Step Inside Actress Karen Gillan’s California Cottage

In her native Scotland, Karen Gillan is readily recognized as Amy Pond, the friendly companion to the Eleventh Doctor in Dr. Who, Britain’s beloved sci-fi series. Yet in her adoptive Los Angeles, Gillan usually wanders about incognito, given that in her biggest Hollywood role to date, the antihero Nebula of Guardians of the Galaxy, she’s a bald cyborg with blue skin. “I can still go out and get a coffee,” she says. “It would be sad to lose that ability.”

She recently shared her home with the team from Architectural Digest and today we’re taking a look inside…

Though her inconspicuousness is unlikely to last, for now the 35-year-old actor is enjoying sitting in cafés near the hillside home she recently moved into with her husband, comedian Nick Kocher. To design their first home together (Gillan and Kocher got married last year in a historic castle near Glasgow), the couple enlisted Pierce & Ward, an AD100 studio known for creating lived-in spaces with an old-world feel and a dash of glamour.

With few instructions other than to “make the house look cool,” as they recall, design partners Louisa Pierce and Emily Ward had to lean on their powers of intuition. They took cues from Gillan’s birthplace, the impossibly picturesque Scottish Highlands, as well as from the property itself, a traditional cottage built in the early 1900s. “It was creaky and imperfect in the best way,” says Ward of the 2,400-square-foot home, which has a shingled roof, wood siding, and rows of French windows.

After tearing down a series of bland renovations and adding elegant finishes like built-in bookshelves and wainscotting, the designers got to work on decorating the space. The result is a transporting residence fit for the shores of Loch Ness, full of floral wallpapers, curvaceous brass chandeliers, and whimsical antiques. It’s a quaint look that in less experienced hands might have turned out rather twee, but the designers—who have worked with A-list clients like Kate Hudson and Dakota Johnson—used a sophisticated palette of muted greens, dusty pinks, and earthy umbers while pairing time-worn objects with custom-made furniture.

“We wanted to make it feel cosy, like an old pub in Scotland, but also fresh and with a balance between the feminine and the masculine,” Ward says. “To achieve that, we played with colour more than we had before.” In the spacious living room, eclectic fabrics in tan, brown, and ochre harmonize with a rustic upright piano, a vintage bar cart with brass details, and an ornate wood-framed mirror. Pops of colour, seen in a forest-green coffee table and sage accent chairs, add visual interest.

“It’s exactly what I wanted,” says Gillan of her newly decorated home and its traditional two-story layout overlooking a tree-shaded backyard. “I could never live in a modern space because it would kill my energy.” Speaking via Zoom, she grins and adds: “Everyone thinks I’m in Scotland when they see the background.” One day, she says, she would love to have a property in the Highlands she so misses, but her California locale is as familiar and comforting as can be, a place to take refuge from a busy schedule (her latest Marvel movie, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, was released on 5 May) and from the gaze of her growing fan base, who will surely start recognizing Gillan during her morning coffee runs.

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