IT WASN’T THE post-and-beam of their dreams, but you don’t come across a near-perfect architectural jewel every day—much less one that’s cloaked in natural light and located in a spot you already want to live in.  Which is how, two years ago, interior designer Chad McPhail and his partner ended up as the stewards of a house designed in 1937 by architect William Kesling. Set in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, it epitomized the post-Art Deco style known as Streamline Moderne.  The couple moved from New York to the West Coast in search of serenity and lo-fi cool, and fell in love with the three-bedroom house, an ode to Jazz Age ocean liners complete with slightly kitschy porthole doors, an observation deck and gangplank front steps. “It was intimidating,” said Mr. McPhail, who no longer lives there. “How could we make it ours without compromising the historical architecture?”  Tempting though it was, they resisted the urge to remake the house in a midcentury mold. And they made a pact: No structural changes unless absolutely necessary, and no cosmetic fixes that couldn’t be reversed. “I wanted to let the strong architecture have a presence without too much color,” he said.  A first step, then, was to replace the stagy glamour of the mint-green color scheme. Second, they introduced a more familiar—and resonant—decade to the William Kesling time capsule: the 1970s. Mr. McPhail, an Orange County native, drew on his experience working under designer Laura Kirar and David Mann of MR Architecture + Décor, but it was his grandmother who had surrounded him with Me-Decade furniture growing up. “There was a revival of interest in Art Deco during the 1970s,” Mr. McPhail said, “so I felt like there was a personal tie to her style” in the house.  The couple ended up outfitting their new home with pieces from many different eras—a coffee table from the 1930s, dining chairs from the ’40s, patio furniture from present-day manufacturers such as Roost—along with art from the likes of Ed Ruscha and less-well-known talents such as Carl Pickhardt.  After closing on the house, they bolted to Morocco to indulge Mr. McPhail’s love of vintage textiles. There, they picked up examples from the ’60s and ’70s, such as a sequined marriage blanket and a flat-weave carpet of reed and camel leather, to complete the look. Still, the original design remained intact. “In 100 years, if someone wanted to remake it exactly as it was in 1937,” Mr. McPhail said, “they could still do that.”  “It was a stage set when I first saw it,” said interior designer Chad McPhail of the living room inside the Streamline Moderne-style house in Los Angeles. “It was like a movie version of a New York apartment.” Here, the couple’s subtle approach to renovation, which included bleaching the floors and woodwork, and repainting the mint-green interior in Farrow & Ball’s All White. A 1930s coffee table and ’70s leather chairs coexist easily with vintage fabrics and a textured and patterned Moroccan carpet from Mansour, which softens the strict geometry of original built-in shelving. A non-working fireplace is now lined with Ann Sacks matte-aluminum tiles.  The patio extends the casual, worldly vibe of the den into a walled courtyard planted with jade, palm, cactus and bougainvillea, and projects a more contemporary vibe than it did before. “It was very formal,” said Mr. McPhail. Existing teak lounge chairs were traded in for lightweight string chairs by Roost that can be grouped or scattered as needed. A Burmese carpet (which spends only the summer outdoors) and wood side tables from Lawson-Fenning help make the patio equally amenable to large groups as a party of one—with the cactuses standing in for art and décor. Said Mr. McPhail: “We wanted to let the plant shapes be the dominant note.”  A dining area adjacent to the living room illustrates the difference between what stayed and what went. The duo kept the original cork-faced cabinets and added a 52-inch custom-built table with terrazzo top, set off by 1950s Swiss plywood chairs and a 1936 bar cart designed by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto for Artek. But they sent the original aluminum blinds (“very Machine-Age,”) to storage and replaced them with wooden Venetian versions—“maybe the single-most expensive thing we bought for the house,” said Mr. McPhail. “And we motorized them, too.”  In keeping with their mantra to avoid structural changes, the kitchen’s alterations can be undone at any time. “The idea was not to mess with history,” said Mr. McPhail. The Western Holly Stove, linoleum floors and tile counters, for example, were left alone, but the circle-decorated cabinets had been painted white, gray and black to flaunt their nautical detailing—a look reminiscent of the Good Ship Lollipop. Mr. McPhail repainted the top cabinets in all white and took the bottom set down to its simple plywood, then sealed it—a nod, he said, to Streamline Moderne’s use of humble materials.  Painting over the mint-green walls in white allowed the minimal architectural detailing of the second-floor master bedroom to recede, while the liquid curves of Vico Magistretti’s 1970 Gaudi chair, which Mr. McPhail bought at Silver Lake’s Rubbish Interiors, stands out against the reductive palette of beige, red and white. A vintage sequined Moroccan wedding blanket drapes the Restoration Hardware bed, and a Persian carpet fades into the bleached-oak floor. The 1940s dresser is from Lawson-Fenning, also in Silver Lake; the work over the bed is by Carl Pickhardt.
This lo-fi Art Deco renovation of a 1937 architectural jewel in Los Angeles reflects (and respects) history, without getting stuck in the past.