Meaningful Mementos & Luxury Interior Design: The Objects That Tell Your Story
- May 18
- 6 min read
Updated: May 18
A Los Angeles interior designer on how meaningful mementos become the foundation of great design
I touched on this briefly in my recent travel-inspired interior design post featuring the new Anantara Kafue River Tented Camp, and realized there’s another side to this conversation that feels worth exploring.
Travel absolutely influences my work as a Los Angeles interior designer, but probably not in the way people imagine. It’s rarely about recreating a place literally. I’m not coming home from Morocco trying to make a house in Los Angeles feel Moroccan. Usually what stays with me is something subtler than that. A certain quality of light. Materials aging naturally over time. The way a building sits against a landscape instead of competing with it.
Long before I think about furniture placement, fixtures, color, and texture, I focus on three things: the architecture of the home, the geography it sits in, and the life of the people living there.
Each one offers its own set of answers.
A Spanish Revival in La Cañada asks different questions than a modern Colonial in Newport Beach. The bones of a building, the quality of its light, the way it meets the landscape. I don’t see those things as constraints. They’re the beginning of a point of view.
And the most personal, complete homes I’ve worked on — across Los Angeles, Pasadena, and the Southern California coast — are the ones where all three of those threads, architecture, place, and personal story, are working together.
That philosophy shapes nearly everything I do, and honestly, it’s probably why my projects vary so much stylistically. I’m far more interested in telling my client’s story than imposing a signature look onto every home. That’s the heart of luxury interior design, at least the way I practice it.
The best way I can explain what that looks like in practice is through the objects and artwork that have quietly shaped many of my projects over the years. The moments where a client’s life and my design eye intersect, and a house starts becoming unmistakably theirs.
Here are a few of those stories
(Past) Midnight in Paris
Several years back I was in Paris for Maison & Objet, making my way back to the hotel with a group of friends after a very late night in Le Marais. It was our last night in the city. Freezing cold, and we were walking far longer than we probably needed to trying to find our way back across Paris.
At some point along the walk, we came across some old photo slides scattered across the street.
Not one or two but dozens of them.
It was such a strange thing to come across at that hour that I stopped almost instinctively. Honestly, in that particular moment, it also felt weirdly exciting. Like we had stumbled into the middle of a story without any context for it. I still have no idea why I picked one up. I could barely even see the image in the dark. But I slipped a couple into my pocket and forgot about them completely.
Days later, back home in Los Angeles and unpacking, I rediscovered them.
I held one up to the light and was taken aback.
The image was striking. Cool, confrontational, a little mysterious. It felt unmistakably like another time. After a bit of searching, I tracked down the photographer: Gilbert Rosati, who had some success in the Paris art scene in the late seventies and early eighties.
There was even a phone number for him printed on the slide mount itself. I tried calling it out of pure curiosity, half wondering if somehow this man would answer and explain how his work ended up abandoned on a street in the Marais at two o’clock in the morning.
Unfortunately, the number was disconnected. Probably for years.
That slide, discovered completely by accident on a freezing Paris street in the middle of the night, is now one of my favorite pieces of art hanging in my home. I’ve dubbed it Jumpsuit Activist. And every single time someone asks about it, the story becomes part of the piece itself.
That’s exactly the point of thoughtfully curating art for a home.
Designing a Home That Tells Your Story: A Single Object Informs an Entire Beach House Design
There are times when a single object carries so much personal and spiritual weight that the only honest response is to let it lead. This ceremonial carving is exactly that kind of piece. It isn’t decorating this Playa del Rey beach house. It’s anchoring it.
The colors, textures, and quietude of everything around it exist in direct conversation with what this carving represents to its owner. That’s not something you can manufacture or approximate with a well-chosen accessory.
Geography does the rest. The bleached pine beams, the pale painted walls, the coastal California light flooding in from every angle. This is Southern California interior design at its most elemental, and the best homes here don’t fight that light, they’re built to harmonize with it.
When the architecture, the setting, and a client's own story are all pointing in the same direction, the design finds its clarity quickly and completely. That's what's happening here. The spiritual gravity of that carving and the need for effortless livability in a beach house shouldn't work together — and yet they do, because both are completely authentic to the person living in this space.
I think this is the part people often miss: Authenticity in a home has less to do with committing to a specific style and more to do with emotional coherence. When the architecture, the geography, and the client’s own story are all pulling in the same direction, the house settles into itself naturally. You feel it even if you can't name it.
Destination Nostalgia: Travel-Inspired Details That Transport You Home
I spend real time with my clients, learning not just their aesthetic preferences, but what drives them, where they’ve been, and where they’re headed. Because a home should tell both stories simultaneously: where you’ve come from and who you’re becoming.
On one project, while putting the finishing touches on a room, I came across a collection of lapis lazuli stones. Their color stopped me immediately. Deep, saturated blue. The exact shade of Chefchaouen in Morocco, which I knew was one of my client’s favorite places in the world.
It was a tiny detail. By no means the anchor point of the space, and something many people probably would have overlooked entirely. But it was one of the very first things my client noticed when they walked into the room.
No explanation needed.
They were instantly transported.
That’s the power of meaningful objects in home design.
They don't just add visual interest to a room. They reconnect people to a memory, a place, or a part of themselves they don’t want to lose. It's why I weave my client's art, heirlooms, and custom details into their space.
Sometimes the Smallest Details Carry the Biggest Stories in Interior Design
Decorative pieces do more than add visual interest. They extend an invitation. They tell people something about who you are, what you value, where you’ve been, and the moments that have stayed with you over time.
But those details only really land when the foundation underneath them is right.
When the architecture has been listened to. When the geography has been honored. When the home has a clear point of view and every decision, even the smallest ones, feels connected to it.
Personal storytelling through interior design.
That’s always what I’m working toward as an interior designer in Southern California. Not just a beautiful home in the conventional sense, but one that feels deeply personal to the people living there. A home shaped not only by aesthetics, but by memory, experience, history, and the objects that carry those stories forward.
Because in the end, those are often the details people remember most.
XO
PE
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