Most of the Ideas for This L.A. Reno Came From a 2018 Road Trip Through Europe
Photo by: Tessa Neustadt
When Joelle Kutner and Jesse Rudolph, cofounders of design studio Ome Dezin, bought a Los Angeles home in order to flip it, they knew their biggest hurdle would be finding a thread through time. Nestled in a historic enclave of the city, between the famed Hollywood Bowl and Runyon Canyon, the neighborhood was developed in the 1920s as a hideaway for movie stars and everyone who helped them shimmer. But this particular property was first renovated sometime in the 1980s, and a lot of its original charm was complicated by that decade’s style.
“As a Spanish home with a focus on indoor-outdoor living, the structure of the property looks much like it did in the 1920s,” Kutner says. “But besides the roof and verandas, it didn’t feel very Spanish or Mediterranean; it just felt confused.” Kutner and Rudolph aimed to re-center the home’s layout so that it felt tied to its storied past, without losing a handful of those totally tubular ’80s accents that have reappeared in today’s trends. And within all of that time traveling, the duo also sought to make the home’s next owners feel like they were on an endless vacation. It is L.A., after all.
