Careful Color Considerations Transformed Leah Ring’s Los Angeles Apartment
For years, interiors and furniture designer Leah Ring, the talent behind Another Human, lived and worked out of a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles’s Atwater Village neighborhood. She didn’t have any roommates. But like so many creatives who operate out of live-work spaces, nearly everything she’d ever made—from a squiggly cocktail table with pool noodles for legs to a lime green metal chair that looked straight from outer space—had permanently shacked up in her living room.
She liked it that way. The accumulation of shapes, colors, and ideas was constant stimulation for the burgeoning designer. But like so many of us, during the pandemic she began to crave a little more wiggle room—a bit of separation between work and life. So when she spotted a great deal on a spacious studio nearby in Lincoln Heights last May, she and her boyfriend, the artist Adam de Boer, who had been living and working separately in a downtown L.A. loft space, decided to reshuffle things. They’d both live in Leah’s apartment and work from that separate shared studio space.
They went for it. But a total redesign was a nonnegotiable on both ends. “I wanted it to feel like a different place—like our place together,” says Leah, who had to remind me that the apartment in these photos was, indeed, the same neon-splashed fantasia we published back in 2019.
“We both like Streamline Moderne architecture—that Art Deco feeling,” explains the designer, who looked to interiors by French architects Le Corbusier and Robert Mallet-Stevens to craft a look that feels a bit like Corbu’s Unite d’Habitation with a PoMo twist. She traded out most of her furniture—she tapped a friend to fabricate new bookshelves and desks, then scoured Etsy and vintage dealers for retro finds, and scored a drapey silver armchair at a funky prop house auction. “I try to imagine what sort of set it was used in,” Leah says of the latter. “Like, was it a seat for an evil super-villain?”
New furniture gave the place an all-around different vibe, but most of the transformation came by way of Leah’s specialty: color. She may have toned down her palette a tad (coincidentally, she also recently traded her signature platinum crop for a more subdued honey blonde), but she hardly shied away from her love of unconventional hues. As proof, office storage is clad in alternating Creamsicle orange and pale yellow doors, a nod to Corbusier. She used saturated sky blue on the kitchen cabinets (“We have ’90s black granite, so I leaned into it in an Art Deco sort of way”) and a paler hue in the living room. An electrifying magenta lights up the bedroom.
Leah is big on color testing—“I go get the little sample jars, roll out sections, and sit with it for a little while,” she says. (To get the camel hue they used in the kitchen, she tried four different shades.) And for those renters teeter-tottering on painting their cabinets, take her advice: Just do it. “I wish I had done it sooner,” she says. “It changed the whole feeling of the apartment in such a dramatic way.”
Another game changer? Grown-up art. (Having an artist for a boyfriend helps.) “It’s my first time living with real art,” Leah says. “And it makes the space feel a lot more mature.” From a Mara de Luca painting in the living room to a Don Edler tablet and Nick Wilkinson painting in the bedroom, most are by friends or Adam, of course, who painted Leah’s favorite work in the house. “It’s called Keluarga,” she explains, of the colorful artwork that hangs in the kitchen. “It means family in Indonesian, and Adam gave it to me when we moved in together.” As for her own work? Aside from a pair of groovy sconces in the bedroom and a mirror on the mantel, it’s mostly absent. And now, Leah says, “I’m happy about that.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
