Celebrity clothing designer Samantha Burkhart may dress colorful people for a living — Billie Eilish, Katy Perry and Mark Ronson are just a few of her clients — but don’t think her home is covered in neon and leather. “It’s never my intention to completely reinvent someone in the same way that it’s never my intention to reinvent a house,” says Samantha. When she and her husband, Jason, along with their two daughters, Eleanor (8) and Lake (4), moved into a five-bedroom, 32-acre ranch in Whitefish, Montana, longtime Angelenos decided to let her peasant bones lead the way. direction of renewal.
Despite the eight-stall horse barn located on the property, this was not your typical farmhouse. The house itself was built in 2004, but done cheaply and confusingly in a New England Colonial style—one of the reasons Samantha thinks it sat on the market for two years. The windows lacked trim, there were no fixtures in the kitchen or bathroom cabinets, and the floors were an orange oak color. Fortunately, the couple, who have been developing and renovating homes in LA for the past seven or so years, were up for a challenging remodel (Jason doesn’t just work in the music business—he’s a licensed contractor in California ). “We’ve bought a lot of ugly houses,” says Samantha, laughing. Their goal was to make the space feel more like a working farmhouse—something she knows a lot about as a rider and having grown up visiting her grandmother in nearby Bigfork as a child—while also making it family-friendly. family.
DIY jobs that weren’t worth the trouble
The facelift of the exterior was mainly a matter of paint (ie, after building an airy front porch to help add dimension to the architecture and make it feel less churchy). Samantha decided to take on the task of making the house white herself. Easy, right? “Including two weeks in November when I sprayed him with cold water while standing in a giant elevator,” she recalls. “Later I found out you could hire a person to do it in 24 hours with a sprayer.”
Repairing the floors was another project that seemed doable in theory, but turned out to be a pain. The couple removed about 70 percent of the rooms themselves before going back and hiring a professional because the machine was too much to handle. Touch it the wrong way and it can take a big chunk out of the boards. “There’s a finesse to it,” notes Jason. Or as Samantha puts it: “It’s not a cute little hobby for a Saturday afternoon.”
The moment of welcome home
First, when you entered the house, you were greeted by a closed staircase with “very square steps” and a cherry wood mantel. “It was one of the most terrifying feelings in the whole country,” Samantha says of the harrowing wait. Opening the ceiling in the lobby to expose part of the second level was a game changer, as was adding a sleek iron railing and covering the floor in a checkerboard design that looks like marble but is actually durable ceramic. . “We have four very aggressive seasons in Montana, so it was important that it was easy to clean and not too precious,” explains Samantha.
Kitchen that is trendy and classic at the same time
While the new kitchen island sits almost exactly in the same spot as the old one, everything around it has changed. There is now a large glass door that connects the cooking area to the deck. That way, Samantha has a clear view of her horses in the pasture. The couple chose a 2022 color (October Mist by Benjamin Moore) for the cabinets and covered the bathroom’s adjacent hallway floors with Saltillo tile—a subconscious nod to their California roots. “Something I think about a lot with my work is timeless time, making things feel like they have a longer space to live,” says Samantha. “I think that’s important with all aspects of design.”
The Magic of Millwork
“We’re really terrible flippers, in the sense that we like built-in gadgets,” jokes Samantha. Although the couple isn’t planning to turn around and sell the farm anytime soon, they naturally keep resale value in mind and prioritize intuitive and intelligent organization solutions.
The pair commissioned one of Jason’s best friends (a trusted LA-based cabinet maker) to carve clever niches like the second-floor closet system that hides the washer and dryer.
Small bathroom luxury
For the guest bathroom, Samantha splurged and sourced an antique dresser from a local thrift store and had the plumbing out so they could line it with a vessel sink. In their space, they went with a shower and marble floors. The bold purple coating on the stone makes it look like it’s all one continuous slab, so you barely notice they’re actually individual slabs.
Gym–Turned–Girls’ Bedroom
There was no need to strip the wooden floorboards in Lake’s bedroom – there was no wood to begin with. “That room was actually a training space with a rubber mattress,” notes Samantha. Carpeting was the budget call in this case. The pair also reoriented the windows so they look symmetrical from the outside looking in.
While the space is set up for games (and homework—check out the built-in desk), the girls can often be found on Samantha’s side of the barn. Jason, on the other hand, prefers riding his tractor to hanging out with horses. “He loves his lawnmower,” says Samantha. “It’s the only thing we fight about: I love the wild meadows and he loves them [short] grass, but at the end of the day it makes him happy.”
