When Will Sawyer decided to move from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara with the hope of bringing a little bit more calm to his busy bicoastal work life, the goal was to find a house where he could gather with friends. He’d hit the farmer’s market first thing in the morning, grab whatever looks the freshest (and always, always mussels), and serve lunch with a side of French fries and Champagne. “That’s the vibe,” he says. His Saturdays look a whole lot like this now, but they didn’t start out that way.
Sawyer, who works as a copywriter and creative director in advertising, found his idyllic California cottage in the midst of the pandemic. So, in the beginning, he was alone—a lot. “Instead of always being able to entertain people, I decided to bring a lot of my friends into the house through their work,” he shares.
Almost all of Sawyer’s art, along with quite a few furnishings, is by someone special in his life, from old friends to new acquaintances. The large painting over the living room sideboard is by Lucy Scarlet Hoffman, the sister of one of his best college friends; the funky creature-like vase on the mantel is by Addison Woolsey, whose grandmother lives just a four minute drive away from Sawyer’s place; the piece in the entryway that only looks like a painting but is actually a collage of book covers is by artist pal Jeff Wallace. Even when Sawyer’s hanging out at home alone, it feels a bit like a party.
Leaning on creative friends was not just a natural way to decorate, but it helped Sawyer hone his sense of style. Before this, “I didn’t have the extensive experience of putting a home together,” he admits. While the two-bedroom, one-bathroom rental is by all accounts small, strangely, the living room is awkwardly large. He wasn’t sure how to approach laying out furniture at first: Should he fill it with a supersized sofa? Could the dining table also live in there? Which way does the furniture face, windows or fireplace?
He started with the walnut sideboard, crafted by friend and furniture maker Sabin Ousey. “You might traditionally see something like that with a TV on it or next to a dining table, but I just turned it into storage and used it to frame that painting above it,” explains Sawyer. He moved onto the sofa, searching for something that wouldn’t obstruct the interior glass looking out to the sunroom and the landscape beyond. A vintage Togo, scored on Chairish, was just the ticket. “It’s exactly one inch lower than the window,” he says.
Most days, you can find him parked on the sofa in the sunroom, napping, reading, or taking Zoom calls. “The light is so magical. It feels like you’re floating over Santa Barbara,” says Sawyer. The couch and the Noguchi lantern were two of very few items that traveled with him when he moved to the west coast from New York City. The pendant made a whole lot of sense in his old Dumbo loft where the ceilings were 13 feet high, but Sawyer loved the piece so much he wasn’t willing to part with it.
Its new location in the corner by the windows, is almost even more grand. “There’s something interesting about the tension of having an oversized lantern in a small room, and I loved the way the lines on the shade are reflected in the [paneling] on the ceiling,” he says. When his bedroom door is open, he has a straight view of the perfectly centered orb. At night, when it’s turned on, it can look a whole lot like the moon.
With Santa Barabara’s sunny climate and mild humidity working in favor of all his houseplants, Sawyer has dreams of growing citrus in his sunroom. “I feel like it could be really amazing. It just requires a lot of natural air to be coming in,” he says, contemplating how his travel schedule could accommodate an orange tree.
Finding the large Wynne Hendry photograph that now hangs over the queen-sized bed felt kismet. Sawyer has seen those red “Little America” oil tanks countless times in person. “Growing up, I lived in Boise but my grandmother was in Fort Collins, Colorado, so I found myself on holidays and in the summer taking road trips. In the middle of that very long, desolate drive through Wyoming, we’d always refuel at this truck stop where these tanks are,” he shares. There’s a memory to go along with every piece.
