Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi Inspired Jessica Alba's House

Photo credit: Stephen Kent Johnson
Photo credit: Stephen Kent Johnson

From House Beautiful

Let's face it: We'd all get a little starstruck having dinner chez Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi. But for Jessica Alba and Cash Warren, an admiration for their fellow celebrity couple (and notorious home renovators) led to a more tangible result: the inspiration for their Beverly Hills home, featured on the cover of this month's issue of AD.

Photo credit: Courtesy of AD
Photo credit: Courtesy of AD

"They’d have us over for holiday parties, and we’d leave and say to each other, 'Their house is so sick,'" Alba recalled to the magazine. So, when she and husband Warren closed on a home in Beverly Hills, they asked DeGeneres and de Rossi for an important introduction: to their designers.

Photo credit: Stephen Kent Johnson
Photo credit: Stephen Kent Johnson

That's how Warren and Alba came to work with mother-son team Kathleen and Tommy Clements, who took the home down to the studs and re-envisioned it as a modern, comfortable family home inspired in equal parts by DeGeneres and de Rossi's style and the relaxed, sunny vibe of Warren's mother's hometown of Provence, France.

Photo credit: Stephen Kent Johnson
Photo credit: Stephen Kent Johnson

The result is a retreat that combines patinated antiques and soft upholstery with clean-lined architecture-and a whole lot of clever organization. Alba herself is a big fan of an impeccable wall of electrical equipment, which, AD reports, she calls "our pride and joy."

Alba went a little bit DIY on some aspects of the home, too: AD describes how she passed on a $70,000 quote for a laundry room floor and instead installed some vintage Italian limestone with the help of her "new friend at Lowe's." Actors/beauty-and-baby-product-moguls, they're just like us.

Read the full story now on AD.

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