Oscar-winner Anne Hathaway’s new home in California comes with a backstory that is both wildly star-studded and completely made-up.
When decorating their Swiss-style chalet, Hathaway and her husband, jewelry designer Adam Shulman, dreamed up an eccentric fairytale history for their 100-year-old property. Speaking to Architectural Digest for the magazine’s upcoming October issue, they reveal how they wove a fictional narrative that included storied years when Yves Saint Laurent lived there, before filmmaker Wes Anderson added personal touches to the decor.
Part of a brief given to interior designer Pamela Shamshiri of Los Angeles-based Studio Shamshiri, the backstory contains further fanciful flourishes – such as Anderson and David Bowie hosting a New Year’s Eve party together. But the magazine’s photo shoot shows that Shamshiri grasped the owners’ unusual demands.
“Pam really leaned into it,” Hathaway told writer Mayer Rus, who interviewed the couple at the property. “This house inspired lots of crazy creative discussions, but Pam wasn’t thrown by any of it,” added Shulman. “She brought a sense of sophistication, magic and fun to the whole process.”
Set amid the rolling landscape of southern California, the home is set around an unusual, circular floor plan.
Shamshiri explained that the house – built as an early 20th century Californian vision of fairytale Switzerland – was already something of a Hollywood film set fantasy. Her famous client, the star of “The Devil Wears Prada” who won an Academy Award for her role in the 2012 musical “Les Misérables,” wanted to go further, layering decades of glamorous history on top.
Resembling a vibrant hunting lodge, the home features pioneer-style desert stone walls, mid-century Italian furniture by designer Carlo di Carli and contemporary lighting fixtures from Michael Anastassiades.
The house’s eclectic color palettes of peach and burgundy were taken from a Gucci shirt, the pair told Architectural Digest, and notes of shining imperial-yellow were inspired by the dramatic cape worn to the 2015 Met Gala by Hathaway’s “Oceans 8” co-star Rihanna.
At the very center lies a large music room decorated with an early-20th-century disco ball sourced from a Turkish spa. It hangs above a piano where the couple plan to entertain guests, said Hathaway, who is currently pregnant with the couple’s second child and filming a remake of the 1990 film “The Witches,” based on a Roald Dahl novel.
“This room has been a long-held fantasy of ours – a place where the people we love can gather and our musician friends can play,” she added. “It’s the heart of the house.”