I In the summer of 2020, when Elyse Benson and her husband Andrew Lebov stumbled upon a scruffy 1957 ranch house in Auburn with bedrooms the size of postage stamps and beige shagadelic carpet, they knew they’d found “the one.” Or rather Benson, a visual designer with a degree in architecture, knew. Lebov, a motion graphics designer, could see the good bones—and the incredible mountain bike trails he’d soon be bombing down, straight out of his garage. Contemplating starting a family, the two were in the market for more elbow room and outdoor space than their tight urban Bay Area digs provided. When working from home became a possibility during the pandemic, the dot-commers decided they wanted to relocate to the Sacramento area to be nearer to Benson’s parents in El Dorado Hills, where Benson grew up—future proximity to grandparents was a big factor. The online hunt for a local designer whose sensibilities matched their own quickly landed the couple with visual thinker extraordinaire Curtis Popp, whose home projects are as individualistic as his clients, and whose fairy dust has been sprinkled over public spaces like the original Ginger Elizabeth Chocolates shop and the current Magpie cafe. “He seemed like he wanted to keep a lot of the mid-century flair, not just do a super modern overhaul—have some contemporary elements, some mid-century elements and marry the two,” Lebov says. “I mean, we’re both designers, so we’re [crappy] clients,” he adds laughing, acknowledging that the couple’s wealth of subject knowledge made them somewhat persnickety. “We felt sorry for him,” Benson says. They can make this joke precisely because the collaboration went so well, despite disagreements about a few details, like the color of the exterior—Popp suggested a darker color, for a more updated look. “Elyse and I would drive around Eichler neighborhoods and take pictures,” Lebov says, referring to developer Joseph Eichler, who constructed some of the most quintessential mid-century enclaves in California in the 1950s and ’60s, including several in the Bay Area and one in South Land Park that was just declared a historic district last year. “We saw plenty of the mid-tone ones, but the ones that really got us excited were lighter, like a warm dove gray.” Pre-renovation, the millennial couple (she’s 38, he’s 42), who both work remotely for YouTube, used to trek from the Bay Area to “camp out” in their newly purchased Auburn house. They would set up a projector to watch movies on the wall above the fireplace. Nowadays, the couple still watches movies over the fireplace—albeit on a retractable screen with a projector suspended from the original exposed center beam in the ceiling. “My approach with all my jobs is to try to capture the essence of what the house is,” Popp says. His own 1937 Art Moderne home in Land Park is similarly retrofitted to celebrate its era and serve as a backdrop to a vivid, eclectic furniture collection. That level of abstract purism is on display everywhere in the Benson-Lebov home. Like a Frank Lloyd Wright design, the home feels so of a piece that it seems more like a sculpture than a house. But where Wright’s houses tell you how to live, in gorgeous but benevolently dictatorial terms (the legendary architect designed not just the furniture, but sometimes even dresses for the homeowners so they wouldn’t sully his masterpieces), Popp’s design seems more like a vessel designed to buoy the dreams of its inhabitants, whatever they feel like wearing. For the exterior color of their 1957 home, homeowners Elyse Benson and Andrew Lebov found inspiration in houses around the region designed by mid-century architect Joseph Eichler. “The ones that really got us excited were lighter, like a warm dove gray,” says Lebov. “It’s the kind of project I really, really love,” Popp says of why he immediately vibed with the 1,400-square-foot house. The previous owners passed down its original plans. The house was designed by the late Sacramento architect Bob McCabe, who remodeled the homes of former Sacramento Bee  owner-editor C.K. McClatchy and painter Wayne Thiebaud, and once interned with the 20th century’s most famous futurist, Buckminster Fuller, best known for popularizing the geodesic dome. “It’s a cool existing house that’s come on hard times but hasn’t been ruined by somebody. And it’s small enough to really focus on the details. Having clients that are design savvy and want to do something interesting—it’s kind of a perfect storm.” A storm of creativity, that is. Popp knows how to set a stage in a way that evokes the dramatic, and has throughout the course of his career. In 2008, he gave Ginger Elizabeth Chocolates’ original midtown shop its signature glamourpuss pink jewel box look. Since then, he’s crafted public spaces you probably inhabit with glee. In 2015, Popp persuaded the owners of midtown’s Magpie cafe, one of his favorite restaurants, to relocate from a quaint space on R Street to a larger one on 16th Street and enter a brave new world of dramatic black and white walls and bold yellow accents, for a glowing, avant-garde interior that looks like a stage set for a Samuel Beckett play—and lends that drama to every plate of food on their Instagram page. For Bike Dog Brewing’s new Broadway digs in 2017, he created a miniaturized abstraction of a Parisian street scene, where every table has its own patio awning and faux “storefront,” so you feel like you’re sitting in a bright, buzzy village square. He painted the trim in his own knotty pine A-frame vacation cabin in Tahoe black before that became a trend, taking the 1969 classic that was decorated in a style he described to Atomic Ranch  magazine as Holly Hobbie and transforming it into one evoking Mad Men  modern without sacrificing any of its originality. READ MORE: Making It All Popp – The style and career of designer Curtis Popp Today, the Benson-Lebov home is open, airy and organized—formally rigorous yet breathtakingly, elegantly casual. You know the saying in fashion: “Wear the clothes, don’t let the clothes wear you”? Some houses, especially showpieces of modern architecture, can be imperiously high-maintenance when it comes to preserving a severe, pristine aesthetic—like the all-open-shelving kitchen with no place to store the crockpot, or the stark living room that looks messy the minute you set your purse down. But this family home in the Auburn foothills feels as comfortable, elegant and practical as a high-end cashmere sweater you never want to take off. Shelves near the kitchen provide an opportunity to add splashes of color and display artwork. Popp’s subtle yet precise update of the home is a near-perfect essay on the way we live now. “It’s just a simple house with a lot of natural light that lives really big.” Popp says, adding, “This generation, they want less, but they want quality.” In other words, smaller spaces, but finer materials. White oak floors meet white oak cabinets and bentwood white oak barstools by Danish furniture company Hay in an elegant study of shape, line and texture. There is something subtly sumptuous about the lavish use of this same wood everywhere; even the appliance fronts are disguised behind cabinetry. “People say, ‘You don’t have a refrigerator?!’ ” Benson laughs. “White oak is the star of the show,” Popp says. “Everything else kind of goes away.” It’s a confident design decision, especially evident in the kitchen, where the fine cabinetry’s luxurious grain draws the eye, with nothing to distract from the intricacies of its texture. Popp didn’t even tile the backsplash, using a gleaming white expanse of the same bone-white composite that makes up the island and countertops, and the wall paint was carefully mixed to match. Popp is an avid home chef, so the kitchen isn’t just for show—it’s meant to be filled with the sights, sounds and smells of cooking. Spill a big basket of fruit and vegetables from the Auburn farmers’ market onto the island, and you’ll have a museum-worthy still life. The skill with which everything is combined and aligned is downright audacious. If you’ve ever tried putting together an all-black outfit, you know how different blacks can clash, and the same principle holds true for Popp’s joining of wood-to-wood without so much as a baseboard to hide behind. Details like the edge profile of the countertop where it meets the cabinetry are Swiss-watch precise, thanks to the craftsmanship of Thomas Nigh of Essential Millwork in Nevada City. “Tom just nailed it. [His work] is exquisite,” Popp says. Part of the budget that was originally earmarked for a dramatic series of skylights went to cabinetry instead—a decision both the designer and his designer clients are ecstatic about. The family watches movies over the fireplace in the living room using a projector suspended from the ceiling that beams films onto a retractable screen. Architects and designers are notorious for having under-furnished homes, as knowing too much and having high standards tends to lead to decision paralysis—Steve Jobs, perhaps the most famous design guru of our era, for example, famously lived in a house predominantly furnished with a Tiffany floor lamp, and sat on the floor. Benson and Lebov admit to a mild case of that syndrome, but in this house, it kind of works in their favor—and they do have a comfy sectional couch in the living room that’s expansive enough for the whole family, which now includes their 2-and-a-half-year-old son August (“Gus” for short). “Honestly, the cabinetry took away our need for a lot of furniture,” Benson says. “It’s been great.” The wooden cabinetry wall of storage that lines the wide entry hall is a study in proportion. A row of clerestory windows was replaced with large squares of glass that bathe the space in slanted light, while a second, lower row of open shelves breaks up the wall of cabinets. It’s both a space to display art and precious objects, and a prodigious amount of storage for a home this size. So much storage that there will never be a need to cram or stuff, just breezily stow and go. If you’ve ever tried to keep a modernist space looking sleek, especially with kids in the picture, you know that the secret is storage, storage, storage. With the abundance here, it’s safe to say Benson and Lebov won’t be stepping on nearly as many Lego bricks as most new parents. “It’s very Marie Kondo in that way,” Benson says. “Everything has its place.” “The hallway was so wide, and there were weird little closets there before. It made sense as an area you could load up on storage—to make it an art feature, but also a functional one,” Popp adds.  Abundant storage is key to the home’s minimalist aesthetic. White oak cabinets line the walls of the master bedroom as well as the main hallway. Design aesthetics aside, the original construction methods were also lacking in places. The walls between the bedrooms, for example, were just 2-inch-thick partitions, and needed to be beefed up with more standard 2-by-4-inch framing studs. Bathrooms of the era were tiny by today’s standards, but by moving the laundry facilities to the garage, Popp was able to open up more space for them. They’re still on the small side, so to make them live larger, the tidy shower stalls and floors were each done in a single neutral shade of Heath Ceramics tile and the medicine cabinets were set flush into the walls, with minimalist black faucets and towel racks serving as the only ornamentation. The small spaces and sheer volume of ship-shape cabinetry makes the house feel a bit like, well, the cabin of a ship. In the late ’80s, postmodern design icon Philippe Starck created a series of interiors for the French boatmaker Beneteau. A rigorously limited materials palette of polished teak, white leather and stainless steel—executed with simple, functional, circular shapes (think a round sink, round portals and round vents) providing pattern in the absence of ornament—resulted in the most surprisingly elegant boat interior imaginable. Less had never looked more luxurious. Popp’s design achieves that same level of surprise, also by doing less where you’d expect more, and more where you’d expect less. Speaking of the unexpected, the three-bedroom plan that originally budgeted a home office for both Benson and Lebov fell by the wayside with the arrival of Gus, who was born before the family had even fully moved in. After some quick, creative problem-solving, Lebov’s animation studio occupies a backyard ADU from Costco, while Benson works out of bedroom No. 3. The way they live in the home continues to evolve, but there isn’t anything they’d do differently. Although a second child is on the way, so it sounds like a cool set of mid-mo bunk beds may soon be in the family’s future.