Key takeaways
- Kelly Wearstler is LA’s most recognizable designer, known for sculptural maximalism, Proper hotel interiors, and a 2026 H&M Home collection.
- Clements Design and Jake Arnold define the warm minimalist look: plaster walls, pale European oak, and vintage furniture with almost no color.
- Commune, Nickey Kehoe, and Reath Design lead the vintage-forward eclectic style, building rooms collected over time rather than delivered at once.
- Studio Shamshiri, OWIU, and And And And Studio think like architects first, restoring Schindler, Kappe, and midcentury post-and-beam houses.
- Hourly rates in greater LA run $150 to $500 and up, with full-service fees of 10 to 30 percent of project cost.
Ask who is shaping Los Angeles interiors right now and you get four answers at once. The glamour camp, led by Kelly Wearstler and Martyn Lawrence Bullard, keeps the city’s appetite for drama well fed. The quiet California minimalists, Clements Design and Jake Arnold among them, build calm out of plaster, oak, and restraint. The vintage-forward eclectics, Commune Design, Nickey Kehoe, and Reath Design, treat a room as a collection assembled over decades rather than delivered in a truck. And the architecture-led studios, Studio Shamshiri, OWIU, and And And And Studio, start with the building itself. This guide covers eleven studios practicing in 2026: what each is known for, one project you can verify, and what hiring this caliber of talent actually costs.
The grand glamour camp
LA glamour today runs through three studios: Kelly Wearstler, Martyn Lawrence Bullard, and Night Palm. Each works the maximalist end of the spectrum, but the results could not be confused for one another.
Kelly Wearstler
Kelly Wearstler remains the most recognizable name in American interior design, and her studio is busier than ever. She built her reputation on sculptural maximalism: oversized stone, graphic pattern, furniture that behaves like art. Her hotel work for the Proper group defined a whole strain of California hospitality design. In April 2026 she made her Milan Design Week debut with a modular furniture and accessories collection for H&M Home, staged inside a redesigned Palazzo Acerbi, as covered by Dezeen. It is her first move into truly accessible price points, and it sold the same vocabulary she uses on eight-figure houses.
Martyn Lawrence Bullard
Martyn Lawrence Bullard is the keeper of old Hollywood exuberance: saturated color, global pattern, and rooms built for entertaining. His client list runs from Cher to Kylie Jenner, and he has now spent 20 consecutive years on the AD100, including the 2026 list. For a public-facing taste of the work, book a room: his Prospect Hollywood hotel turned a 1939 Hollywood Regency building into 24 guest rooms of full-tilt Regency revival.
Night Palm
Tiffany Howell’s Night Palm is the newer voice in this camp, and the most cinematic. A former music supervisor, Howell designs rooms the way a director scores a scene: moody palettes, lacquer, velvet, and vintage lighting with a backstory. Robb Report covered her Hollywood screening room, a small masterclass in dark-room glamour, and in late 2025 she released the Poet sofa with Ellison Studios, featured by Sight Unseen. Her client roster leans entertainment industry, which fits. The work photographs like a film still.
The quiet California minimalists
The counterweight to all that drama is a school of warm minimalism that has become the default look of high-budget Los Angeles. Two studios define it.
Clements Design
The mother-and-son team of Kathleen and Tommy Clements at Clements Design perfected the pared-down luxury that celebrity LA now asks for by name: plaster walls, pale European oak, vintage French and Scandinavian furniture, almost no color. Their houses for Adam Levine and Behati Prinsloo and for Gwyneth Paltrow have both had full Architectural Digest tours, and their Rizzoli monograph Eight Homes collects the strongest of the residential work. The signature is discipline. Nothing in a Clements room is raising its voice.
Jake Arnold
British-born Jake Arnold works a moodier register of the same calm: deep upholstery, cashmere and boucle, stone with visible weight. His Beverly Hills home for John Legend and Chrissy Teigen appeared on Architectural Digest’s first global cover in 2023, and the product side of his practice keeps expanding, with Crate & Barrel collections and a 2026 drapery line with Everhem. He also co-founded The Expert, the platform that lets anyone book a video consultation with a top-tier designer, which has quietly changed how this whole industry sells advice.
The vintage-forward eclectics
The collected-over-time look is LA’s most exportable style right now, and three studios do it at the highest level.
Commune Design
Commune, founded in 2004 by Roman Alonso and Steven Johanknecht, is the studio that taught California to mix Heath Ceramics, Bauhaus, and Mexican modernism in one room. Their Ace Hotel projects in Downtown LA, Palm Springs, and Kyoto set the template for an entire decade of hospitality design, and the practice still runs on collaboration with artisans rather than showroom orders. Of every studio on this list, Commune is the one other designers cite most often as an influence.
Nickey Kehoe
Todd Nickey and Amy Kehoe of Nickey Kehoe run a studio and a shop, and the two feed each other. The look is quiet, painterly, and deeply comfortable with age: rush seats, waxed wood, lamps that glow rather than illuminate. Homes & Gardens recently published their 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival house in Los Feliz for Stranger Things co-creator Matt Duffer, arranged as a series of small vignettes instead of one big seating block. In 2024 they opened a New York outpost in Greenwich Village, on the site of Jackson Pollock’s former studio.
Reath Design
Frances Merrill’s Reath Design is the bravest colorist in Los Angeles. Her rooms layer pattern on pattern, hand-painted finishes, and unexpected palettes that read as joyful rather than chaotic, a balance very few designers can hold. Architectural Digest featured her fantasy-inspired Pasadena Tudor, converted from former stables, in October 2025, and 1stDibs Introspective has profiled her approach to mixing vintage finds with serious art. If the beige wave ever fully recedes, Reath is where the tide turns.
The architecture-led studios
Some of the most interesting LA interiors right now come from studios that think like architects first, working with the city’s stock of Schindlers, Kappes, and midcentury post-and-beams.
Studio Shamshiri
Pamela Shamshiri founded Studio Shamshiri in 2016 after years as a principal at Commune, and the practice has become LA’s most trusted hand for architecturally significant houses. The portfolio includes restorations of homes by Rudolph Schindler, A. Quincy Jones, and Myron Hunt, ground-up work with Marmol Radziner and Johnston Marklee, and the Maison de la Luz hotel in New Orleans. The studio’s signature is depth: materials with history, craft you can read at arm’s length, nothing thin.
OWIU Design
OWIU, short for The Only Way Is Up, was founded in 2018 by SCI-Arc graduates Amanda Gunawan and Joel Wong and now runs about 19 people strong. The studio filters Japanese ryokan principles, tatami platforms, water, low sightlines, through Californian light and landscape. Their renovation of Ray Kappe’s 1973 Glass Ridge House in La Cañada Flintridge, covered by Dezeen in 2025, shows the approach at full strength: reverent to the architecture, serene in the details.
And And And Studio
Annie Ritz and Daniel Rabin of And And And Studio are the quiet achievers of LA residential architecture and interiors. Their Silver Lake Tree House, lifted above its hillside lot for a treehouse effect, made the design press rounds, and their commercial work, including a Century City law office that reads more like a hotel lobby, shows the same warmth applied at scale. The sensibility sits between nostalgia and modernism, with a playfulness most architecture-led firms cannot manage.
What these studios share: the LA throughline
For all their differences, these eleven studios agree on three things: rooms should open to the outdoors, light is a material, and surfaces should be honest. Indoor-outdoor flow is not a luxury feature here, it is the baseline, whether that means steel doors onto a courtyard or a Kappe house that barely has walls at all. Finishes skew real: plaster instead of flat paint, solid wood instead of veneer, stone with visible variation. And nearly everyone shops vintage, which is why the city’s design districts matter so much to the look.
Those districts are walkable, and worth your time even if you never hire anyone. Start with our walking guide to the La Cienega Design Quarter, where many of these studios source antiques, then cross to the Pacific Design Center, the blue whale of trade showrooms, for fabric and furniture lines you will see in their published projects.
How to actually hire an interior designer in LA
Hiring a designer in Los Angeles costs more than the national average, and the fee structure matters as much as the number. Per Havenly’s LA cost data and Sweeten’s industry guide, hourly rates in greater LA generally run $150 to $500 and up depending on the studio’s profile. Many full-service firms instead charge a flat design fee plus a percentage of project cost, commonly 10 to 30 percent, and procure furnishings at trade pricing with a markup of roughly 20 to 35 percent. Expect an initial consultation fee, and expect the studios in this article to take on full homes, not single rooms.
Full-service makes sense when construction is involved. If you are moving walls, redoing a kitchen, or restoring original detail, a designer who can run drawings, contractors, and procurement together will save you from the most expensive category of mistake: the change order. Our realistic guide to remodeling a home in Los Angeles covers how design fees fit into a full project budget. For smaller questions, The Expert offers paid one-hour video consultations with several designers on this list, including Jake Arnold and Martyn Lawrence Bullard, at a fraction of a retainer.
Questions readers ask
Who is the most famous interior designer in Los Angeles?
Kelly Wearstler is the most internationally recognized Los Angeles interior designer, known for sculptural maximalist residences, the Proper hotel group’s interiors, and product lines that now include a 2026 H&M Home collaboration launched at Milan Design Week. Martyn Lawrence Bullard, with 20 consecutive years on the AD100 and a deep celebrity client list, is her closest rival for name recognition.
How much does an interior designer cost in Los Angeles?
Plan on $150 to $500 or more per hour, or a flat design fee plus 10 to 30 percent of project cost for full-service work, based on published LA cost guides. Furnishings are typically procured at trade pricing with a 20 to 35 percent markup. Top-tier studios generally take whole-home projects with six-figure furnishing budgets as their starting point.
What style are LA interior designers known for right now?
Two looks dominate: warm minimalism, meaning plaster walls, pale oak, and vintage European furniture in the Clements Design and Jake Arnold mode, and the collected eclectic look of Commune, Nickey Kehoe, and Reath Design. Both share the LA fundamentals: indoor-outdoor flow, natural light treated as a material, and honest finishes over anything synthetic or flat.
