Sofía Vergara doesn’t mince words about the condition of her palatial Beverly Park manse when she acquired the property. “There were arches on top of arches, all with columns. It felt like a castle in Transylvania,” recalls the effervescent actor-producer, currently playing against type as Colombian cocaine queenpin Griselda Blanco in the Netflix series Griselda. “But the layout was perfect, and I loved that you could see the landscape from every room, even though there wasn’t much of a garden to look at yet. I knew what I would do to make it my own,” she insists.
There were, predictably, a few challenges. Despite the voluminous rooms and high ceilings, Vergara wanted the house to feel “homey and comfortable, a place where people would want to hang out and relax,” she says. On top of that, the existing 1990s architecture did not exactly conform to her vision of “a house with history and texture, a well-lived house.” The structure may not have been new, but it most certainly wasn’t old in the way the actor fancied. After Timothy Corrigan worked for several years on the architectural design and interiors, ultimately Instagram led Vergara to the perfect collaborator to fully realize her transformation mission. Having long followed the work of Ohara Davies-Gaetano, Vergara simply dialed up the Los Angeles–based designer and got started. “I called her, we clicked, and I fell in love with her ideas,” the actor recollects. “When I handed her my inspiration folder, I realized most of the images were hers.”