From the time she was a teen, Kristin Frieben Whittle wanted to live in a gracious home. She envisioned it as an airy loft filled with family and friends, a place with enough space to display the art and curious objects she’d collected throughout her life.
She held fast to her vision after graduating from college and then law school. Even while running her own one-woman law firm, she spent weekends scouring neighborhoods in search of properties.
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In 2004, Frieben Whittle found her future home. “I was driving around Overland when I saw this warehouse with 10 beautiful arched windows,” she recalls. “I took my mother on a walk-through, and she said, ‘Kristin, please don’t buy this building.’”
Eighteen offices and a low drop ceiling cluttered the space, leaving it with a maze of corridors and little natural light. “The building was a mess,” Frieben Whittle says. “The roof leaked, there was asbestos, it was full of debris—but I could see it had great bones.” She bought it, she says, “for a good price.”
Constructed in 1924 by Southwestern Bell as a switching station, by 1947 the building had undergone three additions. Over time, it was sold and resold, then sat vacant until 2004, when Frieben Whittle bought it. During a 10-year negotiation to change its zoning, she had the structure stabilized, the roof replaced, custom windows installed, and the interiors stripped down to the brick. Since 2017, Frieben Whittle has lived and worked from a home office there as a lawyer and as a mediator for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The process of acquiring the 15,000-square-foot building, then transforming the raw space into living quarters, could have frustrated seasoned professionals, but Frieben Whittle was unfazed.
“When I was in my thirties and forties, I busted my butt as a litigator,” she says. “I saved and banked my earnings.” To give herself time to design, furnish, and finish the space, she cut back on her work hours and added a partner.
Frieben Whittle’s life and travel experiences inform all of her design choices, from the Persian rugs underfoot to the bespoke lighting fixtures overhead. “I don’t really follow trends,” she says. “My style is to mix different periods, materials, textiles, and art.”
Frieben Whittle started honing her eclectic style early on, raking through the offerings at garage sales with her mother, an aunt, and a cousin. “All three of them could spot that one antique or piece that was undervalued and snap it up,” she says. “My mom has always decorated really well on a tight budget. I work the same way.”
She regularly shops Facebook Marketplace and scours the auction site Chairish for unique items: “I almost always put in a bid for half of the asking price, then bid it up gradually. I put this home together with good deals.”
Frieben Whittle spends most of her time in the building’s central open area, which was once filled with offices. The three bedroom suites that she built include a master, where cool whites and the clean lines of blue Midcentury furniture give way to a riot of color and pattern in the bath, replete with a Moroccan tile fountain and backsplash. “My bedroom was inspired by the white buildings with the blue roofs and domes of the Greek island of Santorini,” she says. “The tile designs and style of the bath came from my visits to Istanbul.”
A second suite features a Victorian-inspired den, a colorful bedroom done in Chinese floral wallpaper and Provençal prints, and a bath wallpapered in hand-cut Victorian botanical prints. Frieben Whittle designed the third suite, styled as a rustic log cabin bunkhouse, for her niece and nephews: Allie, Will, Kyle, and Kale.
“When my brother William died, eight years ago, his son, Will, was 10 years old,” Frieben Whittle says. “Will’s mom asked if I would maintain my brother’s custody arrangement and take him every other weekend, which I did.” In 2012, when Will’s mother’s second husband died, leaving her with Will and his three half-siblings, she asked Frieben Whittle to help with all of the children, and she agreed.
“I went from having no kids of my own to having one in diapers, a toddler, a 5-year-old, and 11-year-old Will every other week,” Frieben Whittle says. “I designed the bunkroom just for them.
“About the same time, I bought a Sergio Bustamante sculpture, Arco de los Niños, to symbolize our relationship.”
“Aunt Kristin tells us we’re family—me, her, the kids—and we’re all in this boat together; that’s what the Bustamante boat sculpture symbolizes,” says Will Frieben, now 18.
As the children have grown older, Frieben Whittle says, they still visit often, but on a more flexible schedule: “They’re all busy with school activities, so they may skip one weekend and double up on the next. They have free run of the space, except for my office, which is off-limits.
“Sometimes, they just run around the main space like a racecourse. I had actually hoped we could all roller skate around here, but when I was trying to teach them to skate at a rink, I fell and broke my hip. They were traumatized by the medics, and me being down on the ice, so we never skated together here, but running? It’s good.”
“My aunt is amazing,” says Will. “She told us her idea for the bunkroom, but it’s so much more than we expected.”
Honoring family isn’t the only purpose of the home, Frieben Whittle says. Community is essential to her, too: “My friends call [the house] their gathering place.”
