical indoor-outdoor house; it’s not a big, modern building with glass walls, but it has many windows and from almost every room you can directly access outside. It’s well designed for a warm climate,” says Kaeding. There are three outdoor staircases; one inside. “In the morning I make a point of coming down the stairs outside the bedroom. It’s a nice way to start the day.”
Arched doorways, plaster walls and ornate ironwork curtain rails are other original Neff features. Collins has chosen botanical wallpapers from Soane, de Gournay and Iksel, as well as fabrics from Schumacher. “When we moved in the house was very white, and felt big and empty,” she says. “I felt the quickest route to make it cosy was with wallpapers.”
The “green room”, a downstairs den, where the family watches films on a projector (“Tim is a master popcorn maker,” says Collins) is so called for its tree-covered paper, a design by Iksel based on a classical painting. A downstairs bathroom is brilliantly flamboyant with Gucci’s bright pink heron print wallpaper. An upstairs guest room is covered in de Gournay’s “Jardinières and Citrus Trees” designs. In the master bedroom is a bespoke design from Gracie, based on Collins’ drawings of a now fallen tree in the garden — which had a distinctive heart-shaped marking in its bark — amid the surrounding mountains.
In 2017, just before the couple found the house, the Ojai Valley was impacted by the Thomas fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, which burned for more than a month. This year’s California wildfires have been a heightened cause of concern. “You’re always thinking about it,” says Collins. “The orchards are irrigated and offer some kind of protection. It’s not foolproof, but it definitely helps.”
Mother Denim’s first standalone store, due to open in LA’s Pacific Palisades neighbourhood a week after the fires started, was destroyed. “You have to be philosophical about it,” says Kaeding. “It wasn’t our home, no one we knew was injured or died.” Mother Denim is looking for a new store in a different area.
The romantic atmosphere of the house’s interior is counterbalanced by a rock’n’roll and rugged western edge, recognisable to those familiar with the Mother Denim aesthetic (in 2023, its David Bowie-inspired collection was launched in London with Alison Mosshart performing some of Bowie’s greatest hits). In an upstairs sitting room hangs Terry O’Neill’s 1971 photograph of Brigitte Bardot smoking a cigar; downstairs is a cowboy painting by Mark Maggiori. Kaeding also keeps some of his collection of “something like” 20 guitars at the property — as an admirer rather than a player, he won’t confirm the exact “embarrassing” number.
The garage houses another of his enthusiasms: a growing number of pinball machines (“All I hear when I’m going to bed is ping-ping-ping!” says Collins.) “Our neighbours in LA had one,” says Kaeding, “and I thought that’s what I need to get the boys off the computer. So I got one and the boys played it for a day. But, for me, it was way more fun than I’d imagined. So I got four more.” An Iron Maiden-themed machine is his latest find but he says his Willy Wonka and Pirates of the Caribbean machines are the best.
Perhaps the best addition the family has made to the property is an impressive, newly built pool house at the head of the 80ft outdoor swimming pool. It was designed by Collins in a rustic Spanish style, with 20cm-thick stucco stone walls; folding glass doors open along its entire front width. There’s also an indoor pizza oven and grill. Understandably, it has become a major family attraction. “We come to Ojai every weekend and we use the pool house every weekend,” says Kaeding, now a California convert through and through.
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