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Architectural Digest •

This 1950s Los Angeles Home Is a Sanctuary for All Seasons

More often than not the best things in life happen when you least expect them. Or as one Los Angeles couple puts it: “when you’re out of town with zero cell phone reception.” Their current home, a two-story 1950s abode in the heart of sunny Brentwood, was a lucky find. “We never even visited. One of our parents went and saw the place for us and walked us through it via a spotty FaceTime. Lo and behold, we placed an offer the same day,” says the wife.
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This Couple’s Colorful, Pattern-Rich San Francisco Home Is Designed to Last Forever

The thing about living in an old property with great (if worn-out) bones is deciding when and how to give it a new lease on life. For one writer-photographer couple in San Francisco, the tipping point was the near death of their kitchen, which, as interior designer Christine Lin puts it, was, “shall we say, nonresponsive.” The Shingle-style house dates to 1906 and the couple, empty nesters with adult children, have lived in one of its three flats for years. “They really love the place and it is
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This Interior Designer’s LA Bungalow Perfectly Embodies Her Maximalist Spirit

Francesca Grace is a city girl, but the kind that owns chickens, rides horses, and spends her free time scouting out the next swimmable lake. “I’m a grandma at heart,” says the interior designer, who also double-hats as a home stager under her eponymous brand Francesca Grace Home. One look inside her 1920s-inspired Silver Lake, Los Angeles, bungalow, and you know she isn’t wrong. “My last home was an actual 1920s build, but I was forced to say goodbye because the floorboards were falling apart,”
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An Artist Couple Transformed Their Century-Old LA Home Into a Colorful Work of Art

If history is anything to go by, Devon Oder and Adam Miller redecorate best under pressure. The year 2015 was when the LA-based artist couple first put the theory to the test. As newly expectant parents and newly minted homeowners of a circa-1932 home in LA’s Eagle Rock neighborhood, they were determined to renovate and move in before the birth of their baby. But their son, River, had other plans. He arrived early, and Adam moved in by the skin of his teeth while his wife and son recouped in hos
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This California Kitchen Is Like a Quaint Postcard From Italy

Though the whole home was in need of some TLC, it was clear that the kitchen needed it the most. The layout was cramped and closed it off from the living and dining areas. “We didn’t have the space or setting to host people here,” Ashley shares. The solution was clear—the walls had to go. And so they did, thanks to architect Steve Souder and interior designer Leah Vitrano, who stepped in to help the couple overhaul the space. “I remember one evening, while sitting in our previous kitchen, Steve
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This 1960s Atlanta Kitchen Keeps the Sunshine Close

There are two kinds of people in the world—those that love a turnkey home, and those that don’t. Ryan Abrams is a faithful member of the latter club. So much so that when he was hunting for a home in east Atlanta a few years ago, his main condition was finding one that was completely untouched. “I saw a lot of renovations that felt like easy flips, with poor paint and tile choices, and unfortunate layouts. When I saw this house, I immediately saw possibilities. It was nice to be able to make it
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This 100-Year-Old Brooklyn Town House Gets a Luminous New Kitchen

While other parts of the home were in great shape, the kitchen was a disaster. Situated inside a dingy shed-like addition between the living room and backyard, it was the exact opposite of what the couple had in mind. But, adding access to more sunlight would mean losing walls. So to help them build something better, the couple reached out to architect Alexandra Burr of AlexAllen Studio, whom they’d met through a mutual friend.

The end results is a light box—330 square feet of kitchen and dinin
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Inside a Whimsically Renovated English Apartment That’s Probably Not Haunted

Interior designer Sophie van Winden lives alone in her apartment in Margate, England, but she might not be the only soul that inhabits the place. “This area has many mediaeval crypts. The plumbers had to spend a fair bit of time under the floorboards sorting out all the pipes. One day they found a Victorian children’s pram, all rusted and bent. They were terrified!” she shares, insisting that despite the discovery, she is fairly (but not completely) certain that the home isn’t haunted.

Not that
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This Swedish Island Cottage Grows Out of the Woodland

This is a Stockholm story about the island of Torö, to be precise, although it begins on the mainland where one family—a couple and their kids, aged five and one, and one partner’s mother—is based. Tired of the city and desperate for a mid-pandemic respite, they set their sights on creating a year-round vacation home someplace slower, but in a sustainable, ecological, and cost-effective way. They found their answer in a 1970s two-bedroom cottage situated at the highest point in Torö, an isle on
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This 800-Square-Foot West Village Apartment Is a Colorful, Shapeshifting Space

Interior designer Juan Carretero isn’t one to settle, least of all in matters regarding his home. So when he came out of a nearly 20-year-old relationship and moved out of the home he shared with his ex-partner, finding a rental in Manhattan he could use as a pièd-a-terre (he had already established a primary residence in upstate New York) was top priority. It was an exercise easier said than done, and the more apartments he visited, the more disillusioned he became. “I toured dozens of dismembe
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A Designer Turned a Former Mill Into a Personal Sanctuary

The allure of a property is always that much more when it’s been home to somebody significant. Even if that somebody was a nondescript pig named Hamilton. “He did serve as the mascot for the local NHL team, you know,” chuckles interior designer Robert MacNeill, who insists neither Hamilton nor any of his predecessors had any influence on his and husband Paul Ingram’s decision to purchase said home in Raleigh, North Carolina’s Caraleigh Mills neighborhood.

“We came to find this unit in a roundab
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This 1950s Austin Bungalow Is a Sophisticated Slant on Pink

When Taylor took up the design reins, she already had a starting point. The homeowner had worked with stylist Leaia Felder to envisage an initial aesthetic—one that was light and airy, with a decidedly refined femininity. “Together, they had made some preliminary selections that really set the tone for the project,” Taylor shares. But there was still much to be contemplated. Designer and client were keen on achieving a soft, hyper-feminine aesthetic, but with a sophisticated slant. Which meant,
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A Designer Combined Neighboring West Village Apartments to Create the Haven of Her Dreams

As an interior designer, Leigh Kirby Klein is respectful of her clients’ personal space. Unless, of course, that client happens to be her husband. “I’ve never worked with a tougher client,” laughs the AD PRO Directory designer, for whom the line between designer and wife was blurred a few years ago when the couple purchased a home—well, technically two—in a newly built residential building in the West Village.
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This 937-Square-Foot Seaside Home Is a Colorful Potpourri of Old and New

A few years ago, Monika and Michal, their two sons, and their whippet, Donn, decided they’d had enough of Warsaw. “We wanted to seriously slow down,” says Monika. Luckily she and Michal had the option of working from home, which meant moving to a smaller, slower city within Poland was a very real possibility. The seaside city of Gdansk topped their list: It was equally ideal for windsurfing in the summer and long beachside walks in the winter. Finding a home there, however, was another matter. “
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A Circa-1899 Carriage House in Brooklyn Gets a Luminous Refresh

When one designer-academic couple toured a property in Brooklyn, they never expected to fall in love with the circa-1899 carriage house across the street instead. “We said to our broker, ‘Now that’s something we’d love!’ He asked around and found out it belonged to the same owner. We made an off-market offer and it was accepted,” says one half of the couple.

As charming as it was, the 1,000-square-foot interior needed serious work. The layout felt crowded and there were several shortcomings, in
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Inside a Portland Bungalow Where Summer Never Ends

When interior designer Anna-Jaël Hotzel and her husband, designer and engineer Evan Livingston, first toured the Portland bungalow that would be their next home, it was the garden that sold them. “We had been to about 60 open houses, and when we walked into the garden of this one, we knew right away we wanted to live here,” recalls Anna-Jaël, who worked in advertising and prop styling before establishing her own Portland-based interior design firm, Kollective. To be fair, it was the 10-foot-tall
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This Melbourne Home Is a Fantasia of Colorful Forms

When they purchased their Melbourne home nearly ten years ago, Sarah Auld and her husband, Matt, saw past its shortcomings. “My husband loved the location. He had grown up in the area, with his grandparents having lived just two streets away,” says Sarah, an elementary school art teacher who also works in visual merchandising. At the time, the house ticked two basic boxes—it was within 10 kilometers of the city and it had 2 bedrooms. With a baby on the way, the couple decided to put off any majo
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A Seaside Bungalow in New York Where Time Stands Still

In the New York neighborhood of Far Rockaway, just steps away from the beach, is a row of storybook bungalows that look like they belong in France, the Caribbean, or New York in the 1950s. “These bungalows are a bit of a forgotten thread of New York’s urban fabric,” says architect Jonathan Chesley, one half of the husband-and-wife team behind the New York–based interdisciplinary practice KTISMAstudio. For him and his partner in life and work, landscape architect Alexandria Donati, the area felt
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This Hudson Valley Kitchen Is a Triumph in Creative Upcycling

Longtime friends Jiminie Ha and Jeremy Parker had never considered purchasing a property together. Not until they came across a listing for a circa-1949 house designed by celebrated late architect Philip Johnson, best-known for designing the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. “Jeremy shared the link with a few of us in a group chat, and although the Zillow photos made it hard to believe that this was a Philip Johnson, we were still keen to go see it,” recalls Jiminie, founder and creative d
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Mod Minimalist Meets Wild Maximalist in This West Village Apartment

Interior designer Kayla Billings Gardner and her husband, financial technology entrepreneur Clayton Gardner, are opposites in every way. She has a creative bent, he’s analytical. She’s a wild maximalist, he leans modern. She’s into color, he’s not. And yet, in the seven years they’ve shared a home together, they’ve somehow figured out a balance. “In our past homes, we shared every space—in one case, with two other roommates. This was our first opportunity to have designated spaces true to our in
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In This Philadelphia Home, the Bathrooms are the Shining Stars

For Philadelphia natives Mark and Courtney Owens, the pandemic had a silver lining—or two. For one, they became parents. Then, they moved back to Pennsylvania after a decade of living out of state. “We’d spent the last 10 years living across Seattle, New York City, and Chicago, but now felt a calling to be closer to our families,” says Courtney, an HR leader at Google. She and Mark began searching for homes, ultimately landing on a 1920s Colonial Revival home in Penn Valley. “The previous owner had lived there for over 50 years, so the style was definitely dated,” shares Mark, a management consulting professional at Grant Thorton. It wasn’t just the style that the couple disfavored. There was something about the place that just felt heavy (think flashy doses of color, circus stripes in the bathrooms, and mismatched patterns)—a feeling they knew they could shake only with a redesign. An online search led them to Brittany Hakimfar of Philadelphia-based Far Studio, whom they enlisted soon after.
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In This Songwriter’s Midcentury Laurel Canyon Home, No Two Rooms Are Alike

The first time they met, interior designer Victoria Holly had an unusual ask for her client, 30-something songwriter Michael Matosic. “He had a very large, very modern navy sectional scheduled for delivery. Within 10 minutes of meeting him, I said, ‘Please don’t kill me, but you have to cancel that order.’ And he did,” says Victoria. Luckily, the request didn’t throw Michael, who was happy to have her lend a helping hand in figuring out a style for his midcentury Laurel Canyon home. “Funnily eno
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A 100-Year-Old Long Island Home Got a Bright Kitchen Glow-Up

The cost of day care must be less than or equal to the monthly rent, according to the the fail-safe formula most parents swear by—and Genevieve and Amin Tehrani were no exception. But when the Manhattan-based couple had their second child a few years ago, they found that formula fast failing. They took it as a sign to move, and the suburbs seemed like the next best alternative. “We fell in love with this house pretty quickly,” says Amin of their current home in Rockville Centre, Long Island. “It
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This 900-Square-Foot Brooklyn Apartment Is a Tapestry of Travel Memories

Per the trio’s specifications, all the ornate doors, trims, moldings, walls, and ceilings were whited out, eliminating any trace of the color brown, not counting the original parquet floors. “The effect is like a wedding cake,” Jackie muses. When it came to deciding what went where, mother and daughter arrived at an unspoken understanding. “My mom and I are both bossy people, but we always figure out a collaboration. She knows exactly where things should go,” laughs Miro. “In my former apartment
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