An Interior Designer’s LA Spanish Revival Evokes Her “Offbeat Chic” Aesthetic

Vaishnavi Nayel Talawadekar
·6 min read

Jaclyn Campanaro

Interior designer Julia Sobrepeña King is a firm believer in enjoying the chaos before the calm. “I’m an obsessive researcher, so I end up having to sort through lots of ideas and images before choosing a direction,” admits the AD PRO Directory member and founder of LA- and San Francisco–based full-service design firm Studio Roene. But last year, when it came time to redesign her 1920s pied-à-terre in LA’s Carthay Square, the frenzy, admittedly, reached a new standard of epic proportions for the Manila-born, California-raised designer.

“One of the biggest things that screams me is all the postmodern furniture and lighting. I just love the funkiness of that time period, but I am also a child of the 1980s, so it makes sense!” Julia enthuses of the living room, gesturing to the vintage ceramic and burnished copper floor lamp, and Gaetano Pesce resin vase. She wasn’t afraid to step into the present—with a perforated wood chair by Stefan White from The Window, a pink Chinese Art Deco rug, and a triangular plywood table by Waka Waka—or farther back into the past, with a 1930s wood chair and a Royere-style ottoman by JF Chen. The painting above the sofa is a Saxon Quinn work from Rhett Baruch.

“My husband [creative director Tyler King] and I both love collecting unique furniture and objects from antique shops, estate sales, and auctions, so we were constantly bringing home all sorts of interesting objects with no real place for them,” Julia explains. “There was a period when our home started to look crazy and cluttered—there were ten different chairs in the living room, stacks of art leaning against several walls, rolls of collected fabric stuffed into every closet, maybe 40–50 uniquely shaped vessels scattered around. I finally woke up one day frantically wanting everything to be moved to a storage unit to clear my head.”

The couch was dressed in mint linen evocative of Kazuhide Takahama’s Mantilla sofa. “As the home functions as our LA pied-à-terre, I was playing on the history of fabric covers that were used in old mansions to protect the furniture during winter months or when the residents were away,” notes Julia.
In the foyer, French vanilla walls step back to cede the spotlight to the ornate Swedish buffet cabinet and the painting by Colt Seager from Rhett Baruch.

As it turned out, the only thing that needed clearing was her “offbeat-chic” perspective. “I realized as I was sorting through each piece that I was having a lot more fun playing with the things we had already found than trying to be planned and methodical with the design. It forced me to look at things more organically, without overthinking,” she says. The epiphany led Julia to a fluid, freewheeling approach that allowed her to think beyond conventional boundaries, embracing the rental’s Spanish Revival architecture while bringing in the fantasy spirit of a 1980s art loft.

“The graphic art and funky objects feel very cheerful and vibrant, and put me in a good mood when I’ve had a tough day,” Julia smiles. A solid pine bench from Amsterdam Modern lines the wall. The purple and yellow graphic artwork is a vintage find from Shop NFS.

Designing a home is one thing, but designing one for yourself—and a rental at that—is a completely different game. “We couldn’t make too many architectural changes,” so we used furniture and materials to bring our personalities into the space,” Julia recalls. She didn’t worry about how a classic Spanish Revival interior should look and feel, inventing instead her own alternate reality by combining eye-popping colors, abstract art, and European midcentury and 1980s postmodern accents in unexpectedly whimsical ways. “I often pair things that don’t go together, use color and art as a way to enhance a space, or add subtle touches to inject a bit of quirk,” she explains of her selection which included postmodern furniture and lighting, and funky objects by design icons like Mario Botta, Gaetano Pesce, and Ron Rezek.

A rug from Lawrence of La Brea and a pink Pop Up Home cabinet rouge the dining room, lending it a sunset glow throughout the day. A vintage painting from Shop NFS and an Ileana Alarcón mirror enliven the walls, while a 1950s dining table takes center stage.

Lucky for Julia, the home brimmed with historic details. Unlucky for her, so did all the others in the neighborhood. “I wanted the spaces to feel relaxed yet modern and airy, but also with a little edge—all while respecting the home’s bones,” she says. Her plan included keeping the envelope all-white, including the wood floors, walls, and moldings, to create a lighter-than-light backdrop for the real stars: the archways, coved ceilings, and stained-glass windows intact from the 1920s. “I wanted the home to feel collected, to feel like every piece was selected with intention and love.” Julia saw the devil in the details, spiffing up the living room with a pink Chinese Art Deco rug, conjuring a constellation of vintage-style furniture covers to ward off dust in the winter, and embracing the plastered bathroom with its perfectly imperfect finish to channel a minimalist hammam.

The bedroom is a pastiche of colors and patterns, thanks to a Meghan Spielman tapestry, a vintage American quilt from The Window, and an eye painting by Hassan Rahim. The calm after the color, in typical Julia fashion, emerges in the way of vintage Swedish nightstands, a lamp by Ron Rezek, and Mario Botta’s Quinta chair.

As to whether she is happy with the result, Julia nods emphatically. “The graphic art and cheery colors put me in a good mood when I’ve had a tough day,” she says. “There is a fun story attached to every object, and the design was really inspired by various things we collected over time.” Still, Julia calls the home a work in progress. “We enjoy using it as an ever-evolving laboratory for our design experiments,” she adds. “We’re nowhere near done.”

“It’s a nice little sanctuary,” Julia says of the bathroom, which, with its cream plaster walls and vintage Moroccan rug from Lawrence of La Brea, seems like a postcard from the Mediterranean. An artwork by Tyler Hays of BDDW gleams on the wall.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest

More Great Stories From Clever

Latest Stories