Housewarming Melissa Warner Rothblum

Melissa Warner Rothblum and her family

Melissa Warner Rothblum

Beauty meets practicality and durability in the designer’s family dream home.

The dining room looks elegant but is child-friendly, with easy-clean surfaces. WHEN MELISSA Warner Rothblum, half of the award-winning interior design team of Massucco Warner, set about envisioning her home in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Hancock Park, she applied the principles that guide her company’s design projects: “Detail, color, and pattern are definitely the common threads in all of our projects regardless of the style,” she explains. “We use color and pattern in big ways, while making sure a space still feels approachable, soothing, and inviting.”

Rothblum fell in love with the house—a classic white stucco Mission-style home with a terra-cotta roof—the moment she first saw it eight years ago. “I like separate rooms and spaces, versus everything being open, so I was excited that the house had a formal dining room and living room,” she says. The only exception: “I love an open space from the kitchen to the breakfast room, which this house had as well. That’s what drew me to it— having the best of both worlds.”

The ability to blend seemingly contradictory or disparate elements in a home seems to be a strong suit of Rothblum, a busy mom of two who needed a residence that could look beautiful but where her two young daughters could feel at ease—and where their parents wouldn’t have to stress over every spill and stain.

“Family living here is the soul of the house,” she says. “That’s what makes it special.”

Rothblum is adamant that just because something is high traffic and high use doesn’t mean it can’t be attractive. “When I see my kids barreling down the hallway over the custom rug, I’m like, ‘Great!’ It’s being used and loved. You don’t have to sacrifice aesthetics for durability if you pick the right items and use the right materials.”

For example, “The kitchen banquette has a faux leather seat, which I can wipe down with a wet cloth after the kids eat,” Rothblum explains.

Her favorite spot? The dining room. “I like a dining room to be pretty, but it’s also approachable, and it’s not too fussy,” she says. Soft gray-lavender wallpaper is flocked with flamingos and hints of pink. Rothblum found the dining chairs outside a vintage store years before finding the house and reupholstered them in gray with channel-stitching detail. She also recovered stools she had owned for 15 years in gray with contrasting pink bands.

The gray rug with white stars is “an outdoor rug, so we can eat in here with the kids,” she adds. “While I don’t want them to spill spaghetti, they could spill spaghetti and I could literally hose the rug off. If you looked at the room from afar, you wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, it’s so child friendly,’ but it is.”

What she loves most about her dining room is not one specific piece but the overall feeling. “It feels clean and happy and cheerful,” says Rothblum.

An abstract painting overlaid with graffiti reads Just Be You. That, essentially, is her mantra. “When you’re doing a house, fill it with things that you love and that reflect you,” she advises. —Lisa Rosen

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