On first inspection, Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent felt that the house, clocking in at nearly 9,000 square feet, was much too grand for them and their toddler daughter, Poppy. “Our immediate reaction was, Who lives like this?” Berkus says, recalling his and his husband’s initial visit to the 1928 Spanish Colonial in Los Angeles’s Hancock Park neighborhood. “Certainly not us.” But as they made their way through the various salons and gardens, the designers soon began to heed the property’s siren call.
First, there was the majestic 200-year-old oak tree rising in the backyard, like something out of a fairy tale. “We pictured Poppy, and eventually the rest of our family, playing under that tree, and we thought this was a place we could put down roots,” Brent says.…
