A beach-inspired home captures the essence of the coast.
A beach-inspired home captures the essence of the coast.
Tia Castille is a detail-oriented person. It's something that's clear as she walks you through her beach-inspired home in River Ranch.
Photos by Robin May
While the coastal-infused home is made for the kind of easy living equated with the beach, it was created with painstaking effort and thoughtfulness.
"This is the first home we've ever built. And it will be the last," Castille, a Lafayette audiologist, says with a laugh of the 3,600-plus square foot home on Elysian Fields she shares with her husband and their four children.
A front porch that spans the full width of the exterior gives a clear indicator of what's to come with pale blue details and easy seating. It's just where Tia and her husband Iggie can sit and watch their kids play in the adjacent park.
"They are out there literally every single day," Castille says.
The home has an outdoor living space that runs the entire length of the house with a full kitchen and comfy seating area. An outdoor bar with rustic wooden stools opens with an accordion window into the interior's bar - perfect for entertaining fluidly at shindigs like their annual Kentucky Derby blowout.
Across from the bar is an office with a stunning armoire that was custom-made for the home and converts into a Murphy bed and connects to a bathroom in the hallway - one example of the sort of space saving you can see throughout the home.
The living, dining and kitchen are one open, expansive space that transports you to the Gulf Coast with glossy teak floors and beams and crisp white everything. A flax-hued couch of linen is made for casual evenings while ostrich-covered dining room chairs are absolutely opulent. But, above all, the space is livable. It's beach-centric without the campy vibe.
"There's not a lot of fuss," says Crissy Greene who was charged with designing the interior of the home. "There's not a lot of bright color. It's soft and neutral and airy."
And it's utterly functional. In the hallway next to the kitchen, cabinets line the wall from floor to ceiling - one of those opens to a walk-in pantry nestled behind the wall. And the wall across from the cabinets includes large framed photos of the children that upon further inspection open to show individual cubbyholes cut into the wall.
"That was wasted space in the wall," Greene says. "The functionality of the house is really good."
White seems an unusual choice for a four-child family, but Castille says it's simply what she wanted. And Greene points to pieces like the flax-colored couch that are more forgiving but still work with the palette. And everything is fiber sealed to ensure stains come out easily.
While the downstairs is scarce in color, the children's domain on the second floor is full of color and winks to youth. There is a light fixture made from classroom rulers and a playful display with the kids' portraits covering one wall.
And on the third floor sits the space perhaps most inspired by the couple's love of the beach - a rooftop spot to lounge. Overlooking River Ranch high above the rooftops is a place of true escape.
"We go to Rosemary and Seaside and we love those places and they have this kind of architecture and the big porches and the Caribbean shutters and that inspired us," she says looking off of her deck on a sunny spring afternoon. "This may not be the beach. But we have the park."