A Beautifully Collected Home with Timeless, Traditional Style _ House Tour

Today we're in the Hollywood Hills visiting textile and interior designer Sean Leffers at his beautiful 1930s neoclassical home. A voracious collector and world traveler, nearly everything here is antique or vintage. From a 17th century Peruvian desk to Tang Dynasty polo players and lighting reclaimed from the Waldorf Astoria, New York. I love these little lamps. I love, I guess these are probably from a train. It looks like you can see where they would have screwed in so they stayed in place. But I got these in the auction of the illustrator Pierre Letain's possessions after he passed away. From the charming breakfast room to the grand foyer and relaxed living room, every space in this home is filled with meaningful paintings and sculptures by friends and local artists. But this house is anything but precious. Floor cushions invite lounging, books spill across tables, and the rooms are designed for everyday life for Sean and his two sons. We're big chess players here. My sons love chess. I love this game table. It's by Olay Von Scher from the collection he did in the, I think the, maybe the mid-60s. Traditional at its core but layered with global influence, the house is collected, personal, and just a little bit unexpected. To watch Sean's home tour ad-free, scan the QR code on screen or visit homeworthyplus.com for access to all of our latest episodes ad-free plus exclusive membership perks. Hey Homeworthy, I'm Sean. Welcome to my house in LA. You're watching Homeworthy, where we believe every home has a story. I'm Alison Kenworthy, the founder of Homeworthy, and we take you inside the world's most beautifully decorated homes and introduce you to the brilliant people who live there. Hi Homeworthy, I'm Liz Lang. Welcome to Gray Gardens. Click the join button below to access all of our latest episodes ad-free and watch extended cuts of this and other homes, opening the doors to new rooms and exclusive content featuring our beloved hosts. I can't wait to see. I'm so excited. And if you're looking to shop items inspired by this and other Homeworthy tastemakers, be sure to use the product links below or scan the QR code on screen to find fabulous furniture, coffee table books, and accessories that can transform your house into a home. Hi, my name is Sean Luffers. I'm a textile and interiors designer and welcome to my home in LA. This house was built in 1937. It's a sort of Southern California classical vernacular, very indebted, I would say, to Paul Williams, who I think the architect who built this was definitely looking at his work. It's in a part of the quiet and very accessible to a lot of parts of town that I like. I've actually lived a lot of my adult life within walking distance of here. The other thing about this house is that my son's other father, who I co-parent with, lives just a few blocks away, so that was really important for us being close together as a family. So welcome to the living room. This is where we hang out the most. It's really important to me to make living rooms super cozy and functional for how people like to sit because otherwise, if they're not, people won't use them. And they're usually the nicest room in the house. I really like putting meditation cushions out of our fabrics on the floor everywhere. This is called a Zafu. This is called a Zabotan. Very California way to set up a seating plan, I guess. This is a painting that I love by a really good friend of mine named Santiago Queznel. He's from Argentina. The settee here is also from Northern India, and we upholstered it in different fabrics that we make as well as old antique fabrics. I think this was my grandma's and by some other fabric makers that I love. The table is by Aldo Tura, who is really well known for making Italian mid-century, kind of like an Italian version of Hollywood Regency stylistically. I really love these, which are called Suiseki, or in Chinese, Lingbi, or Scholar Stones in English. I think that it's a kind of very Taoist thing to put in your study and have as this beautiful object of contemplation for a very sophisticated scholar to ponder. So these cabinets are from India. I bought them from an antique dealer that I work with in Kolkata, and I saw them when they were coming out of this house that was so gorgeous and just completely falling apart. The rain was coming in through the roof, and we bought them and restored them. I love whenever I can just to work with antique dealers who know a lot about the culture that they're operating within, because it's one of the most amazing ways of learning about material culture, especially people who have been doing it a lot of their life. It's like anytime I have the opportunity to spend time with someone like that, I definitely avail myself of it. This is an interesting piece. It's from a church in Peru, probably from the 17th century. I thought it was so beautiful. This coffee table is actually a daybed from Rajasthan area. It's very Mughal style, and I guess it would have originally probably had a nice mattress on top of it, but now it's full of books. My coffee table is always really messy, full of things that I'm reading, and I'm always reading. I think it's really important to have a circle whenever you can. If the point of the seating is to connect with people, I get in a lot of trouble with people in my family because I love antique furniture that is maybe not always the super deep restoration hardware level of comfort, but I think not everything has to be a lay flat bed in a theater. I'm a huge fan of butler's trays and little occasional furniture that you can move around and rearrange things. Whenever I have the ability to, I like to put furniture that's pretty light so that if we want to just move everything out and have this space for something totally different, it's not that difficult. The light is designed by Mario Fortuny originally, an amazing master, one of like the most iconic lights of all time. I think it's so good because it kind of has a lightness to it, but it also gives you a lot of volume, and these are especially good if you want something dramatic, but you don't have a ton of ceiling height. Works well. So this piece is by a Chilean artist. These guys are polo players from the Tang dynasty, actually, which I had no idea that polo was originally invented in China. I always thought it was India, but apparently these are, well, they were playing it at least 800 years ago, and these are another good auction find. So this desk is one of my favorite examples of like looking really closely when you're shopping, especially in places where things haven't been restored, like an auction or a market that's kind of selling things newly found. So I bought this at a place in Florida, and when I found it originally, it was just completely black filled with grime and soot, and you could barely even tell that it was all full of this gorgeous marquetry, and we worked with a guy who's based here in LA and is, you know, trained in France in fine marquetry restoration, and in the end, we were able to reveal all of these amazing mermaids and pegasus and mythological creatures and figured out that this piece is actually from the like early 17th century vice regal Peru. So kind of an amazing like historic piece, and I think I bought it for maybe 800 bucks, which is like a steal. Of course, art is one of my big passions, and I really love this piece. It's a collaboration between two of my favorite LA artists, Rafa Esparza, who made the sort of Nike Cortez hummingbird, and Beatriz Cortez, who made the sort of flower shield. They're two of, I think, the most interesting artists working in LA. This chair is a really lovely one by Axel Einer Hojo. I don't know how you pronounce his name. I just realized that I've only ever read it, and it's H-J-O-V-R-A-T-H, however you say that. I'm a big fan of putting beds in living spaces because I am a little bit lazy, and I like to be able to have a nap wherever I want. Usually, I just come here with like a stack of magazines, and we'll hang out with coffee and, you know, vibe in the room. Oh, this is a really special painting behind me by Ami Phillips, who used to be known as the Connecticut itinerant painter until around the 70s, and then a woman who's a great like early American art historian realized that all of these different paintings that were in the Boston MFA and the National Portrait Gallery and sort of all the great historic encyclopedic museums of the East Coast were really like stylistically so close, and she was able to connect all of them to this itinerant painter who is working mostly in Connecticut and New York called Ami Phillips, and you might know his most famous is one is probably The Girl in the Red Dress, which I think is in the National Portrait Gallery. When I first bought this house, I would say it had a really, I don't know, it felt very East Coast by way of Palm Springs, like somewhere located between somewhere in Connecticut and mid-century Palm Springs, and it was a lot of color, a lot of pattern, and very specifically the people who lived here before, and I basically just wanted to kind of simplify it and make the forms as quiet as possible. I really like the fact that it is a traditional house. I think before this house, I was living in essentially a glass box in San Francisco, and that experience made me realize that I personally am a lot more comfortable in older houses, places where you can kind of like kick things around and not be too worried because everything's already a little bit beaten up. The first thing that I really wanted to address was that the ceilings were quite low upstairs. They were like just under eight feet tall, and so we had to figure out how we were going to go into the roof and reorganize the entire like structural element of the roof so that we could make the ceilings much higher. So now they range from 12 to 14 feet tall in all of the bedrooms upstairs. There was also like a big lack of light in the entry foyer and stair hall, and so we went through the roof and made this really pretty sort of Georgian English style skylight that you would expect to see more in maybe a townhouse in London, and now that part of the house is flooded with light. So really it was about increasing the volumes and making the different areas of the light as possible. Another thing that I wanted to edit was the proportions of the windows and doors, which to me felt kind of very suburban American, and so in a lot of places where there used to be, you know, three, for example, three very wide sets of French doors all next to each other, we slimmed down the sets of doors and added nice moldings and made things feel a little more maybe the proportions that you would expect to see in a traditional house on the East Coast or in Europe than in like a more suburban American environment. So before I bought this house, this was mostly a TV room, and I am like way more pro book than TV, and so we turned it into a library. This wall actually used to just be a big television set, and we worked with the architect that I worked with on the house, Tim Barber, and his team to make new millwork and paneling in a lot of the rooms, and I think they did a particularly good job with this. I love wood burning fires, so I had to keep at least one here. My bedroom and the living room, I use them all the time, and so I wanted to be able to switch them on with a remote, but in the end, I probably actually use this one the most just because it's so emotional to have the crackle of the wood fire going. The fireplace is original with the curve. There was a little kind of like cracked marble surround here, and so I made these tiles with a ceramicist in Mexico, and they're actually based on the like the end cap of a Japanese roof. I had this little piece on my desk for years that I used as a as a paperweight, and so we ended up making it based on that. I've had this couch for a really long time. It was probably one of the maybe the first like expensive piece of furniture that I ever bought designed by Peter Marino, and it's just the leather is so good. The longer I have it, the nicer it gets. Well, some of the fabrics are by us, and some are by other fabric designers that I love, including Pierre Frey, and Zak and Fox, and Clay McLaurin, and some antique pieces. I love this work. The photograph is by another LA-based artist, Paul and Pagi Sapuia. We're big chess players here. My sons love chess. I love this game table. It's by Olay Vonshir from the collection he did in the I think the maybe the mid-60s. These are bamboo chairs from China that were designed for the export market. It's kind of interesting also like I love learning the history of decorative arts, and when specific places started shifting the ways in which they would make things in order to export them when global trade started to become more of a thing. I love using antique textiles also whenever I can, and that was a huge inspiration for why we started our textile company. It's just I wasn't able to use nearly enough antique fabric because it would be too small or not sturdy enough, and so that's kind of been the thesis of our project is making things that feel like they have that earned age and historic relevance. So this is a pharaoh and ball color. I like this sort of gray blue. I feel like it goes with anything but particularly well really dark reds, and I love this color together with like the dark red of the sofa. Many of the fabrics are this sort of oxblood. A lot of the wood is also this like rich oxblood red, and it's just one of my favorite color combos light blue and dark red. It's so good. So I studied literature in college and worked in publishing and then real estate development before I wanted to focus on creating more specific and special interiors for individuals. I think that studying literature really impacts my approach to design because at the end of the day it's all about storytelling. I've always loved antiques from the moment that I was first going around with my mom. She would always take us to flea markets and antique shops, and I think later on that love of sort of old things and things that represent history was really amplified when I was working for the publisher Toshin because they have such an amazing catalog focusing on design from so many different periods and areas of global art history and design history, and so that was an amazing opportunity for me to learn more. My studio works in all different styles. We've worked in like formal, deconstructivist, architectural houses, commercial spaces, but really my favorite is working with traditional interiors, working with antiques and vintage pieces, and that's definitely what I did here. I think that there are probably less than five items in the entire house that I bought brand new, so really almost every single thing is either vintage or antique. A lot of things are really old. So this is our breakfast room, which is a very fancy room to have, but it's also really nice. We actually do eat breakfast here a lot, mostly just because we changed this window from a sort of fixed sash window into being French doors, so on a really nice day like today we can just open it up and enjoy the sunshine and the neighbor's leaf blowers. I love the cabinetry here. These were all original to the house and I thought these are just such a sweet kind of simple detail. I collect a lot of porcelain and tea things from all over the place. I love things that we don't really have that much anymore, like tea caddies that are so beautifully designed and really interesting part of decorative arts history. I love this painting. I bought it on the Via Giulia in Rome when I was there with my son, and I think that's so special when you can bring things back from your travels and they kind of instantaneously take you back to a particular time and place, especially with loved ones. So this is actually also original to the house. We just replated it because it was so corroded. I really wanted to keep all of the sort of verdigris patina, but it was no longer functional, so we had to do some work to get it going again. Really brilliant. I'm a big fan of Gustavian furniture, mostly because it's this sort of classical aesthetic but so imperfectly executed. There's such softness to the way that the shapes are cut and I love how the paint is usually allowed to age and get better and more interesting with hundreds of years of earned patina. So the table here is Cape Dutch. I bought it from a great antiques dealer on Sacramento Street in San Francisco named Tom. And then actually, the chandelier is from the Netherlands but from the 1930s, so also made around the time period of this house. And when I bought it, it was originally this like very kind of like harsh brass color. And so, I took it apart and we dipped it in silver and then it was out, you know, for a couple of years patinaing and I think now it's just reached the sort of perfect moment. This particular statue here is another amazing deity, Avalokiteshvara who is the god or bodhisattva of infinite compassion and a good thing to remind yourself in the morning when you're having your coffee. Be nice to people. So this is the kitchen. When I bought the house, there was this massive island in the middle of space and all of the cabinets were sort of, there are a lot of upper cabinets, a lot of cabinetry everywhere. And I just felt like it was a little too full slash claustrophobic. So we made the cabinetry open and one of the things that I wanted to do was remove this island that felt a little overscaled for the room. And I always really appreciate how more furnished European kitchens are than American kitchens which tend to be very sort of built out with cabinetry everywhere. And so, I found this beautiful Italian farmhouse table in Ravello and we put this here instead. And it's kind of great because when we are cooking, usually we'll, you know, sit down and cut and you can have 10 things going on here instead of, you know, the island which I find a little bit restrictive sometimes. Another thing that we used in this kitchen is this wallpaper also from Mind the Gap and I think it's so beautiful. Most people walk in here and they're coming up and touching, trying to figure out how we got this much antique tile into the space because the reproduction is so good. We also made this custom brass hood that was based on the same kind of motif in the original cabinetry in the breakfast room. And I was feeling doing cabinetry that was something different. I had never made mahogany cabinetry before. When I was working on this house, we were spending a lot of time in the Caribbean and there are all these sort of tropical dark hardwoods that felt really romantic and that combined with the wood floor, I think ended up really activating the space. This used to be probably the darkest room in the house and I think because of the light bounce and the way that we differentiated the balance of color, it feels a lot more lively now. So this is the dining room, of course. We love to cook. We entertain a fair amount and also this ends up doubling as homework space and extra office space working. This cabinet is one of my favorites. It's from Myanmar or Burma. Then it was in an old officer's club. I think the like fineness of the doors and roughness at the same time is something that's so beautiful and they just don't see that much in furniture being made anymore. The table is a really rare one from Karl Malmstedt from the 1960s and it was one of these like rare times where I just could not find what I wanted for less than an exorbitant price. I was talking to the dealer in, I think he's in Sweden, for years before I ended up buying this one and it was maddeningly expensive but I love it so much. Just the like rough simplicity of it. So the chairs are actually, they're Regency style but they're from the Philippines. So another one of these examples of cultures coming together and creating something totally new. They're all bone inlaid and each one of them has a slightly different inlay pattern and so we play this game where we mix them around and different patterns mean different things to our family. This is a sculpture by my really dear friend Leora Kaplan who is a genius. Another great sculpture by Z Carlos Garcia here which is this Rosewood Art Nouveau chair and another work on Adobe by Rafa Esparza which is actually going to the Archeology Museum in Mexico next week for a show. These tables are really interesting too. They're from Sri Lanka, originally the Demilun. The faces on top are Chinese and then the gilt mirrors are George I and this is an incredible piece by an artist that I love also based in LA called Gala Boris Kim and she's also a genius. She actually just won the MacArthur Genius grant so she's officially a genius. So a lot of the times with houses in the 1930s you'll notice that the public rooms ended up having much shorter ceilings than what you get in the 20s because nobody had the budget anymore and one of the things that I wanted to do to kind of fight the somewhat lower feeling ceiling in here was just make it really interesting looking and so we put in these walnut beams which I found at a great reclaimed wood lumber yard in LA and also this light which was supposed to be just a placeholder for the city inspection while I found the kind of final chandelier but I actually really love it in the end even though it was only 70 bucks on Etsy. I think it kind of gives the room a little bit of, I don't know, chill edge so we'll keep it. So my original idea with the floors and the entryway was to do a stone checker kind of pavement and when I was about a year into the budgeting process I realized that that was going out the door and I had always loved the floors that I saw in Bunny Melon's house where she just painted them in a really simple way and I think I actually like them better this way than if we had done the stone in the end. I really love this table it's a Gustavian special one from some point in the 18th century. I love Buddhas and I especially love Gandaharan Buddhas. Gandahara is the country that it's an ancient kingdom that's where Pakistan and Afghanistan is now and they specifically worshipped Maitreya Buddha who is a Buddha of the future who hasn't even existed yet. I'm a Cancer, I love crabs. These are little Japanese crabs that started being made after the end of a long period of war in Japan and at some point I believe in like the mid or late 18th century there was a huge refocus of resources between from making swords and war machinery into making art and toys so it's always a sort of reminder to me that you know we can be using our resources in better ways. I love this work is by a Brazilian artist named Z Carlos Garcia. It's an Art Nouveau screen and you can see that there are all these glass bottles broken on the top of it. This is a painting that's by one of my favorite California artists his name is Arthur Okamura. He was a teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute for about 50 years and a beloved townsperson in Bolinas which is one of my favorite little towns in northern California and it's this sort of I don't know astral view of the coast up there. I think it's so beautiful. This is another painter that I love named Balcombe Green who is more known for his abstract work but I thought this one was really really beautiful and found it in an auction in Long Island for nothing and it's one of my favorite pieces that I've ever had so I think it's another thing too is if you end up looking long enough and in enough places you'll end up finding things for really good value that become important to your environment. This is another artist who I love the photographer is named Iko Hosue who is a great Japanese photographer of the 20th century and it's a portrait of Yukio Mishima the famous novelist iconoclast revolutionary from a series called Death by Roses that they did I think at maybe some point in the late 60s. The table here is pretty interesting it's technically Chippendale but executed in Mexico and so it is one of these examples of just you know style and taste roving around the world and being you know combined with different materiality. In this case it's a hardwood that wouldn't have been used in Europe. I think there's more like bombastic romance to the way that the furniture maker carved it than you might have seen in in England at the same time period so fun. I really love when you have these sort of edges of different cultures meeting and creating something in the margins is really interesting to me. I'll show you really quickly the powder room because I love this wallpaper it's from this company called Mind the Gap. They're these guys I think they're from Transylvania actually and I just think it's one of the most beautiful wallpapers I've ever seen. The lights here are from India I bought them in Kolkata and the vanity is actually from probably like the late 1800s early 1900s and it was this example of purpose-built bathroom furniture when there were still these amazing workshops creating like incredible Edwardian furniture and in this case it's probably one of the first purpose-built vanities and this is another auction score that I bought. I bought five of them because I'd never seen a vanity so beautiful. All of the flush mounts in the house are actually reclaimed from the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan and the funny thing is that this house and the Waldorf were built in the same year and was able to get these from Old Good Things in New York. They had bought all the flush mounts. So I love the staircase the handrail is original we made this runner with the carpet company Armadillo and the sconces are from Rose Tarlow Melrose House who is amazing and here you can see the skylight these are more of the ceiling lights that we got from the Waldorf Astoria as well. We made this little niche here to house our friend Buddha. So this is my bedroom another one of the rooms where we raised the ceilings. The other big change that we made was this wall here previously just had a giant television on it so I added the fireplace it's one of my favorite luxuries in life to have a fire when you're sleeping it's like so nice. We also changed the doors they were all sort of regular sash windows and we added these french style doors. I'm a big fan of canopy beds this one I've had for a long while and every time I move it it falls apart a little bit more so this might be its last installation but there's something so great about being tucked away inside a canopy bed it's like sleeping in a cloud. I love this work over the bed this is by a french artist named Theo Mercier and something I love to do which I don't know anybody can do really easily is if you have an headboard that's kind of not that exciting you can throw some vintage or antique fabrics over it and switch it up a blanket. This is a really fun vintage American quilt. I love changing the bed stuff often I get bored. This is another interesting painting it's actually a 350 year old knockoff of a painting that is in the Academia in Florence that's from the 15th century and I love the idea of something that's fake but also you know hundreds of years old at the same time. These are some of my favorite possessions I have maybe around 50 of these and it's this incredible artist who was an engineer for a railroad company in India in the 1800s and his hobby his like side passion was documenting flowers and plants and so they're all of these incredible hand drawn and hand painted with all of the meticulous notes that he made and it's it's it's a really unusual thing because usually if you if these were being made for plates they wouldn't have any of the notes on them and I don't know there's something so gorgeous about this documentation of somebody's passion in that way I love it. This is a really cool piece of furniture that I bought in India as well pretty fine I guess really regency style but definitely like executed in India in a pretty fine way and this is a great painting that I love by another LA based artist named Annie Lappin who's super cool and another one of these chairs by Axel Einer you guys tell me how to pronounce it so one of my favorite things to do in bedrooms especially when you have a lot of stuff that you want to organize in a beautiful way is to use desks as bedside tables and in this case I have this secretary and I can put in my you know collection of Japanese snuff bottles and little sculptures and it all looks very kind of curated and collected as opposed to really messy but it works really well also in guest rooms where you don't have quite enough space to you know have a table for somebody to sit at and a bedside table combining it into one that's good I love these little lamps I love I guess these are probably from a train it looks like you can see where they would have screwed in so they stayed in place but I got these in the auction of the illustrator Pierre Latan's possessions after he passed away this mantelpiece is also really special it is older than the US it's from a house on Church Street in Charleston I think 72 Church maybe and that was built in the early 1700s and again this sort of Georgian motif keeps on popping up in different places in the house and thought that was a cool thing to incorporate here so welcome to my bathroom I spend a lot of time in here again as a cancer I'm in the bathtub at least two hours a day I don't recommend anything less for my fellow cancers this is where I usually read the newspaper and hang out my kids come and take office hours with me here one of the big things that we changed about this space is really just opening it up again it was completely built out including a big shower in the corner that had just a sort of little archway to get inside built-in vanities kind of around the entire space and so we knocked all of that out put two of these Regency style vanities from Scotland in here that feel much more like fine furniture than a vanity this nickel tub from Penn Heligons and this awesome old Moroccan rug which is pretty cool we also added this skylight so the shower really becomes a kind of like glass vitrine so this room is my son's my both of my sons I love these beds I found them at an antique shop in Mallorca they're from there from the early 19th century we have a Gustavian desk that we're using as a nightstand I really love this wallpaper it's this kind of historic scene very romantic we took the Mughal style arches and replicated them in these bays for shelving and this area here for the desk which I think turned out pretty well and this is an example of one of the rooms that before this room actually had about like seven and a half foot ceilings they were quite low and now there's a lot more space and we put in these dormers with dormer lights as well and this is probably my favorite light fixture in the house it's a Dutch Sri Lankan fixture super beautiful I love this cabinet this is another auction piece I got into a really extreme battle with whoever was on the telephone but I won out in the end even though I paid five times what I thought I was going to this is their closet obviously and I really like when you're when you have tight spaces to take the door away make an arch and then put curtains because it's both more functional and really romantic it kind of gives some extra architecture to what would otherwise be a really simple part of the room I love block prints and this is just a really simple one it's super thin that I found in a market in I think in Jodhpur in Rajasthan and it was you know probably a few dollars a yard or something like that I think it's really important to remember also when you're doing interiors that things don't have to cost a lot of money to look amazing or at least to you so here we are in the garden it's pretty great space for being in the middle of the city we have this pool that is the size of a lake we added a fireplace around the corner here and it's just a great space we can have a big cocktail party out here which we've done a lot there's a hot tub in the back and a little sort of tropical space to hang out I really love tropical plants and so I put them in the only place where it would be possible to keep them alive on the south side of the garden where they're always in the shade and I got all of these from this amazing nursery in San Diego called Jungle Music that has all of these rare types of palm trees and bromeliads which they're really great there so this is our my son and I's weekend cruiser it's a 1969 Mercedes 250 SL and we reupholstered it in all of our fabric called Borobudur which is based on a Javanese warp print that we that we make and we even put in new chartreuse carpet which I had to unfortunately order like 10 times as much as I needed from Stark to do the car so now I have a beautiful chartreuse rug in our other house too for me home it's it's so much less about the physical spaces even though that's most of the time what we talk about and it's about how you are when you're in those places and how you are with your family I think you know the people that I admire the most that are working in designing houses or making interiors or making things for the home they're really thinking about how these objects or spaces are facilitating families joy enjoyment of each other enjoyment of their time together at the end of the day I think as long as you are in a space that brings you together with your family your friends that's what it's all about could be a shack in the woods or it could be a neoclassical house in a fancy neighborhood it really doesn't matter at the end of the day as long as you're happy thanks for watching be sure to go to homeworthy.com for exclusive content shopping guides and so much more