Photography by Kim Leeson
Photography by Kim Leeson
Before Ryan and Sara Lumbley fell in love with their 1931 Hollywood Santa Monica home, they fell in love with the neighborhood. After living in Dallas for over 20 years, the couple never knew the neighborhood existed. They remember driving into Hollywood Santa Monica and immediately feeling a kinship to it.
“We were like, ‘This is adorable – idyllic even,’” Sara says. “Then, as soon as we walked into the house, we knew it was going to take some work to make it ours, but we loved the bones of the home, and it’s very warm. The house feels super bright, super light, super open.”
The work began with hiring specialists. Sara jokes that there wasn’t a straight line in the house. Everything was a “little quirky and wonky” and had been created for the previous set of owners, the Moomaws.
They had done a full remodel on the property about 30 years prior. The kitchen was yellow and green, the bathrooms had small hand-picked mosaic tiles everywhere and the bathtub was in the middle of the room. Throughout the entire house, there were signs of a different time.
“Just like we’ve taken and put our fingerprints on this home, they had put theirs on it,” Ryan says. “It was everything that they wanted, everything that they’d loved, and they were also extremely detail oriented.”
The Lumbleys were also detail-oriented in their approach. The backyard alone took eight of their family and friends three days to completely gut and start fresh.
“The interior of the home was in a much better position, but it was just not relative to today’s design aesthetics,” Ryan says.
In order to achieve a more up-to-date look, the Lumbleys took somewhere between six to eight months to transform the interior of the home. But even with all the work on the home’s structure, the modernization of the space was truly solidified in the pair’s interior design choices. As they started trying to formulate what they wanted for interior pieces, a few buzzwords kept coming up: “warm,” “cozy” and “unique.”
“We didn’t have an interior designer. We just kind of trusted what we liked,” Sara says. “It’s fair to say we like things that are big and bright and colorful. We like mixing textures, mixed metals, things like that.”
Between the couple’s ideas, an array of colors, like the deep plum purple of their backyard doors, and “wacky” fixtures, like the LED bars resting on a wall in their living room, started populating the space. In time, the home would become filled with different patterns, textures, shapes and art that made their initial dream for the home finally snap into place.
Photography by Kim Leeson
Photography by Kim Leeson
Photography by Kim Leeson
Photography by Kim Leeson
Photography by Kim Leeson
“We love art, and so when we walked into the house, there was so much space for us to kind of display the art that we’ve collected over the years,” Sara says. “We could kind of focus the aesthetic of the homes around the art we have.”
The pair’s art collection is filled with pieces they’ve collected on their international travels, like their hand-painted longhorn skull from Bali that rests above their fireplace, alongside a healthy dose of local East Dallas pieces to tie everything together.
“I feel like that’s a very East Dallas thing,” Sara says. “You want to support local people and local businesses.”
While the rich colors and modern decorations have certainly given the space a new feel, the couple made sure to keep a few things they felt would integrate into the new design well. One of which was the hardwood flooring in the front of the house. They kept the original 100-year-old, 1-inch White Oak boards and opted to sand and stain them rather than change them out. They also left one half bathroom completely untouched.
“That bathroom feels like a 1920s speakeasy,” Sara says. “Originally, the Moomaws had kind of a bar set up, and that half bath was kind of like the guest bath when they were having parties — they entertained quite frequently. And so when we moved in, it’s the one thing we never touched, because it was so insane.”
Despite feeling content with their home’s transformation, and finding ways to connect the old with the new, the work continues for the Lumbleys. A fix here, an addition there. The two feel that you’re never really done making a house a home.
“It’s a labor of love,” Ryan says.
