HOME
Living in Color Sarisa and Brandon Munoz bask in the vibrancy of their eclectic, boho interiors BY E VIE KLOPP HOLZER | PHOTOS BY DON RISI
rowse the home images Sarisa Munoz has posted on her Instagram page, @IndigoLeopardHome, and you’ll be shocked to learn she ever decorated in neutrals. Turquoise, sunny yellow, fire-engine red, coral, navy and emerald green flow, surprisingly seamless, from room to room. “My husband and I don’t want cookie-cutter,” Munoz says. “There’s a time and a place for that in people’s lives, and if that’s what you like, there’s nothing wrong with that either. For us, we just like a little more daring, ‘out there’ look.” With husband Brandon’s blessing, Sarisa mixes intense color schemes with animal prints, black-and-white-patterned tile and bird-themed wallpapers. It’s a lively boho style that has evolved over time. When they purchased their first home in 2005, their neutral, play-it-safe décor resembled a Pottery Barn catalog. Then Munoz started experimenting with bolder design choices, and she loved the outcomes. In her last home, located in Corpus Christi, she and her husband ripped out the bedroom carpet and applied a Moroccan stencil design to the concrete floor in white and electric blue. “That started my wild streak,” Munoz says. “I think it’s just me getting older and coming into my own – not having to fit into this mold of, ‘This is what your house should look like.’” Munoz says she found courage, ideas and inspiration by following designers online. (She especially loves Jonathan Adler.) Today, in a pay-it-forward-kind-of way, she posts her own decorating projects on social media. Her @IndigoLeopardHome page has more than 93,000 followers. “Sometimes if I write a caption that’s meaningful and heartfelt, people will write me messages,” Munoz says, adding that others reach out to tell her how her photos have influenced their own home design choices. “There’s this connection with people who I don’t even know. I think it’s cool. I love that people want to follow me and see what’s going on.” There is a strong community of design aficionados posting regularly to Instagram; a community Munoz once followed and now has joined. When she moved to Edmond in 2020, she connected with Oklahoma City-based Daniel Mathis of @NotaMinimalist. The two met up downtown on a COVIDfriendly sidewalk. “She was looking for vintage portraits, and I had picked up a bundle of them at an estate sale, so I gifted one to her,” Mathis says. “We both have very eclectic styles, and so we clicked immediately. Since then, we enjoy supporting one another
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on Instagram and talking about our favorite places to thrift and antique.” Munoz had quite the challenge redesigning the family’s new suburban home. She decided to change several aspects of the home – including the tilework, paint colors, wallpapers and upstairs flooring – but she was orchestrating it from Texas. “I created a laminated flip book for our contractor,” she says. “For every single room, it showed, ‘This is the tile I want, this is the paint I want, these are the colors.’ Everything was lined out.” It was an approach that worked well … for the most part. However, not being able to see the full effect immediately and in person proved problematic in the laundry room. Munoz had the cabinets painted Sherwin Williams Untamed Yellow, and she hated it. The paint sample she found in Texas did not translate well to the space. Rather than start over, she decided to balance it with a citrus-themed wallpaper called Amalfi Umore by Graham and Brown. “Once that wallpaper was up, it transformed the room. Now, it makes me happy to go in there,” Munoz says.
RIGHT: Sarisa Munoz decorates with whimsical accents and lots of plants. BELOW: The range hood in the kitchen is one of many areas in the home featuring black and white tile work.