A designer’s mid-century Los Angeles home strikes a delicate balance between custom details and the beauty of restraint.
A joining of old and new defines interior designer, collector and Studio Balestra founder Adriano Balestra’s light-filled refurbishment in the hills of Los Angeles. Studio Balestra—a design studio and vintage furniture store—shaped the home through custom pieces, art, and influences spanning wabi-sabi philosophy, Belgian design sensibility, and Balestra’s past as a gallery owner. Each room, Balestra says, is “a sequence of emotions,” where “art, furniture, and objects are not displayed but integrated into the rhythm of daily life.”
For Balestra, it was less about what to add than what to leave out. This disciplined approach draws on Japanese design principles, seen in antique vases, contemporary vessels, and a custom paper ceiling light by Studio Balestra. These influences, Balestra explains, were “reinterpreted” through light and the Californian context, where light becomes “diffused, reflected, and constantly in dialogue with the textures around it,” shifting the home’s atmosphere throughout the day.
Materials such as lime plaster, pale oak, oxidised metal, and local stone were chosen to create a sensory landscape of matte and sheen, smooth and rough, cool and warm. These juxtapositions fuse with the subdued palette, allowing material to take precedence over colour.
