Los Angeles is one of the most complex and creatively demanding interior design markets in the world. The city is vast and architecturally diverse — a 1920s Spanish Colonial in Hancock Park sits a few miles from a mid-century case study house in the hills, which sits a few miles from a newly built contemporary in Brentwood. Each has its own logic, its own history, and its own set of design requirements. Designing well in Los Angeles means being genuinely fluent across all of it.
JAC Interiors was founded in Los Angeles in 2012. In the years since, we've worked across a wide range of the city's neighbourhoods and housing types — from renovation projects in the older, character-rich parts of the Westside to new construction in the hillside communities to comprehensive reworkings of post-war homes across the Valley and South Bay. This is our home market and we know it in detail.
The breadth of Los Angeles residential architecture
Most major American cities have a recognizable residential architectural identity. Los Angeles doesn't — or rather, it has many simultaneously. The Spanish Colonial Revival and Mediterranean buildings of the 1920s and 1930s, concentrated in neighbourhoods like Hancock Park, Los Feliz, and parts of Santa Monica and Brentwood. The mid-century modern buildings of the postwar era — Case Study houses, Cliff May ranchos, Joseph Eichler developments — scattered across the hills and flatlands. The early 20th-century craftsman bungalows of Silver Lake and Highland Park. The contemporary architecture of new construction across the Westside and in the hillside communities. And everything in between.
Each of these building types presents a different interior design challenge. A Spanish Colonial Revival calls for an approach that respects the warmth of its arched doorways and decorative tilework while updating it for contemporary living. A mid-century modern demands a more restrained palette and a sensitivity to the relationship between inside and outside that the original architects made central to their work. A new contemporary build gives you a clean canvas but requires equally careful choices about how to bring warmth and personality to a space that has no existing character to draw from.
We don't have a single signature style that we impose on every project — we have a strong point of view about quality, proportion, and material, and we apply it differently depending on what the architecture and the client require. That flexibility is what makes it possible to work effectively across Los Angeles's full residential range.
Fox Hills
Neighbourhoods we know well
Our Los Angeles work spans the city broadly, but there are neighbourhoods where we've worked extensively and developed particular familiarity:
Westside: Santa Monica, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Venice, Marina del Rey, and Culver City make up a large portion of our active project base. The Westside's combination of proximity to the ocean, strong architectural stock, and high residential investment makes it consistently one of the most active design markets in the city.
The Hills: Hollywood Hills, Mulholland Drive, Laurel Canyon, and the hillside communities above Beverly Hills and Bel Air. These properties often have exceptional views and complex sites that require design solutions as much for the site as for the interior.
Beverly Hills and Hancock Park: Estates and character homes with significant investment and exacting clients. This work often involves comprehensive renovations that preserve the architectural character of the original building while completely reworking the interior for contemporary life.
Valley and South Bay: Sherman Oaks, Studio City, Encino, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, and the surrounding communities. A different scale from the Westside estates, but often complex renovation work with serious clients who invest significantly in their homes.
Mulholland Drive
Designing for the Los Angeles lifestyle
There are a few things that define how people actually live in Los Angeles that consistently shape the interior design work we do here.
Indoor-outdoor living is not optional. The climate makes year-round outdoor living genuinely possible, and the best Los Angeles homes treat their outdoor spaces as real rooms — furnished, lit, and finished with the same care as the interior. We always design indoor and outdoor together, ensuring that the material language moves through the glass doors without a jarring transition and that the terrace or garden is a genuine extension of the home rather than an afterthought.
Natural light is abundant and demanding. Los Angeles gets more than 280 days of sun per year, and that light is intense and directional. Colour choices that work in the Pacific Northwest or the Northeast read completely differently here. Material selections need to account for UV exposure and the way the light shifts from the cool morning hours to the harsh afternoon. Window treatment specifications are a serious design decision, not an afterthought.
Entertaining is central. Los Angeles is a city where people entertain at home regularly and often at scale. Homes that don't work for entertaining — that can't comfortably hold a dinner party of twelve or a cocktail gathering of thirty — feel incomplete. We design for the way our clients actually use their homes, which means thinking about traffic flow, seating capacity, kitchen-to-dining relationships, and outdoor overflow from the beginning of the space planning process.
Venice Beach House
Our approach to Los Angeles projects
The majority of our Los Angeles work is full-service: space planning, architecture coordination, finish specification, custom millwork, furniture specification and procurement, lighting design, window treatments, art and accessories. We take responsibility for the complete interior so that our clients don't have to manage multiple vendors and hope that everything comes together.
We also work closely with the city's contractor and architect community. A full-service interior design engagement on a renovation project requires genuine collaboration with the general contractor and architect — coordinating on details, reviewing submittals, catching deviations from the design intent before they're built in. We've developed working relationships with contractors and architects across the city who share our commitment to execution quality.
For clients considering new construction or major renovation, we're most valuable when we're involved early — ideally before the architectural drawings are finalized. The decisions made at the architectural stage have major downstream effects on the interior, and having a designer at the table during that process prevents the kind of expensive corrections that happen when interior design is treated as something that happens after construction is complete.
Starting a project in Los Angeles
Most projects begin with a brief introductory call — fifteen minutes to understand the scope of your project, answer your questions about our process, and see whether we're a good fit. There's no pressure and no commitment. If we're the right firm for your project, we'll know it quickly. If we're not, we'll say so and point you toward someone who might be.
To start the conversation, request an intro call here or call us directly at 310-428-2645. We're based in Los Angeles and we're glad to talk through what you're working on.
