Inside Jessica's Home

[RebelMan]

At Home With Jessica Alba

By In Style
By Kate Meyers and Glynis Costin
October 26, 2008, 8:39 pm PDT

New mom and actress Jessica Alba gives a tour of her sleek Los Angeles pad.

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Sure, babies change your life. That's why Jessica Alba and her husband, Cash Warren, have moved to a larger LA home and gone green. The "Fantasic Four" gave In Style a tour of her house and revealed how she went about decorating the eco-friendly space.

As she leads a tour of her new two-story LA canyon home, Jessica Alba pauses before a foyer wall lined with framed photographs and singles out a black-and-white portrait of a stunning Mexican-American woman. "That's my grandma," she says of the eye-catching matriarch. "She had five kids, and her sister had 10. Crazy, right?" As Alba points to other ancestral photos, she radiates pride in her family. "I never, ever doubted their unconditional love for me," says the 27-year-old actress, who's taking her turn to lavish that love on her own family: her 5-month-old daughter, Honor Marie, and her husband, Cash Warren. A big part of that is creating a home that she hopes her child "will remember forever."

With the help of Alba's father, a realtor, Alba and Warren looked at over 30 homes before finding this villa-style house. Though it was an aesthetic mishmash, "it had good bones, and the rooms just made sense," Warren says. Alba agrees. "I loved the indoor-outdoor flow," she says of the way most rooms open to the outside. "The vibe was really family."

Still, the house needed a makeover. "I had a really good idea of what I wanted," says Alba, who chose to work with interior decorator and eco-design enthusiast Kari Whitman on the project. The two women met in 2006, when Alba surprised her parents with the chance to have their kitchen renovated on the WE network television show, "Designer to the Stars Kari Whitman." (Emilio Estevez and Virginia Madsen are among her other celebrity subjects.) They discovered a common passion for eco-friendly living. "We clicked immediately," says Whitman. "I incorporate the green aesthetic into my home designs as much as I can." And she found a kindred spirit in Alba, who drove a Prius before switching to a larger Yukon hybrid better-suited to her growing family.

Alba and Whitman agreed that the house's look needed to be simplified. "It was Italian with Mexican and Spanish touches," the actress recalls. "I didn't want to feel like I was living in a theme restaurant." Respecting the environment and protecting the family's welfare were the guiding criteria for all decisions, from the chlorine-free saltwater pool out back to the used furniture inside. "It's all about working with existing things," says Whitman. Together they hit antiques shops and hotel-liquidation warehouses looking for pieces that suggested Old Hollywood "ut could be reinvented with a modern spin (like a desk chair that once belonged to film director Cecil B. DeMille!). "I hand picked every piece of furniture," says the ever resourceful Alba, who mixed old finds with new accessories and rugs from Calvin Klein Home. "I found that at an antiques store in East LA," she says of a glam chandelier twinkling in her stairwell, "and we had it dipped in silver."

The actress claims she is not in a rush to go back to work. Instead, her mind turns to the upcoming holidays, and she rattles off a list of relatives she's inviting for Christmas dinner. "We do a potluck and sing carols while my grandfather plays the guitar," she says. And although she doesn't say where the tree will go, rest assured, Jessica Alba knows exactly.