Inside Mandy Moore & Taylor Goldsmith’s Sophisticated Family Home - Open Door - Architectural Digest

Hi AD, I'm Mandy Moore. I'm Taylor Goldsmith. Welcome to our home. Come on in. We wanted this house to be more of a family home than our previous home. We knew we were coming into this one with children. We didn't know how many at the time, but it turns out it was three. But we wanted it to be the kind of home where it was going to age gracefully along with all of us. Yeah, I feel like that it's very intentionally softer and warmer and richer and more colorful and more playful. The fact that we kind of moved from this sort of straight lines of a mid-century to a Spanish colonial like this, it feels less precious and like the best way. Sarah Sherman Samuel, who's our interior designer, and Emily Farnham, who's our architect, we worked hand in with them to sort of honor what this house was. I came here the day, like a few hours after the fire passed through this area. So like the studio was on fire in the back. Our garage was already burned down. You know, as the days went on and we realized that our house made it. Me and my ignorance around what it means to live in a home that had been through a fire, I walked through and thought like, everything's fine. We made it. It's going to be okay. And we'll be back within a month or something. But very quickly, we learned that all the soft goods, all the furniture, the rugs, clothes, that was all thrown away. And we're so lucky that we do have a home because so many people that we know and love don't. And I think like what initially lured us to Altadena is the spirit of the community here. Like overwhelmingly, you just feel like so proud to live here and so proud to like kind of stake your claim here. Like we are, we're not leaving. We're like digging in deep. We're rebuilding what we lost. And so many people that we know too, like neighbors of ours are are doing the same. And I feel like it's just going to bring everybody that much closer. Yeah. The goodwill has been infectious. Iteration of this room has changed a little bit post fire as well. Like those chairs were here. This couch was here, but a different fabric. These are new chairs. These are also Sarah's collection from Lulu and Georgia. And these are her tables, these beautiful skimming stone tables. We're not in here too much. We're here on Christmas morning. I was just about to say it's the Christmas room. Yeah. And then I'm in here a lot on the piano. Piano is one of the things that made the trek with us from our last house. So she's coming with us wherever we go. We are in our kitchen. Where every day starts. Where every day ends. Pretty much. Where we spend most of our time. I love this kitchen. There's French doors here. There's French doors there. There's entry here and entry through the dining room. So like, I feel this kind of acts as like the nucleus for the house. Even down to like the curvature of the kitchen island, we wanted to make it something where we could run into walls and you could cook and get it dirty and have it not be the kind of house where everything needed to be in perfect shape all the time. Because it's never going to be. It's never going to be. But yeah, I mean, I think the breakfast nook, being able to sit somewhere with the kids and sort of the memories that would happen around the kitchen table. We're reheating food there. Lou's in her high chair. The boys are running around with like Legos, monster trucks, something crazy. Like there's definite chaos at all times. Taylor and I flank Lou and like handle one boy. He handles one boy. I handle the other boy. It's like just divide and conquer at this point. And something that happened like post fires when we left and we were in like a rental house for nine months, we started giving them all baths together in the primary bathtub. And so when we got back into this house, we're like, we're going to continue that. So like we all decamp up to our bedroom and they take a bath in our bath every night. Yeah. And then they come back down here and try to sneak more snacks after not finishing their dinner. Yep. Pretty much. That's that's kind of the routine. This is our family room, the TV room. I would say it's like where we spend another good chunk of time with the kids. But this was another room that we decided to sort of open up this room and the dining room. There's these like really beautiful arches that weren't here that were not here. They were Emily Farnham's brainchild. The room initially has this like interesting little alcove back here that we didn't quite know what to do with. And the ladies had this like genius idea of kind of making this more of like a little built-in sofa moment with like some storage down here, because, you know, three kids, there's lots of toys, lots of Legos and blankets and things that you want to just sort of tuck away. There were built-ins initially there, right? Yeah. They're loaded with Legos right now and books. How you keep your house from looking crazy and just put all the Legos back. It's so funny. I went on Instagram a couple of weeks ago and I was like, what are we doing with Lego storage, parents? Like, tell me. And people either said, throw them away or just like get a giant bucket. So we did. That's what I do after the kids go to bed. I'm like picking Legos out of the rug, out of the carpet, and just like putting them in this box. And this is one of the best chairs in the house for a cup of coffee and some reading with the way that the windows are set up for light. Welcome to the dining room. This room will eventually get used. Right now it serves as like Lego headquarters. We decided collectively to go with like a darker moodier vibe for this room. These chairs are vintage and Sarah recovered them in some of her fabric and the dining table's hers as well. I love this apparatus chandelier. The lines of like the chandelier really pick up on like the table and just like everything feels rounded and smooth. I think this room and the living room, most of all, I feel like are a testament to you and Sarah and Emily's kind of vision for what a room can be. If you told me on paper, this is going to be the color of the walls and this is going to be the lights, I would have thought like this is going to be crazy, but it's incredible. It's bold, but it also feels like home. It's really beautiful. Thanks, babe. This is the boys' room. Although it's been a lot of different things, this is going to be a guest room. It was always going to be this beautiful blue and then Mandy got pregnant with Ozzy, our second, and then we're like, okay, it'll be the baby's room. And then Mandy got pregnant with Louise, our daughter, and then we thought, okay, we'll transition our oldest Gus to living down here too. This was his bed for a while. Yeah. This was his first big boy bed and he shared with Ozzy and it was great. And then the fires happened and we were out of the house for nine months. So when we moved back in, we had these like incredible bunks built in. I'm like, can I sleep in here? I love it so much. And the boys love it. It made coming back to the house, I think, even more exciting for them because like for months we got to talk about like, you guys are going back to your bunk bed. You guys are going to bunk beds. And it was actually a much easier transition than I thought. We had a little vintage turtle before. And then when we had to get rid of everything after the fires, we managed to find these little vintage turtle stools. He has googly eyes too. He has googly eyes. Also, I will tell you a fun fact about this. So Sarah found this like dollhouse bookshelf cupboard and I came home from work one day and someone's holding up like an iPhone flashlight for her and she's painting the blue stripes on the white. I was like, Sarah, you are? But that's just her. She just has such a vision for things that again, if she were like, we're going to bring in this white doll house in the boys' bedroom, I would have been like, what? But I just sort of like trust her vibe and her intuition and such a like fun little centerpiece of the room. And yeah, it's amazing. We are in, I guess, the screening room. I like to call it the library, but yeah. Taylor calls it the library because the most important aspect and detail of this room were these built-in bookshelves. Taylor is an avid reader. I like to collect books. The sunlight wasn't coming in here to wear out the spines. So this felt like the perfect zone for me. Yeah, it's a perfect zone. What's exciting, babe? For the ultra nerdy stuff, I like to get these clamshell covers. But yeah, some first edition, some Thomas Pynchon first edition stuff. I'm a musician and I'm on tour a lot. And I was buying like eight books for every one that I finished. And I thought like, this isn't going to work out. But I still love visiting bookstores because they seem like these last ambassadors of like what a community is and less homogenized like every other shop. But I had to stop buying so much new books. And so I thought, oh, I can get into first editions. They're harder to find. You create your own relationship with where you found it, how you found it. And so that became a big part of my traveling. I'm just like, what's the nearest bookstore that might have some kind of lost treasure of some kind? I feel very fancy saying that we have like a screening room because we're not those people. We've never had that. But we didn't know what else to do with this room. I love this sort of nod to the movie theater aspect of these kind of reproduction art deco-y sconces on the wall and the light fixtures on the ceiling. The wallpaper was such a fun find. This is like our cozy, sneakily like favorite room in the house. Our three-year-old Ozzy doesn't love it quite yet. He just says like, no, no, no. It's a beautiful day, which means... I want to go upstairs. It's too dark down here, too loud. It's a beautiful day. Then he marches out. But yeah, otherwise we try to convince him to understand how cool he has it with a screening room like this. You could watch Bluey with surround sounds. We are upstairs. We are in our daughter Lou's bedroom. This room, as we mentioned before, was initially Gus's room. The fun thing is there's his name up there. Oh, and we got the Lou now, too. Of course. So Sammy Hauschild, who's friends with Sarah, she came in and like hand drew all of this. Even though Lou was this fun, unexpected surprise, we were like, you know what? I'm not big into the gender of it all and leaning into like super girly. I was like, this is such a rad kid's room. Like we're not touching the walls. They're so cool. I love them. So we just moved her in here and it was like, this is your room now. We're just like, you are now the custodian of this room. This is the primary bedroom. Does everyone say this is where the magic happens? Of course they do. What we were going for with this space is just cozy, comfortable. And it feels like the end of the house. Like some primary bedrooms you see and they're like right next door to the entrance or right off the kitchen. And we really liked how you got to come upstairs and into the hall. And here's this sort of final space. It helped keep it sacred and private. We also have some art from local artists here in Los Angeles. Skylar Hughes, this painting here. We really love it so much. This is Taylor Kibbe up here that we commissioned. And she came herself and hung it when we moved in. The bed is Sarah. The sconces are Hennepin made. I feel like they're jellyfish on our walls. There is something that feels very architectural about these sconces. And I think the room's pretty simple otherwise. So I just like that you kind of let a few things do all the talking. We do our baths in here for all the kids. And then in here, Mandy helps them with their like lotions and stuff while I just flip them as much as I can until they're tired. Yeah, we also have a different philosophy when it comes to that. Taylor loves to tell me that like it's very good for them. Supposedly laughter releases melatonin and helps. I don't doubt that. But I just talk about the like getting them riled up before bed. It's not up to me. They come to me like, Dad, like flip me. They don't ask me to do that. When Dad's out of town, there's no like flip me like a pancake. They know that like I'm not the person asked for that. So there's a lot of flipping on this bed. No innuendo about that. No innuendo. We're in the primary bath, which we've told you one million times is where we do bath time for everybody. This was not the way that we originally intended this bathroom. I was like, wow, this is like a fancy adult with this beautiful like a clay tile and the tile in the back gives so much like texture. And I have my own little vanity that I can in theory get ready in front of my own vanity. I would love to take baths myself in here more, but it's kind of hard to give the kids a bath at six o'clock and then like at seven o'clock be like, no, I'm ready to take the bath toys out. Take all these dinosaurs out of here. Take the dinosaurs out of the bath and like get in with like and have a nice bubble bath. So it's really their bathroom right now until that changes. The pool was not here. We built all of this. Our friends at Terramoto and Johnson Vidal who did our last house also did all of the construction and landscape work back here. And they're the best. Everything that we lost in the fire was primarily back here. This part of the yard was untouched. Thank goodness. The pool, she remained intact. This is going to be like the place to be in the summer. We have a little outdoor shower over there. This Baja shelf, so it's like a long shallow step. It's the perfect thing for someone learning to swim for the first time. Then there's a walkway around the whole thing. There's kind of a step, a shelf that goes around like the whole perimeter of the pool. I spent like a fair amount of time at the very end of my pregnancy with Lou, like in here, just like laying on that shelf, miserable and hot and super pregnant. But the kids love it. And we've had a couple of like swim classes over here for like the kids and their friends. And it's like, yeah, I'm ready. Ready to like just jump back into that part of our life. I'm excited to be back. Thank you so much for joining us, AD. We loved having you here, but you got to go. We got to go. Bye. See you next time.