In Los Angeles and New York, TV impresario Ryan Murphy creates two splendid homes for his growing family. At the age of eight, Ryan Murphy was allowed to decorate my own bedroom. His family’s tract home in Indianapolis backed up to a cornfield, and the overall color scheme leaned heavily on blah/beige. He decided to buck the bland and go bold: olive-green walls, chocolate-brown shag carpeting—and a gold disco ball.
In the years that followed, well into adulthood, that sensibility remained. Ryan Murphy preferred bold rooms, collections of items, color and more color. His first house in Los Angeles had a prized teal (!) love seat (it was the ’80s; cut me some slack). And my second home, which the lovely and talented Dakota Johnson now inhabits (AD, April 2020), was a midcentury masterpiece designed by Carl Maston that Ryan Murphy fixed up and filled with period-true swatches of saffron and marigold orange and Tynell chandeliers.
After that house came Diane Keaton’s Spanish Colonial Revival, with its colorful tilework that provided instant cheer. My husband, David Miller, and I moved into that house right before we got married, and we had our two boys, Logan and Ford (now seven and five respectively), there. And with family life came more color and more collections.
- Interiors: Stephen Shadley
- Photos: Stephen Kent Johnson David Miller
- Words: Ryan Murphy
