Inside Georgia Tapert Howe’s Hancock Park House

My design philosophy is that you should buy what you love, and it usually works. It should feel like a reflection of you, you know, be authentic. When you walk into a room and it's this interesting mix that's reflective of the clients, the space, the people that live there, that to me is good design. I'm Georgia Howe, I'm an interior designer, and we're here at my house in Los Angeles where I live with my husband and two kids. The architectural style of this house is kind of a hybrid, I think, of a few different styles. I think achieving a look that doesn't feel one note goes back to buying things you love. I love a lot of different types of furniture. I tend towards clean lines, but maybe slightly more traditional fabrics and things, so I think it has to work with the architecture, and you can't ignore the space that you're designing in. My favorite room in the house is probably the living room. It has some of my favorite pieces of furniture. A lot of them have a story behind them, and we spend a lot of time in here. It's so central to the rest of the house that it actually isn't a room that never gets used. I would describe my home as happy, comfortable, cozy. It gives me a lot of joy. I love it. It's over time, we keep sort of chipping away at it. That was one of the things that we knew when we bought it. We felt like this house will get better over time. We can't do everything we want to do right now, but we will approach it in phases. This is our latest project. It was a sort of sunroom artist studio for the people that lived here before us. We never quite knew what to do with it. It had these beautiful old glass doors and windows, so about two or three months ago, we decided to rip out the old storage and build a bar, pantry, sunroom that worked for us. For me, art is hugely important to a finished room. I don't think a room feels finished until there are things on the walls, and it doesn't need to be a million-dollar painting. There's things that speak to you, that feel personal. If the walls are bare, to me, that's not a finished project. When we moved into this house, we had a lot of walls and not a lot of art, so I took these illustrations from a book on Andy Warhol that was out of print. I like that they feel a little off the beaten path. A lot of people don't know that there are Warhols. They're quite whimsical. It adds some color, and I think, as a group, they feel very impactful. This is our dining room. We recently repainted it and changed out some things. It was an emerald green for many years, and so we toned it down, still a green, but changed it to kind of a sagey, softer color. The chairs are a vintage set I found on First Dibs a while back, and I just re-covered them in a kind of mustardy yellow boucle that I actually think will hide dirt and maybe food quite well. If you're a young family, that, I think, really becomes paramount. What's durable? How do we balance beautiful and chic with practicality? The curtains were the first thing I found when I redid this room. I just fell in love with that color, the pattern, and I built off of that. The dining room is sandwiched between our family room, where our kids spend a ton of time, and our living room, so it has a really nice flow when we have people over. We might be sitting in here while the kids are watching a movie. This is our kitchen banquette, where we spend a ton of time as a family. We eat dinner here. The kids do homework here. My husband and I sit here at the end of the day. When we bought the house, it was a separate room, and I opened it up because I knew I wanted an eat-in kitchen. I love our bedroom. I feel like we're in a treehouse up here. It's very peaceful, and it looks out over the patio. When my son was about two, he did a little playgroup out there, and I would spy on him every morning as I was getting ready to go to work. What I love most about this house is that it's really the only place we've ever lived as a family, as a family of four. And it feels kind of like an oasis, you know, in this busy city with busy lives and a million kids' activities. We just love being here. The house really has evolved with us. You can't really imagine living anywhere else. It's just, it's perfect for us.