In Love with L.A.

Author:Abigail Stone

Melissa Benham’s latest project—her first under Studio Emblem & Co.—is a love letter to her newly adopted city

We are all products of the places we have called home; they etch us with a sensibility that we carry within us, integrated into the memories of what has come before. “From my time in Chicago and New York I had honed a sophisticated, serious eye,” says Melissa Benham, explaining the effect those cities have had on her interior design work. Recently, however, she moved back to the Golden State, unable to deny the strong pull of her Southern California roots. “I don’t know what it is,” she says. “But returning to L.A., I feel brighter and more energized, I’m using more color here. Maybe it’s the light, maybe it’s the city’s ability to laugh at itself, but I just feel so happy being back here.”

After a decade as a partner with Chicago-based Studio Gild, the move also prompted the founding of her own company, Studio Emblem & Co. The first project under her solo shingle is this Los Feliz home, which coincidentally also happens to be her third project with the clients. The young couple had, inadvertently, followed her to the West Coast and naturally called on her for help with their new residence.

The house they’d discovered is a 1950s interpretation of a classic 1920s Spanish Revival home that had been remodeled in the ’90s and was a mishmash of eras and styles. “There was a huge disconnect,” Benham remembers. “The finishes were seedy, the rooms were choppy and poorly organized and it was dark.” She decided along with the clients that the best solution would be to bring the house down to the studs and start all over again, reconfiguring the floor plan to reposition the doors and windows and enlarging them to open up the home to its surroundings. “Bringing in a lot of natural light was important to them,” Benham notes.

“We did a complete remodel, stripping back the ornamentation to make it as clean and contemporary as possible,” she explains. Dated finishes gave way to a soothing palette of European white oak, white plaster and blackened steel—creating a serene canvas that is imbued with the slightest essence of its Spanish Revival past. This new and much more zen backdrop provides the perfect setting for both the California contemporary artwork the clients assembled, with the help of Karyn Lovegrove Art Advisory, and the collectible designs that Benham envisioned. “I wanted to work with as many local makers as possible. That was something that was really important to me,” she stresses. “The clients trusted that I would bring my A-game.” Her explorations engendered an orchestration that, with its pairing of local artisans with makers from across the globe, channels both Los Angeles’s glamorous past and its global identity. It is, in many ways, a love letter to the spirit and promise of her newly adopted city.

Take the breakfast nook with its windows reimagined into a gently sweeping curve, its walls sculpted into sensuality by Kamp Studios (their hand is also visible in the alcove that shelters the home’s sole working space and the fluid green ribbon of plaster that rings the dining room). “I have no idea how they’re able to execute such precision by hand,” Benham marvels. Their work is complemented by a table from Waka Waka, Pierre Frey’s Litho chairs and Apparatus’s Trapeze fixtures, creating a tableaux that invites both celebration and contemplation.

This deft mix is repeated in the kitchen, where cabinets from Boffi converse with a bar cabinet by De Winter Metalworks and Gallotti & Radice stools; in the library, a lively discussion takes place between a table from Wud Furniture, chairs from De La Espada and a rug from Erik Lindstrom. “It’s a party house,” Benham laughs. “I wasn’t thinking that’s what it would be when we first started but that’s how they’re using it, and I could not be happier.”