Beach Sweet

With bright colors and clever space solutions, interior designer Victoria Dunivin creates a Mission Beach house a kid could love

Summertime in San Diego is about as good as it gets, especially if you live steps away from the sand, like Evelyn Wiggins and her husband, Richard Schneider. They moved to Mission Bay with their two children in 1999.

“My husband and I met in law school at USC,” says Evelyn. “We were living in Crown Point, in a really lovely neighborhood, and some friends came to visit from the Midwest and rented a place on the bay. We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could buy an old place here and fix it up?’”

Richard discovered just the house while rollerblading. “It was in bad shape,” Evelyn says. “I thought he was out of his mind.” The house never sold, and she gave in.

But when they were ready to remodel, they found out it wasn’t possible to add a second story. After years of seaside weathering, the 1,000-squarefoot beach cottage was ripe for a teardown. It would be cheaper to start over.

The homeowners selected Victoria Dunivin of Dunivin Design Group in Pacific Beach to work on every aspect of the reconstruction and create a new 2,850-square-foot multilevel home on a narrow waterfront lot. The contractor for the home remodel was Wardell Builders in Solana Beach.

“Now that they live right on the water, it’s a big dream come true,” Dunivin says.

Key to the new interior design was the family’s desire for a vibrant color scheme. They also wanted uncluttered rooms for multiple uses.

“Creating more space was critical,” Evelyn says. “We really wanted something that would fit our lifestyle: not pretentious, yet elegant on occasion.”

Their children—Elizabeth, a highschool freshman, and Sam, a middleschooler— were front and center in the couple’s design thinking.

Dunivin understands that families with active children need separate but equal space for birthday parties, hanging out with friends and homework. A third-level mezzanine with colorful builtin banquettes is used for reading or extra sleep-over space. Historical pictures of South Mission Beach are framed in bright teal. Weather permitting, a spacious rooftop deck can double as a dorm under the stars.

But Evelyn and Richard didn’t turn the entire home over to the kids. Upstairs, parents can escape into a large high-tech office area with a small deck.

The ground level’s colored concrete floors unify indoors and outdoors with quirky geometric designs that continue to the bayside patio. Sand is easily swept out the French doors.

A bright red family room offers a media center at one end and two walls for built-in homework desks on the other. Opaque-glass pocket doors close for privacy when guests use the Murphy bed, which is built into an L-shaped unit with a desk and bookshelves.

The great room’s living and dining areas, with light yellow walls, open to the kitchen, which has Shaker-style fir cabinets and a countertop-to-ceiling slate backsplash. Jade, granite and stainless-steel appliances make the kitchen both casual and California sleek.

“Richard found such a perfect location,” Evelyn says. “So I am now in the terrible position of having to always say, ‘Yes, he was right!’”

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