In the early months of 2020, before the majority of the world was familiar with the term coronavirus, interior designer and Netflix star Bobby Berk was taking a walk with his husband in downtown Austin, where they were filming the forthcoming season of Queer Eye. “All of a sudden, this handsome guy pulls up in a gorgeous classic pickup truck and he’s like, ‘Hey, Bobby!’,” Berk recalls. “Dewey and I thought it was a fan so we waved and kept on walking. But then he’s like, ‘No, it’s me, Cory! Sophia [Bush’s] friend!’”
Berk remembered meeting photographer Cory Tran some years ago, when he lived with Bush, his close friend and one of the stars of the hit 2000s teen drama One Tree Hill. But what he didn’t know was that Tran was newly engaged to actress Freida Pinto—who famously starred as Dev Patel’s love interest, Latika, in Danny Boyle’s eight-time Oscar winning drama, Slumdog Millionaire. Berk also didn’t know that they were neighbors in Los Angeles and Austin, where Tran and Pinto kept a house just one block away from Berk’s Airbnb.
“Fast forward a week later and. . . . Well, you know the rest,” Berk says. The world—and their filming schedules—hit pause, leaving both couples to quarantine in Austin. They began hanging out often and spent their days hiking and going on daily walks to the river, leaning on one another for support over the course of many months. “I think a lot of us during the pandemic got either really far away from people or got really close to people,” Berk says. “And Cory and Freida were two people I got really, really close to.”
It makes sense, then, that later that year when public life resumed, Freida and Cory came to Berk to let him know that they had just bought a new house in L.A.—a low slung, 1950s style California bungalow, replete with pink-tile bathroom floors, ample garden space, and airy, sun-blanched rooms. They said that they wanted him to renovate and design it. He told them what he usually tells all well-meaning close friends who come to him with similar requests: “Absolutely not.”
“He has this friend rule,” Pinto explains. “He never works with his good friends and said to us, ‘I love you too much to design your home.’ He didn’t want things to get messy. But we were so convinced that he had the right taste for everything we envisioned for this house, which we had been searching for so long—it has the best bones, the best energy, and belonged to the loveliest couple before us—that we decided we just had to convince him to make an exception and break his rule.”
Eventually, they wore him down after what Berk recalls was the fourth or fifth attempt. He accepted on the condition that he would spearhead the design concept and all the major planning, but leverage his team as a kind of buffer to deal with the minor day-to-day gripes and “little details.” Though Tran had renovated their two other homes—“beautifully,” Berk says—and knew a considerable amount about design, Berk kept his focus squarely on Pinto. “It was really about impressing Freida,” Berk admits. “And to do that, I had to get out of my normal comfort box because the fact is, she’s in love with color. Color is what makes her happy, and that’s not really what I’m known for. But she grew up in India in these more traditional, beautiful homes, and she wanted to bring in that element from her childhood, but sort of modernize it.”
Pinto, who later moved to London, struggled to clearly articulate her vision beyond a feeling and the general sense that she wanted to be surrounded by warmth, familiarity, and a kind of earthiness that provided a respite during breaks from filming. Berk took note of this and sought to recreate the old world charms of the homes she grew up in. He centered the three-bedroom property’s color palette on mossy shades of green that conjured the feeling of indoor-outdoor living, cornflower blues, and crisp, airy whites. He outfitted the sitting room with a large indigo flat-weave rug, soft-edged walnut-and-oak coffee and side tables, a teak chair with rush seating, a two-light, swing-arm wall sconce by Stilnovo in black (the sole modern accent in the space), and a potted fiddle-leaf fig tree. The exposed beams on the ceiling were kept true to the house’s original structure, and prominently featured, as one enters the room, are its two cane-woven chairs—design staples of any good Indian home, which transported Pinto to the houses of all her family in Bombay.
“I was speaking in broad strokes all the time, talking about Indian inspiration and then Bobby, I remember so clearly, just said one word: Rattan,” Pinto says. “And I looked at him and was like, ‘Oh yeah, the cane weaving.’ It’s so beautiful and so common in India. . . . Every house I went to as a girl had some sort of cane accent.” To heighten the feeling, Berk added touches of cane to virtually every room, from the four-poster bed in the primary suite bedroom to the chairs in the pattern-filled dining room whose walls feature a color-blocked blue-and-gold floral wallpaper by Kravet and loose, cream-colored drapes.
Of course, Berk oversaw more extensive changes to the property as well—including a full renovation of the guest bathroom, which previously featured, in Pinto’s words “a pink-tile, retro vibe.” In the original flooring’s place, Berk installed mosaic-style white-and-blue tiling throughout, a generous tub, and a glass curio. The room is one of Berk and Pinto’s favorite spaces—as is the nearby powder room, a little jewel box that showcases Schumacher’s sublime Birds & Butterflies wallpaper.
The media room features walls painted in azure blue, sumptuous seating, and shelving filled with books and objets d’art to achieve an intimate, library-room aesthetic. “I love doing dark walls to help control the light,” Berk says. “It makes for a much more cozy environment.” And in addition to knocking out the wall of the breakfast nook in order to make the kitchen area a roomier, more open space, the cabinets were painted a calming sage green. Berk notes that they chose to paint instead of replace the cabinetry, since labor costs had skyrocketed during the pandemic. Berk installed a small bar for at-home entertaining, featuring a vintage bar top and a small chandelier with faceted, old glass pendalogues.
Though the project took three times longer than Berk predicted because of the pandemic, Pinto is over the moon with how it all turned out. Over the phone, she excitedly describes her new home as a kind of “mini spa,” a place full of carefully curated little nooks and crannies where she feels she is able to unwind and be herself. “I’m not even just saying this to you because there’s an article you have to write,” she says. “But I’ve literally texted Cory almost every day to say we couldn’t have done better with buying this house, and with the way it was designed, because I truly feel at home.”
“And that word, home, is such a weighty thing,” she continues, “If you have a house and you don’t feel like you belong, or that it belongs to you, it’s really very uncomfortable. And I don’t have that feeling at all.”
For the living room, designer Bobby Berk prioritized shades of green, blue, and white to bring to mind the color palettes Pinto grew up with in her homes in England and India. He layered patterned pillows from Surya and Coterie on the living room sofas, sourced reclaimed wood sculptures from Four Hands, and hung a chandelier made from hand-cut wood beads from the ceiling.
A rattan bar cart from Universal Furniture and a teak-and-rush chair from Lulu & Georgia make up a far corner of the living room, with walls flanked by framed artwork from Leftbank Art.
“I knew Bobby through Cory, but I also loved him on Queer Eye,” Pinto says of the designer, pictured far left. “During quarantine, I got to know Bobby as a person as well, not just a guy over whom I was fangirling while watching the show. That’s when I realized that his general taste is something I really love, and [that] it translates beyond just his work aesthetic and what’s shown on the show. So when it came to figuring out who we were going to ask to help design this house and upgrade it in certain areas, I asked Cory, ‘Do you think Bobby would do it?’”
Upon Tran’s suggestion, Berk knocked out the wall between the breakfast nook at the kitchen to create more flow. Now, it’s one of Pinto’s favorite spaces. “The breakfast nook is the best place to sit in the mornings,” Pinto says. “There’s a lot of breathing space. And it’s so cozy with the table, the seating, and the foot rail. It’s a good place for coffee, for mornings.”
Pinto in the other half of the kitchen, which includes Berk’s sage green cabinetry and a fridge by GE Café Appliances. The renovated kitchen also features finishings by Brizo and leather tiling by Walker Zanger.
The kitchen includes modern appliances and fixtures.
Cane dining chairs from Noir, fabric-covered chairs from Universal Furniture, a dining table from Four Hands, sculptures from Soicher Marin. and Kravet wallpaper fill the dining room.
The media room, configured to emphasize intimacy and coziness, features a cane accent chair, console, and cocktail ottoman from Universal Furniture, and a desk from RH.
The “mini bar” includes a vintage bar top, glassware, and a frame from Framebridge.
“It does feel like a dream home,” says Pinto, who at the time of our conversation is 29 weeks pregnant. “When I walked in the first time, I immediately felt this house was mine even though it obviously wasn’t at the time. It just kind of felt like the place where we would write our next chapter. I was halfway through the viewing when I began to see my future here. . . . Family, kids, all of that stuff.” Pinto’s primary suite features a vibrant, garden-set wallpaper print from Astek, table lamps from Circa Lighting, and a four-poster bed from Lulu & Georgia.
Pinto’s dressing room includes closets by California Closets, installed to maximize space.
This bathroom features an original work of art by Cory Tran, navy fabric wallpaper by US Wall Decor, a curio from Anthropologie, and a glorious tub. “I love baths,” Pinto says. The floor tiles are from Walker Zanger.
Berk planned this garden-adjacent bedroom around a colorful anemone-motif wallpaper by Astek. “It’s one of my favorite spaces because of the garden,” Pinto says. “I use that mainly for my yoga practice. I love the way the doors open right into the green.”
The guest room includes a woven headboard, bed, and side table from Universal Furniture and an artwork from Juniper Print Shop.
Another bathroom features lighting from Circa Lighting.
Berk covered the little powder room with wallpaper from Schumacher, and hung an LED light mirror from CB2.
This article was first published in AD US
