When it came to her own family’s lush and leafy oasis in Venice, Los Angeles–based designer Kate Driver started off, surprisingly, by abandoning her aesthetic roots.In the eyes of a lesser visionary, the house’s grand 25-foot heights and 4,500 square feet of concrete floors may have felt overwhelming to furnish. But for Driver, who at the time had just discovered she was pregnant with her first child, the house was merely a blank canvas. 

“I aspire to that kind of layering—rich and textured but very personal,” Driver says. To wit, the living room in Driver’s home is a worldly pastiche of collectibles old and new, manifesting as a spontaneous and synergistic tableau. A rather prim Fritz Hansen midcentury settee, covered in lush Liberty floral velvet, offers a level of decorum offset by the humorous geometry of Ettore Sottsass’s famous Tahiti lamp, a playful postmodern interpretation of a flamingo.

Elsewhere, the gravity of twin walnut coffee tables by West Haddon Hall—emblematic of Driver’s desire to design pieces that are “distinctive and functional anchors in the visual atmosphere”—are challenged by the charming granny fringe of an antique floor lamp or American printmaker Denise Kupferschmidt’s punchy cobalt painting. 

The home is constantly in flux, expanding and contracting with pieces and people.The upstairs landing was transformed into an intimate sitting room, where the designer placed a 1970s Luis Montiel tapestry—a “retro rainbow,” as Driver calls it—in contrast to a needlework rug with a more serious palette. An outdoor dining room, which hosts the resident family of 5 on West Haddon Hall picnic benches as easily as it accommodates 25 visiting taco buffs.