“If someone goes, ‘What is that?’ I want to be able to say, ‘Oh, there’s a really cool story behind it,’” he explains. “In our home, we have everything from a dinosaur egg to a Wes Lang piece and a part of a sculpture that fell off a 700-year-old temple in Burma.” Additionally, the sweet nursery for their daughter, Aurora James, who was named after the aurora borealis under which DeLeon proposed marriage, incorporates plush Arctic animals and Sleeping Beauty references.
Pregnancies aside, the project was rife with happy surprises, such as when Baran Tréan sent a rendering of the dining room featuring a French flea market tapestry of the Garden of Eden in saturated greens, reds, and purples. “Absolutely not,” DeLeon recalls saying. “Our house is neutral, you can’t have this one piece that’s all color.” The designer sent it anyway, insisting they at least test it out. Admits the singer, “We fell in love [with it], and it was cool that Elisa pushed us. [We got] this unique, awesome house that feels artistic and creative but also architectural and structural—it’s so special.”
Even more than that, Baran Tréan artfully transposed the core Danish concept of hygge to Southern California, where Aurora was born three days after the installation. “I like that it’s not in your face,” says Skriver. “It being so hot and colorful and American outside, there’s a calmness and coolness to the house that makes me feel very at home.” Now, the model says, “when I open my [front] door, I feel like I step out of LA and into this sanctuary.”
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