Tour Holland Roden's Cheery Bright Bungalow
Photo by Monica Wang1/8“It’s sort of the no-makeup makeup look where it’s in the details,” says Roden of her ethos on tightly curating the little things. She painstakingly pored over shiplap texture, for example, and crown molding. “The details make an impression on the house, how pristine or prestigious it looks. I wanted a more laid-back rustic feel, with pops of gold metallic.” The actress designed her living room around two Alexander McQueen needlepoint pillows. They were an investment she made five years ago when she couldn’t afford the rug version. “I literally sweat for days because I bought them, but I love them. I believe in ‘Use the china every day.’ My dog lies all over these things, but I’m obsessed with them.” Pops of blue and golden yellow weave throughout the bright room where, she says, “I eat, sleep, and breathe.”
Photo by Monica Wang2/8Knickknacks, books, and quirky pieces on Roden’s wooden bookshelf and around her house come in part from her global travels and OK, a housewares and jewelry shop on L.A.’s West 3rd Street. “Books are a big part of how I decorate and use color in my house," says the actress. "I like finding smaller publishers that make interesting books on anything, like Icelandic bodybuilding. I think everything can be a piece of art these days.” The floating bookshelf also features Viking figurines everyone assumes she bought in Scandinavia—she’s of Norwegian descent—but the figures are actually from Etsy. An hourglass is a subtle nod to her longtime TV show: She took it from the Teen Wolf set of her character Lydia’s bedroom.
Photo by Monica Wang3/8“I love wood—I’m too much of a wood hippie,” says Roden. “I could buy a full wood house and I would have paneling all the way up.”
Photo by Monica Wang4/8Roden designed her fireplace with the help of her electrician, carefully considering everything from the exact texture of the brick to the size of the steps. A big gamer, she hosts many game nights in her living room.
Photo by Monica Wang5/8After she fell for this Florian Schulz chandelier in a shop on Beverly, priced at $4,000, she was determined to get it for less. After four or five months she found it online and had it shipped from Germany for $600. “I’m a person who likes to do it once, do it right. I try to buy pieces that hopefully I’ll never have to part with.”
Photo by Monica Wang6/8In Roden's kitchen, Heath Ceramics dishes fill the open shelves, as well as global cookbooks (“I want to get into tagine cooking, because Moroccan food is something I’ve come to love in my 20s. I’m having an Aziz Ansari let’s-cook-homemade-pasta-with-a-grandmother moment”). In this space, she does what she calls dance cooking: "While I’m cooking I have a party and dance by myself,” she says. The vintage Moroccan rug is from Culver City’s Hannoun Rugs.
Photo by Monica Wang7/8The kitchen’s butcher block helped sell Ronen on the house, and she took great pains to find the perfect green for her cabinets. “I looked at greens—that’s probably the number-one thing I did out of everything in the house.” She estimates that she collected more than 3,000 photos of different shades before her mother spotted the ultimate color in the back of a cab in San Francisco. It’s a Benjamin Moore shade called Lafayette she color-matched at Home Depot. Pink grout crossed her mind, but ultimately she felt mustard yellow was a better complement.
Photo by Monica Wang8/8The Stefan Müller painting in the master is “the fancy one, so to speak,” says Roden of the large painting of abstract birds hanging next to her bed. She also has two Matthew Porter photographs from M+B Gallery in West Hollywood. The deep blue of her bedroom is the one consistent thing she’s kept through every house she’s lived in since she was 14. It’s a holdover from her childhood obsession with the bedroom of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character in Cruel Intentions. “I recreate the exact same bedroom wherever I am,” says Roden. “I still wake up thinking I’m in another house because I’ve kept the bedroom so precisely the same.”
