Change of Scene

Marg Helgenberger, star of the hit series CSI, took on a tough case when she decided to renovate her Spanish-style house in L.A., restoring it to its architectural roots. But the result—practical, cozy and family-friendly—was worth the effort

By Mark Morrison
InStyle Home – Spring 2004

“Guys at the club were talking about you today,” Alan Rosenberg calls to his wife as he arrives home after a round of golf. Marg Helgenberger, standing in the couple’s mint-green kitchen, shoots him a “been there, heard that” look. In low-rise jeans and a turquoise sweater that sets off her piercing blue eyes, the actress exudes the same natural allure—and no-nonsense attitude—as Catherine Willows, the stripper turned forensic scientist she plays on the top-rated CBS series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. “I hear about her a lot,” explains Rosenberg, who plays lawyer Alvin Masterson on the CBS series The Guardian. “’Your wife…I love her.’ What’s funny is they don’t give Margi enough credit. She’s very hot on that show. But she’s much more than that. She’s very thoughtful, very intelligent, very savvy.”
Helgenberger’s husband of 14 years may not be the most objective judge of her talents. Yet one look at the smart renovation of their two-story Santa Monica home, a job masterminded by the actress, tells you that she is a woman of discernment. Built in 1928, the house had been modernized by previous owners, who enlarged the dining room and merged several smaller rooms on the first floor into one huge family-style great room. “The openness was kind of fun for a while,” says Helgenberger, who moved in with Rosenberg and their son, Hughie, now 13, In 1993. “But it didn’t feel right.” The rooms seemed out of scale and character with the rest of the house. And soon she began to notice other disadvantages of so much randomly defined space: noise drifting from the family area where Hughie and his friends watched television, piles of clutter visible in the adjacent office nook, and a dining room that was rarely used. In fact the couple realized that plenty of space was going to waste. “So we changed it all around to make the best use of it,” Helgenberger says.
Although the meat inspector’s daughter from North Bend, Neb., and the nice Jewish boy from Passaic, N.J., seem like they could not have less in common, Helgenberger, 45, and Rosenberg, 53, both come from families that took great pride in their homes. And once they became parents they began searching in good school districts for a family home of their own. (The couple met in 1984 on the set of Ryan’s Hope but didn’t start dating until they bumped into each other years later.)
Helgenberger fell for the house almost immediately. Despite its overhaul, it had retained plenty of integrity, including its hardwood floors, a high ceiling in the living room, a vine-covered guest cottage, and a master bedroom with wraparound windows.
In keeping with the house’s architecture, the couple at first decorated it with wrought iron and heavy Spanish-style furniture. But the longer they lived there, the less the layout suited them. To create a more practical design, the actress turned to her friend, architectural designer Barbara Schnitzler of New York City. Helgenberger and Schnitzler enlisted designer Jackie Terrell of Hollywood to transform the interiors into something that would fit the new space.
Terrell began by choosing paint colors, opting for a pale pink shade in the living room and upstairs hallway because those areas don’t get much light. For the rest of the house she used a contrasting mix of soothing greens and spicy oranges. With Schnitzler and Helgenberger, she picked an espresso-colored stain to darken the floors—which now unifies the house and its mix of traditional and modern furniture while also serving to ground the varied palette.
But the biggest task was the seven-month renovation. “I felt it was my job to put back some of the structure and give the house a little more substance,” says Schnitzler, whose ideas have made a dramatic difference in the house and in how the family lives in it. She opted to gut the kitchen, replacing everything except the floor and adding an archway to connect it with the breakfast nook. And she moved the office to the front of the house, where the unused dining room had been, giving Helgenberger a private work space with a much-needed door and plenty of storage. Nearby, Schnitzler created an intimate hallway with a library nook, where the actress keeps her 1990 Emmy (for playing prostitute K.C. Koloski on China Beach) and Rosenberg houses his collection of first-edition books. “I like to create little spaces like that within a home,” the designer says. “it gives it a lot of richness and texture.”
Schnitzler next proposed putting the dining room in the central space where the family area of the great room had been. It turned out to be her boldest—and best—move. Walls were added to create a formal but well-proportioned dining room separate from, though next to, the kitchen. Where the TV had been, a niche was created to house a built-in bar. Then Schnitzler proposed an idea that seemed radical: losing six feet from the length of the room. “Most people want to blow out their house,” Helgenberger says, “but Barbara wanted to move the exterior wall of the house in.”
At first Rosenberg had trouble accepting that plan. “He worried it would be confining,” Schnitzler says. But it turned out to have the opposite effect, particularly since Schnitzler extended the rear of an adjacent room—a small, dark space off the living room—and created a covered patio, or loggia, behind the dining room. “When this area was part of the house, we never used it,” Rosenberg says. “The dog kennel was stashed there. Now that it’s outside of the house we spend a lot more time there, even when it’s raining.” In the newly expanded sitting room, Schnitzler added a large window and a door facing the garden. A window seat is flanked by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, replacing bulky built-ins. An existing sofa was re-covered in Ultrasuede for a luxurious yet lived-in feeling.
As Helgenberger wanders among the palms, papyrus plants and potted geraniums o f her subtropical garden, the sand-colored home soars above her patio and poll like a Mediterranean villa. “We’ve done so many things to this house,” she says, sighing as if she misses the process. “People keep saying, ‘Just stop, Marg. What’s left to do?’ And I say, ‘Well, there’s till the front yard.’” ♦

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“I wanted to get away from the heaviness we had before and make the house more casual and hip,” Helgenberger says. “I think it made it more chic to darken the floors. It’s a better backdrop.”
“The former owners had done this kind of great room,” Helgenberger explains. “But by making the rooms smaller, the house feels bigger. I wanted to redo the house so we could use every room to it’s fullest.”
“My parties are really groovy and loose,” the actress says, addiing that no get-together is complete without some James Brown on the CD player. “The house works well for parties—it has a really good flow.”