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{
"slug": "asseeninla",
"domain": "asseeninla.com",
"siteName": "As Seen In LA",
"port": 11102,
"siteEmail": "info@asseeninla.com",
"tagline": "The wallcoverings of Los Angeles design.",
"heroHeadline": "As Seen In LA",
"heroSub": "Explore the collection",
"metaDesc": "As Seen In LA — The wallcoverings of Los Angeles design. Free memo samples, expert trade service, and hand-holding on every order from Designer Wallcoverings.",
"nicheLabel": "designer wallcoverings",
"aboutCopy": "As Seen In LA curates designer wallcoverings for designers, architects, and discerning homeowners. The wallcoverings of Los Angeles design. Every selection is backed by Designer Wallcoverings' decades of trade experience.",
"niche": {
"pos": [],
"neg": [],
"types": [
"Wallcovering"
]
},
"theme": {
"accent": "#a8884a",
"bg": "#0a0a09",
"bgLight": "#f4f2ee",
"ink": "#f0ede6",
"inkLight": "#15140f",
"rule": "#cfcabf",
"serif": "'Playfair Display',Georgia,serif",
"sans": "-apple-system,'Inter',system-ui,sans-serif",
"palette": "noir",
"font": "playfair"
},
"monetize": true,
"heroImage": "https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0015/4117/7456/files/morris-acorn-morris-and-co-ochre-fabric-236827-image01.jpg?v=1788956952",
"content": {
"lede": "Los Angeles design lives at the meeting point of light and ease. The city's best rooms treat walls the way it treats its afternoons: sun-washed, relaxed, and quietly confident.",
"sections": [
{
"h": "What LA style actually means on a wall",
"body": "The Los Angeles look is not one style but a blend the city keeps returning to: warm neutrals borrowed from the canyons, the clean lines of midcentury architecture, and a little Spanish and Mediterranean warmth underneath. On walls that shows up as sandy grounds, terracotta and ochre accents, and organic patterns that feel drawn by hand rather than printed by machine.\n\nThe throughline is restraint with one moment of personality. A Los Angeles room rarely covers every wall. It picks a single surface, a dining nook or a bedroom behind the bed, and lets that one gesture carry the whole room while everything else stays open and bright."
},
{
"h": "Designing for the light",
"body": "Los Angeles gets long, strong, warm-leaning sun for most of the year, and that light changes how color reads. Cool grays that look sophisticated in a gray climate can turn flat and dull here, while warm whites, greens, and earth tones seem to glow. This is why so many local interiors lean into the warm end of the palette.\n\nSheen matters too. High-gloss finishes throw hard reflections in this much daylight, so matte and low-luster grounds, along with natural textures like grasscloth and plaster-look papers, tend to sit better. They absorb the light rather than bounce it, keeping a room easy on the eyes at 3 p.m."
},
{
"h": "Indoor-outdoor and the canyon palette",
"body": "Because so much of local life happens with the doors open, walls are often chosen to carry the outside in. Botanical prints, palm and agave motifs, and soft desert tones let an interior wall rhyme with the garden or the hillside just beyond the glass. Done lightly, it feels native; done heavily, it tips into theme, so scale and color restraint keep it grown-up.\n\nThe canyon palette, dry greens, warm stone, faded blue, and bleached wood, is the safest place to start. Pull one of those tones for a feature wall and let the rest of the room stay pale and open, and you get the unforced Los Angeles feeling without trying too hard."
}
],
"guideTitle": "Quick checklist before you order",
"guide": [
{
"k": "Go warm",
"v": "Favor sandy, ochre, green, and terracotta tones that glow under strong LA sun instead of going flat."
},
{
"k": "Kill the glare",
"v": "Choose matte or natural-texture grounds; high gloss throws hard reflections in bright daylight."
},
{
"k": "One statement wall",
"v": "Pick a single surface for pattern and keep the rest open so the room stays airy."
},
{
"k": "Nod to outside",
"v": "Botanical or desert motifs let an interior wall echo the garden or hillside beyond the glass."
},
{
"k": "Test at 3 p.m.",
"v": "View samples in the harsh afternoon light this city is known for, not just morning."
}
],
"faqTitle": "Frequently asked",
"faq": [
{
"q": "What colors work best in bright California light?",
"a": "Warm whites, greens, ochres, and earth tones read best under strong warm sun, while cool grays tend to look flat and lifeless."
},
{
"q": "Is grasscloth a good fit for an LA home?",
"a": "Very. Its natural texture absorbs harsh daylight and carries the relaxed, indoor-outdoor feeling the city's interiors are known for."
},
{
"q": "How do I get the LA look without it feeling like a theme?",
"a": "Limit yourself to one statement wall and a restrained canyon palette; the ease comes from what you leave plain, not from covering everything."
}
],
"about": "This is an independent guide to Los Angeles interior style and the wallcoverings that suit the city's light and way of living. It explains the palette, materials, and design moves plainly so you can bring them home. It is a reference, not a store.",
"guidePage": {
"lede": "The Los Angeles interior is built from a few recurring architectural roots. Knowing them tells you which wall treatments belong and which fight the house.",
"sections": [
{
"h": "Match the wall to the house",
"body": "Los Angeles is a city of distinct housing types, and each one asks for a different wall. A Spanish Colonial with its thick plaster and arched openings wants earthy, hand-worked patterns and warm grounds. A midcentury post-and-beam wants clean geometrics or a single quiet texture that respects its glass-and-line simplicity. A Craftsman bungalow suits richer, more traditional patterns in deeper tones.\n\nThe mistake is choosing a covering you like in the abstract and forcing it onto the wrong bones. Start by naming the era and character of your home, then let that narrow the field before you look at a single pattern."
},
{
"h": "Texture as the local dialect",
"body": "More than any single print, texture is what makes a room read as Los Angeles: plaster-look finishes, grasscloth, raffia, cork, and paper that mimics hand-troweled walls. These materials speak to the city's love of natural, imperfect, sun-friendly surfaces and give depth without adding busy pattern.\n\nTexture also solves a practical problem. In relentless daylight, a flat printed pattern can look cheap and every seam shows, while a textured ground diffuses light and forgives the wall underneath. If you want one dependable move, choose a natural-texture covering over a busy print."
},
{
"h": "Restraint is the finishing move",
"body": "The rooms that photograph as effortlessly Los Angeles are usually the emptiest of pattern. One considered wall, a warm ground, good light, and a lot of breathing room. The discipline is resisting the urge to decorate every surface, because openness is itself the aesthetic here.\n\nA useful test: if you removed the statement wall, would the room still feel calm and intentional? If yes, you have the balance right. If the room falls apart without pattern doing all the work, you are leaning on the wallcovering to fix a room that needs editing first."
}
]
},
"articles": [
{
"title": "How an LA room actually gets specified: inside the Pacific Design Center",
"dek": "The blue-and-green glass complex on Melrose is where a large share of Los Angeles's serious wallcovering decisions start, and it runs on trade rules a homeowner never sees.",
"body": "The Pacific Design Center opened on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood in 1975, designed by Cesar Pelli while he was at Gruen Associates. Angelenos nicknamed the first cobalt-glass building the Blue Whale; the green building followed in 1988 and the red one in 2012, completing the trade campus. For half a century it has been the hub where much of the region's contract and residential interior work gets its materials chosen, which is why a Los Angeles room that has considered wallcovering has very likely passed through a showroom here.\n\nThe complex runs on the to-the-trade model, and that is the part homeowners find surprising. Most PDC showrooms sell through designers and architects holding trade accounts rather than directly to the public. The structure exists because contract-grade material is specified on performance data as much as looks: a designer arrives with a project's fire, width, and cleanability requirements and leaves with cuttings matched to a spec, not an impulse roll off a rack.\n\nWhat a designer is really collecting is a memo sample and a set of numbers. The memo is the loaner cutting that goes back to the studio to be pinned against paint, stone, and fabric under the room's own light. The numbers come with it, printed on the sample or its binder page: material type, width and repeat, the ASTM E84 fire class, and the washability rating. On a project where a single feature wall in a Bird Streets house anchors an entire scheme, that memo step is where the scheme gets proven before anything is ordered.\n\nThe building also concentrates the events that move local taste. The annual WestEdge Design Fair in Santa Monica and the La Cienega Design Quarter's Legends program bring each season's introductions into public view, and the shelter press covers them, so a texture that shows well in spring tends to appear in finished Los Angeles rooms within the year. That is the quiet mechanism behind the phrase as seen in LA: a look becomes local less because it was invented here than because it was specified here, one memo sample at a time.",
"slug": "pacific-design-center-how-la-rooms-get-specified"
},
{
"title": "Hollywood Regency and the wall treatments that built the look",
"dek": "Lacquer, oversized pattern, and studio-set glamour came out of a few named Los Angeles decorators working for the movie industry. Here is who they were and what they did to walls.",
"body": "William Haines is the usual starting point. A popular MGM leading man in the silent era, he left acting around 1933 and opened William Haines Designs, becoming decorator to a client list that ran from Joan Crawford to, decades later, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, whose Bel Air house he worked on. Haines translated the polish of a film set into rooms people actually lived in, and in doing so helped invent the idiom later called Hollywood Regency.\n\nThe style reads on contrast and nerve: high-gloss lacquered surfaces, mirrored and metallic accents, black-and-white grounds, and deliberately oversized scale. On the walls that meant treatments a quieter decade would have called too much, with large-repeat patterns, high-sheen grounds, and chinoiserie panels doing the work of making a modest room feel theatrical. The look borrowed the vocabulary of early-nineteenth-century Regency neoclassicism and pushed the glamour, which is where the Hollywood prefix came from.\n\nTwo other figures round out the lineage. Dorothy Draper, whose 1939 book Decorating Is Fun! preached bold color and pattern against the era's timidity, set the maximalist tone nationally. Tony Duquette, the Los Angeles designer and set decorator who in 1951 became the first American given a solo show at the Louvre's Pavillon de Marsan, brought a scenographer's instinct for fast, built atmosphere to private rooms. Both treated a wall as a backdrop to be dressed rather than a neutral surface to leave alone.\n\nHollywood Regency never fully left; it resurfaces roughly once a decade, and knowing that is useful before committing to it. A high-gloss ground under a big-repeat pattern reads as glamour when the rest of the room is disciplined and as noise when it is not. The decorators who invented the look understood it as an editing problem first: one dramatic wall, everything else calmed down. That restraint, not any single pattern, is the transferable part.",
"slug": "hollywood-regency-wall-treatments-history"
},
{
"title": "Why Los Angeles rooms read as sun-washed, and the Case Study Houses that taught them to",
"dek": "The relaxed, light-flooded LA interior traces to a postwar architecture program run out of a magazine, and its logic still governs how the city treats a wall.",
"body": "Between 1945 and 1966, the Los Angeles magazine Arts & Architecture, under editor John Entenza, commissioned architects to design and build affordable modern houses for the postwar family. The Case Study House program produced around three dozen designs, roughly two dozen of them built, many in the hills and canyons around LA, and together they defined the indoor-outdoor, glass-walled California house the rest of the world now imitates.\n\nThe best-known is Case Study House No. 22, the Stahl House above the Sunset Strip, designed by Pierre Koenig and completed in 1960. Julius Shulman's 1960 night photograph of it, two women seated in a glass corner cantilevered over the city grid, is among the most reproduced images in architecture. Charles and Ray Eames built their own Case Study House No. 8 in Pacific Palisades in 1949 from off-the-shelf industrial parts. What these houses shared was a rejection of heavy, dark, closed rooms in favor of light pouring through large expanses of glass.\n\nThat inheritance still shapes how LA rooms use wallcovering. When much of a wall is glass and the daylight is strong, the surfaces that survive the comparison are textural and low-contrast rather than loud: grasscloth and other natural-fiber wovens, sand and plaster tones, quiet organic patterns that hold in flat afternoon sun without competing with the view. The material contributes depth and warmth instead of shouting for attention.\n\nThe lesson underneath is about light, not fashion. A pattern chosen under a showroom's even lighting can look like a different product on a west-facing wall at four in the afternoon in the Hollywood Hills, where raking sun exaggerates texture and flattens subtle color. This is precisely why the local memo-sample habit matters: an LA designer pins the cutting to the real wall and watches it across a full day before ordering, because the city's light is the most demanding reviewer in the room.",
"slug": "sun-washed-la-rooms-case-study-houses"
},
{
"title": "Set decoration and the LA wall: what production designers know about pattern on camera",
"dek": "Los Angeles is a studio town, and its film craft has its own rules for wallcovering. What reads on a Burbank soundstage is not always what reads in a living room.",
"body": "In most cities, interior design is a purely domestic trade. In Los Angeles it overlaps with an industrial one, because many of the same wallcovering lines that dress a Los Feliz dining room are also pulled for the soundstages at Warner Bros. in Burbank and the Sony lot in Culver City. The people who make those choices work under the Art Directors Guild (IATSE Local 800) and the Set Decorators Society of America, founded in 1993 and headquartered in Los Angeles, and their instincts have quietly shaped local taste.\n\nA production designer chooses for the camera and the story first. A pattern has to fix period and character in the second a viewer sees it, so scale gets pushed larger than a home would use and color gets picked for how it behaves under tungsten or LED film lighting rather than window light. Tight small-repeat patterns can moire on camera under some combinations of lens, distance, and sensor as the pattern beats against the pixel grid, so decorators often hedge toward larger, calmer motifs, or toward textured grounds that carry richness without inviting that effect.\n\nContinuity and turnaround drive the material logic. A set may be papered, shot, struck, and rebuilt for a reshoot, so decorators favor wallcoverings that install predictably and can be sourced again, and they keep exact records of what went where. That is the same discipline a well-run contract job uses, knowing the product, the run, and the placement well enough to reproduce it, only compressed onto a shooting schedule where a mistake is expensive by the hour.\n\nThis matters beyond the lot because set decorators do not stop being tastemakers when they go home. The oversized florals, saturated period papers, and dramatic entry walls that turn up in real Los Angeles houses often arrive through people trained to make a wall carry a scene. That lineage explains a durable trait of LA interiors: they are comfortable being theatrical in a way that more reticent American rooms are not.",
"slug": "set-decoration-la-wall-pattern-on-camera"
},
{
"title": "Grasscloth, plaster, and the California organic-modern wall",
"dek": "The textured, tonal, natural-material wall is the default in much of today's Los Angeles design. Here is what the two workhorse materials actually are and how they behave.",
"body": "If Hollywood Regency is LA at its most theatrical, organic modern is LA at its most current and most relaxed, the look that fills the shelter-magazine showhouses on the Westside and in the canyons: warm neutrals, natural fibers, hand-worked plaster, and a sense that the room grew rather than got decorated. Its roots run partly through the Belgian designer Axel Vervoordt and the wabi-inspired taste for weathered, natural surfaces that spread through American design in the 2010s. Two wall materials do most of the work, and both reward knowing what they really are.\n\nGrasscloth comes first. It is a broad family of woven natural-fiber wallcoverings, traditionally arrowroot, jute, sisal, or sea grass, laminated to a paper backing. Because the fibers are natural, no two panels match and color shifts subtly strip to strip, an effect the trade calls shading. In organic-modern rooms that variation is the appeal, but it is also why grasscloth is specified with eyes open: the shading that reads as depth on a feature wall can read as a defect to a client expecting a uniform ground, so a good designer sets that expectation before ordering and hangs strips in sequence to blend the shift.\n\nHand-troweled plaster is the second, usually lime-based Venetian plaster (Italian stucco veneziano) or a limewash finish. These are not roll goods, but they fill the same design slot, giving a wall soft tonal movement and a chalky, light-absorbing surface that pairs naturally with woven fibers. Their appeal in Los Angeles is partly practical: a matte mineral surface holds up under strong, even light and photographs as warmth rather than glare, which is why it recurs in the AD and Elle Decor showhouse circuit.\n\nThe organic-modern wall works on subtraction. The materials stay quiet, the palette holds inside a narrow band of oatmeal, greige, and sand, and the interest comes from texture caught in raking light rather than from pattern. Get the light and the texture right and the room feels calm and expensive; over-decorate around it and the effect collapses into beige. That editing instinct, more than any single fiber, is what makes a wall read as genuinely Californian rather than merely neutral.",
"slug": "grasscloth-plaster-california-organic-modern-wall"
},
{
"slug": "beyond-paint-defining-los-angeles-style-through-wallcovering-6",
"title": "Beyond Paint: Defining Los Angeles Style Through Wallcoverings",
"date": "2026-09-11",
"excerpt": "Los Angeles design often prioritizes light and space, but the subtle art of wallcovering selection plays a critical role in shaping the city's distinctive aesthetic.",
"body": "The prevailing image of Los Angeles – sun-drenched, casually luxurious, effortlessly modern – isn’t solely achieved through furniture or architecture. Walls contribute significantly to this visual language; they dictate atmosphere and nuance. While a fresh coat of paint remains popular, discerning designers are increasingly turning to wallcoverings to achieve depth, texture, and a unique sense of place that reflects the city's diverse influences.\n\nHistorically, Los Angeles design has embraced both grand gestures and understated elegance. Think of Hollywood Regency’s bold glamour or the Case Study Houses’ minimalist practicality. Wallcoverings offer a way to bridge these seemingly disparate styles. A subtle pattern can add visual interest without overwhelming a space, while richer textures contribute tactile warmth that counterbalances the prevalence of concrete and glass found in many LA homes.\n\nThe current landscape favors nuanced palettes – soft grays, warm whites, and muted earth tones are common—but the selection of material dictates how those colors appear. Consider the impact of texture: a subtly embossed paper can transform a neutral hue into something far more dynamic than flat paint ever could. This is where thoughtfully selected wallcoverings truly shine; they provide visual complexity without sacrificing the sense of openness that defines Los Angeles living.\n\nFor a client seeking understated sophistication, patterns like *Bromonte* offer a beautiful solution—the delicate texture adds depth while remaining unobtrusive. Those desiring a touch more personality might consider *New Blue on Tint Wallcoverings*, its soft color and subtle design lending itself to both contemporary and traditional spaces alike. The *Victoria* collection is particularly impactful in varied applications; *Grey on Tint Wallcoverings* provides a quietly elegant backdrop, while *Victoria, French Green on Tint Wallcoverings* introduces a touch of unexpected sophistication.\n\nThe key isn’t necessarily about bold statements, but rather layering subtle details that contribute to the overall feeling. Even within a minimalist setting, strategically placed wallcovering can define zones or highlight architectural features. *Victoria, Mocha on Tint Wallcoverings*, for example, brings warmth and richness – ideal for creating intimate spaces like libraries or dining rooms.\n\nThe best Los Angeles design isn’t just about what you see; it's about how a space feels. Carefully considered wallcoverings contribute to that feeling by adding dimension, texture, and personality—elements often overlooked in favor of more prominent décor choices but essential for achieving true California style. They offer an opportunity to subtly shape the narrative of a room.\n\nThese designs can be seen at Designer Wallcoverings (designerwallcoverings.com)."
}
],
"articlesLede": "In-depth guides and practical articles on designer wallcoverings."
},
"ga4": "G-JY2KYWF22J"
}