Rustic Romance
Daniel and Elena De Meyer put love into the game and their home
A family that plays together— Elena, Olivia, and Daniel De Meyer raise their mallets on the field.
Written by Jennifer Blaise Kramer
Photographs by Megan Sorel
“It’s hard if you don’t both play, the other partner has to be so tolerant,” Elena says. “It’s great we can be together.”
For Daniel and Elena De Meyer, their love story started on polo fields. The pair—she’s an actress, he’s in finance—met at the Will Rogers Polo Club in Los Angeles in 2002 and soon started dating. The fact that they both loved the horses, the tournaments, the wins, and the losses made it much easier to spend a lot of time with one another. “It’s hard if you don’t both play, the other partner has to be so tolerant,” Elena says. “It’s great we can be together.”
That passion for polo continues to fuel their marriage—and even real estate decisions. Five years ago, they moved from the Mission Rose Garden area to be closer to the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club, looking for a place where their school-age daughter, Olivia, could grow up around horses, farmers, and nature. Since the couple has European roots—she’s from Romania and he has family in Belgium—they wanted a home base in California that felt like the best of both worlds. They found a cottage-style home not far from the polo field that looks as if it’s been plucked from the English countryside and dropped right in Carpinteria.
“They found a cottage-style home not far from the polo field that looks as if it’s been plucked from the English countryside and dropped right in Carpinteria.”
“With timbered homes and horse country, it reminded me a lot of the Normandy coastline…all rolled up into a California scene,” says Daniel. That European romance is apparent at first glance with rounded rooflines, vaulted ceilings, wood beams, and warm sconces, which lend a cozy feel throughout the library and kitchen, where copper pots hang overhead.
To enhance the rustic feel, they painted the walls in a soft custom blend of Flemish gray that Daniel calls the color of parchment and then layered on Belgian linen drapery. “The French are masters at shades of gray,” says Daniel, who did most of the home improvements himself. “We wanted to make it cozy, not grand, and give it that aged look.”
French doors lead to various outdoor nooks—from a kitchen cutting garden that they keep full of seasonal veggies, flowers, and herbs, to a fragrant lemon garden to a tiered lawn with trellised walkways weaving through the one-acre property. In the summer, they picnic by the garden with friends before matches; in the fall, they throw a big autumn harvest party; during the holidays, all the old oaks are lit up when relatives come to visit. When not entertaining or playing low-goal polo together, the family of three heads overseas, which is always a source of design inspiration.
“When you visit family as much as we do, you see how they do things—that blend of old and new,” Daniel says. “We come back with ideas every time.”
