Interior designer Georgia Tapert Howe’s definition of good design is more personal than aesthetic: A home “should feel like a reflection of you, and feel authentic when you walk into a room,” she says, leading us on a tour of the gracious 1921 Georgian-Colonial home she shares with her husband and two children in the leafy Hancock Park enclave of Los Angeles.
Howe and her husband, both native New Yorkers, moved west for his film career and bought this house about a decade ago. Just as Howe aims for “an interesting mix that’s reflective of the clients, the space, and the people that live there” in her interiors practice, her own house beautifully marries her family’s East Coast sensibilities with the light, contemporary feel of Los Angeles.
“I tend toward clean lines but maybe slightly more traditional fabrics. It has to work with architecture—you can’t ignore the space you’re designing in,” says Howe. “Achieving a look that doesn’t feel one-note” is grounded in “buying things you love.” This philosophy is epitomized in her living room, where crisp white linen sofas mix with sculptural 1950s Danish leather chairs, modern art, and an antique Japanese rice box. The living room—“probably my favorite room in the house”—isn’t just for show: “We spend a lot of time here,” says the designer.
The redesign of the dining room began with the curtain fabric: “I just fell in love with that color and pattern and built off of that.”
In her formerly bold emerald green and black dining room, Howe has softened the mood, wrapping the paneling in a soothing sage-y green and adding vintage chairs she found on 1stDibs and recovered in a forgiving mustard-yellow bouclé. “If you’re a young family, then I think it becomes paramount what’s durable,” she explains. “How do we balance beautiful and chic with practicality?”
For day-to-day life, the roomy corner banquette in the kitchen beneath family-photo-lined walls is ground zero. “We eat dinner here, the kids do homework here, my husband and I sit here at the end of the day,” says Howe. “When we bought the house it was a separate room and I opened it up because I knew I wanted an eat-in kitchen.”
An out-of-print book of Andy Warhol illustrations became a whimsical, colorful display of affordable art in the living room.
In many ways, the most important element in a room to Howe is the art: “If the walls are bare, to me that’s not a finished project. It doesn’t need to be a million-dollar painting, [it can just be] things that speak to you, that feel personal. When we moved into this house, we had a lot of walls and not a lot of art, so I took illustrations from a book on Andy Warhol that was out of print,” and framed a series for the living room. “They’re quite whimsical, it adds some color, and I think as a group they feel very impactful.”
“What I love most about this house,” says Howe, “is that it feels like an oasis in this busy city with busy lives. The house really has evolved with us. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”
