She really first went to scope it out a number of years earlier, when the home was initially up on the market and Gray’s was nonetheless in its infancy. “I knew I couldn’t afford it, however I didn’t inform anybody that,” she confesses. She swooned over its unimaginable bluff-top location and “good proportions,” however needed to stroll away. The home got here again available on the market in 2013, and he or she seized the second probability. It didn’t harm that Pompeo was by then one of many highest-paid actors in tv—a pleasant place to be in in case your ardour is gorgeous homes.

As her followers know, Pompeo is a bona fide interior-design fanatic whose weak point for actual property has resulted within the renovation of a collection of stunners, together with a contemporary barn in Sag Harbor and her principal residence, a Nineteen Twenties Mediterranean-style villa in Los Angeles (AD, November 2014). “I actually benefit from the craft and artwork of homes,” she says. “It workout routines a special artistic muscle.”

As a rule, AD100 designer Martyn Lawrence Bullard—the British-born maestro behind pleasure palaces for Cher, Elton John, and several other members of the Kardashian household—has been her accomplice in these pursuits. “We’ve been in one another’s lives for therefore lengthy we all know what the opposite will like earlier than even exhibiting it to them,” says Bullard, mentioning that the seashore home marks his fourth challenge with Pompeo. After so many collaborations, he considers her one in every of his closest buddies. 

In-built 1979, the home is modestly sized—at the moment about 3,000 sq. toes, after a later addition—and designed extra as a machine for dwelling than a mogul’s mansion. However what it lacks in magnitude it greater than makes up for in intimacy and drama, due to its central courtyard and phenomenal ocean views. “We didn’t change its stream or footprint,” says Bullard, “but it surely did require updates.” He recloaked the outside in contemporary teak and swapped the weathered doorways and home windows for modern black powder-coated steel ones that now, as soon as opened, appear to vanish. Instead of the terrazzo flooring (“too slippery”), he put in earthy concrete. And although Bullard could also be greatest recognized for his fanciful Morocco–goes–to–Beverly Hills aesthetic, he proved he might pull off midcentury utilitarian stylish with the compact, gleaming white kitchen, an apt match for the home’s modernist spirit.