A SENSE OF DRAMA

Actress Anne Hathaway and her husband, jewellery designer Adam Shulman, have imbued their Californian retreat with a fairy-tale wonder

- JULIET BENNING

At the foot of the mountains, a chalet of dark wood and stone sits perched on a velvet green lawn. Given its Alpine styling, it wouldn’t look amiss in a Swiss or German fairy tale, but the property is in fact located in southern California. Built in 1906, the architecture is a quixotic combination of traditional Swiss mountain lodge and Californian arts and crafts styles. Its owners for the last few years, actress Anne Hathaway and her husband, jewellery designer Adam Shulman, were eager to embrace the chalet’s storybook theatricality. Indeed, their choice of interior designer reveals much about their creative instinct – Pamela Shamshiri of Studio Shamshiri was a production designer on films before she moved into interiors and a sense of narrative is key to her work.