Drop Out Boy’s Lead Guitarist: Step Within His Mild-Crammed Los Feliz House

A proem, the dictionary tells us, is an introduction, a preamble, a preface. When Marie Trohman (spouse of the lead guitarist for Drop Out Boy) and Ashley Drost started their Los Angeles–based design exercise in 2017, they named the company Proem Studio as a idea of the hat to new beginnings. “A large amount of shoppers come to us looking for a refreshing start just after some important alter in their lives. Proem felt like the right message—the commencing of a new chapter,” Drost points out.

As so it was for Trohman and her husband, Joe Trohman, when the pair relocated from New York to L.A. in 2013. The renovation of the Trohmans’ property in Los Feliz—a typical L.A. Spanish-type abode created in 1929—was a person of Proem’s initial major collaborations. “There have been specific items Joe and I needed, like a pool and a new music studio, but we also needed to hook up the house to the land in a much more significant way. In every thing we did, we experimented with to tie the DNA of the late-1920s and ’30s to much more modern touches,” Trohman suggests.

In the dwelling space, for illustration, Trohman and Drost replaced the overwrought fireplace surround and mantel with a far a lot more streamlined style executed in white plaster. “It experienced been touched too a lot of occasions more than the many years, so we desired to provide it back again to anything more sympathetic to the period of time architecture,” suggests Drost. As a counterpoint to the house’s historic bones, they outfitted the space with midcentury treasures by the likes of Marco Zanuso, Joe Colombo, Paavo Tynell, and Gunnar Nylund. A Louis Philippe mantel mirror exudes just the ideal perfume of antique loveliness, while present-day artworks by Urs Fischer and other individuals retain one particular foot firmly planted in the existing. A Lalanne-ian sheep—“It arrived from Ukraine,” Trohman says, laughing—caps off the centuries-spanning ensemble.

The same sensibility—juxtaposing distinctly vintage and modern day items against the placid backdrop of time period architecture limned in white plaster—extends all over the dwelling. In the entry, a warped mirror by experimental industrial designer Christopher Prinz and a curious 1960s Italian round-again chair carefully activate a traditional Spanish-fashion entry hall. In the dining space, an 18th-century French table is ringed by Nickey Kehoe chairs beneath Lindsey Adelman’s Terrarium lights, with artworks by Raymond Pettibon and Pieter Hugo to enliven the finely calibrated mix. The Kelly Wearstler Graffito wallpaper that addresses the entry powder area, as properly as the traditional Dieter Rams bookshelves that line the higher corridor, make particularly amiable companions to the architecture.

To make much better use of the tricky hillside website, Proem enlisted architects Peggy Hsu and Chris McCullough of the L.A. agency Hsu McCullough, whose scope of operate incorporated a new pool—a overwhelming endeavor that necessary caissons and piles between 80 and 100 feet long—a pool house, and a stairway-porch connector to ease the transition amongst the principal household and the freshly pioneered outside playland. “The kinds and elements of the new additions, the tile roof and arches of the pool home, the iron balustrade and harlequin tile of the stair, do the job in just the existing language of the house,” Hsu points out. Yet, the architects’ disciplined deployment of all those forms and elements keeps the job from getting a dry workout in historical verisimilitude or twee nostalgia. Almost everything feels attuned to the rituals and rhythms of a youthful innovative family.

“It feels very good to do this undertaking at this position in my daily life,” Trohman concludes. “I’m in my 30s, I have two young ones, fundamentally I have a greater experience for who I am and how I want to reside.”