Call it the amazing Technicolor dream house.
This for-sale 1,664-square-foot Spanish-style property in Palm Springs, Calif., comes with some sweet features — a private stone courtyard and unobstructed views of nearby Mount San Jacinto among them. But nothing tops its fabulous splashes of color.
Curbed.com, which first spotted this $499,000 listing, calls the pad “straight out of a Van Gogh painting.”
Just a quick flip through the listing photos shows that the home’s exterior flair — marigold-colored paint with teal-colored trim — leads inside to quirky rooms with brightly colored walls (some are green, others pink, purple or red) and, in certain areas, multicolored wood floors.
Carl Tookey and Gregg Featherston — the couple who have owned this home since the mid-1990s (and named it “Penguin Cottage”) — decked this formerly all-white pad into a full-on chromatic display thanks to a number of influences.
In part, the pilot (Tookey) and flight attendant (Featherstone) were influenced by landmarks they visited during their world travels, says listing agent Klint Watkins, of HK Lane Real Estate. A standout for them was Charleston in East Sussex, England, the home of artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, who turned parts of their colorful house into artwork by literally painting on the walls and furnishings.
The pilot and flight attendant [owners] were influenced by landmarks they visited during their world travels.
Tookey and Featherstone also took cues from some of their favorite paintings, working with a close friend to recreate them.
The dining room, for instance, which has red walls, a multicolored floor (painted blue, purple, green, red, yellow and orange), and a green table is a recreation of a painting by Valerie Berlin Edwards, a Memphis artist. Her painting also shows an open door with sheep outside; the couple ended up affixing a similar image onto the dining room’s window to complete their homage.
And one of the home’s two bathrooms has pink walls with a deep soaking tub, replicating a print that hangs there called “Bathing the Emperor,” in which a seagull washes a penguin in a bathtub.
The couple were also captivated by a trip to London’s Buckingham Palace, says Watkins, where they saw the sage-walled Green Drawing Room — originally the Duchess of Buckingham’s saloon. It became the model for their living room, which has a similar wall color and a lofty, beamed ceiling.
“Their goal was to create whimsy and fantasy,” says Watkins.
Let’s just say they succeeded.
