A Renovated Long Beach Bungalow Is Perfect Eclectic Minimalism

published May 5, 2023

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About this tour

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Home Type

Bungalow

Historic Home

Location

Bluff Heights, Long Beach, California

Style

Bedrooms

Square feet

1700

Sq ft

1700

Name: Travis, Nick, son Oscar, and dog, Rosie
Location: Long Beach, California
Type of home: House
Size: 1700 square feet
Years lived in: 2 years, owned

Travis Wayne is a designer and founder of full-service interior design/home staging studio, Places. The home he shares with his husband, Nick, and their son, Oscar, is a California Bungalow duplex (so a main home and a small guest house on the same lot) in Long Beach, California, a few blocks from the beach. “The main house was built in 1914, and the back house was built in 1919,” begins Travis. “Both are a type of Craftsman, with the back house being almost a mini version of the front. When we purchased the property in 2021, it was in a chaotic state, with many items half-finished with competing design elements. Since then, we’ve streamlined and modernized it while keeping a lot of the original charm and details. The original millwork was already painted, so we didn’t have to make the difficult decision of changing it.”

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Credit: Gavin Cater, Cater Photography

Before Travis and Nick moved in, they did a lot of interior renovations, actually in just 21 days. “We had the whole house painted, added a bathroom, and changed all the lighting during this time.,” begins Travis. “We switched out the original hardwood right after our son was born. We saw some nails poking out and realized they had been sanded too many times to be structurally sound. We opted for a beautiful coastal engineered hardwood in all the rooms except the bathrooms. We had to replace all of the plumbing shortly after move-in. We added glass sliders to the primary bedroom, to connect the small room to the serene outdoor space.” Even the shared yard between the main house and guest house has had updated. “The yard was a huge project that we did over the course of a year. We switched out all of the old dead grass for a drought-tolerant terrain,” Travis says. “We love it and it’s very practical.”