Updated Oct 12, 2018 1:38 AM EDT
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Domino Reno: Before + Afters, DIYs, and Advice From the Pros.
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The tropical-inspired dining space in Oh Joy! founder and creative director Joy Cho’s Los Angeles guesthouse–slash–work studio isn’t just for breakfast. It hosts meetings, lunches with out-of-town friends or coworkers, and sprawling pizza boxes when her two daughters have sleepovers. It can juggle all those roles while still looking every bit the traditional breakfast nook — thanks to Cleo Murnane, creative director at Project M Plus, who led the design of Cho’s WFH spot alongside her architect husband, McShane.
“Immediately, I wanted to give Joy something that could actually last,” says Cleo. Luckily the couple had just designed a restaurant called the Salted Pig, where they’d gone deep on beautiful, functional booths, so they knew the ins and outs of a hardworking eat-in nook. “It was an opportunity to make something special, especially because there’s a proper dining table on the other side of the room,” says Cho. Ahead, we chat with the digital creative’s interior designer about carving out the niche from scratch.
To contrast all the linear, angular elements elsewhere in the A-frame house, Cleo leaned hard into curves, starting by wrapping the bench base in flexible tambour wood sheets from Surfacing Solutions. “They turn any corner easily, without a millworker custom-fabricating the edge,” she says of the product, which is glued in place. Below, she opted for brass Schluter trim — a detail that makes the Concrete Collaborative terrazzo floor tiles feel less industrial and more residential. Plus, the Durabrass metal is easier to clean than solid brass and doesn’t flash obvious scuff marks when feet kick it.
The feature that makes this a forever-kind-of dining nook? The seat and rolled-back cushions, clad in a commercial-grade vinyl upholstery from Acacia that only looks like leather. “Joy was very specific about wanting kid-friendly spaces that were durable,” says Cleo. The emerald material threads the needle between the two most popular breakfast-nook fabric options: the plasticky kind your legs stick to in summer, and the fancy linen kind that’s basically a stain magnet.
Part of the reason for choosing a banana leaf wallpaper for the nook was to pull the tree-dotted skyline views outside… inside. The other reason? Sneaking some sophisticated, darker neutrals into the pink-and-yellow-heavy living area. But not all tropical prints are created equal. Cleo landed on the Mokum La Palma print by James Dunlap because it was beautifully drawn — almost mural-like — and the absence of animals kept it adult-approved. “It created a colorful, textured vignette without stealing the show from the architecture,” says the designer. True to the owner’s brand, this spot is joyful to its core.
Lydia Geisel has been on the editorial team at Domino since 2017. These days she writes and edits home and renovation stories — house tours, before-and-afters, DIYs — and helms our design news coverage. She lives in New York City, where she fantasizes about closets big enough to renovate.
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