In Los Angeles, new construction tends to arrive over-prepared. Immaculate lines, pristine finishes, rooms that photograph beautifully and somehow make you feel nothing. Designer Sam Donnelly, founder of Mercantile & Merchant, had little interest in any of that.
Her Studio City home — a 3,000-square-foot ground-up build tucked along a tree-lined stretch of Klump Avenue — was conceived as something quieter. A house that feels settled. Layered. Genuinely lived in from the moment you walk through the door, rather than the moment its owners finally exhale.
The architecture is contemporary: crisp lines, expansive glazing, large-scale doors that dissolve the boundary between interior and the garden and pool beyond. But inside, the mood is softened by vintage furnishings, worn materials, and objects that carry the subtle irregularities of time. The result is a house that feels like it has always existed — which, for a new build, is no small achievement.
Above: Designer Sam Donnelly inside her kitchen. Photographed by Joe Schmelzer of Treasurbite Studios.
Donnelly had lived in Los Angeles for more than a decade before breaking ground on this project. In that time, she had renovated several houses — and owned, by her own admission, a “showstopper” in the hills that impressed everyone who visited and never quite felt personal. This time was different.
Working again with architect Ryan Perella of Perella Architecture, a long-time collaborator, she approached the project with an unusual degree of creative freedom and a rare self-awareness about what to do with it. “There’s no translation process when you design for yourself,” she says. “But sometimes you know too much.” Restraint, it turns out, is harder than invention.
The lot — roughly 12,000 square feet — gave the project room to breathe. Rather than maximising the footprint, Donnelly chose to leave significant space for the garden, front and rear, giving the house a sense of quiet privacy that its openness might otherwise have undermined. Moving from the UK to Southern California had changed how she thought about outdoor space entirely; sunshine, suddenly reliable, made the garden as essential as any room inside.
Large doors open directly onto a hardwood deck and pool, but the backyard unfolds less as a single patio and more as a sequence of outdoor rooms — spaces that shift in mood depending on how many people are in them.
On collecting, and the case for imperfection
Donnelly has always been a collector. Antique furniture, ceramics, textiles, books, artwork — objects with their own histories, their own accumulated character. In a new build, those pieces do something that money and good taste alone cannot: they introduce friction.
“I’ve always believed new construction needs friction,” she says. “Something with age, irregularity, or memory to soften it.”
An antique cabinet interrupts a clean architectural line. A worn leather chair sits easily beside modern cabinetry. The contrast is deliberate — not a period interior, not nostalgia, but juxtaposition that keeps the rooms feeling alive. There’s also a pragmatic logic to it. A scratch on a century-old dining table isn’t a crisis. It’s just another chapter.
California light was always going to be part of the design. Coming from the diffused skies of Britain, Donnelly found the Southern California sun almost architectural in its clarity — something to be worked with rather than simply admitted. She and Perella studied how light would move through the house over the course of the day, positioning windows to allow it to travel deep into the interior. Lime-washed walls, warm woods, and matte finishes shift subtly as the daylight changes. The house never quite looks the same twice.
The kitchen and living areas form the social core — spaces where cooking, conversation, and gathering blur naturally together. But Donnelly is clear-eyed about what makes open-plan living actually work, and it isn’t the furniture. It’s the infrastructure behind it: a compact pantry that absorbs the daily mechanics of a functioning kitchen, keeping appliances and preparation surfaces out of sight. “If I built the house again,” she adds, “I’d find a way to include a scullery. The Edwardians understood that practicality and beauty aren’t mutually exclusive — they simply separated the two.”
The same logic applies to the quieter rooms — mudrooms, closets, laundry areas — that rarely make it into photoshoots but quietly sustain the whole. When those functions are properly contained, the open-plan areas remain calm. When they’re not, openness quickly becomes disorder.
The home has continued to evolve since completion — as Donnelly always intended it to. The ADU, initially finished with a simple stucco exterior in keeping with budget constraints, was later clad in cedar shingles as the surrounding garden matured. The material change is subtle but significant: the building settles more naturally into the landscape, as if it had been there longer than it has.
“I don’t believe a home should arrive fully formed,” she says. “The best interiors evolve. You add, remove, and shift things as life changes.”
It is, in the end, a house guided by proportion, comfort, and the rhythms of everyday life — generous enough to gather in, intimate enough to remain grounding. Not a showpiece. Not a statement. Just a very good home, which is considerably harder to pull off.
SOURCE BOOK
For those who want to bring a similar sensibility into their own spaces, a number of the pieces featured throughout the home are available to source directly. The kitchen anchors around a La Canche range, with lighting throughout by Urban Electric and Workstead. Seating includes an Amber Interiors sofa and Croft House exterior lounge chairs, while the dining area pairs Ercol chairs with a vintage table — a combination that captures Donnelly’s approach to mixing the contemporary with the collected. The primary suite features a canopy bed by DWR, with a Room & Board canopy bed in the ADU. Pieces from Lulu and Georgia are layered throughout alongside vintage finds sourced over time.
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Credits:
Photography by Joe Schmelzer of Treasurbite Studios | @treasurbite
