SCROLLING THROUGH LISTINGS online seems to be the first step these days. But when Joy Cho set out to find her family's dream home, she landed somewhere else: Google Earth. It was 2014, and Cho, the graphic designer behind blog-turned-lifestyle-brand Oh Joy!, was looking to trade the apartment she shared with her surgeon husband and young daughter for a full-fledged house in Los Angeles that checked all the boxes-good school district, outdoor space, reasonable price. It wasn't going well. "We were about to give up when a friend suggested that we basically look for patches of land from the sky," says Cho. They struck gold with an adjacent pair of hillside lots, and with the help of Project M Plus (aka husband-and-wife duo McShane and Cleo Murnane-he's an architect, she's a designer) began drawing up plans. Inspired by the neighborhood's architecture (it's dotted with homes by the likes of Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler) and constrained by the steep slope of the land, they designed a U-shaped house around a central outdoor courtyard. "We wanted a big, flat yard, which meant giving up some square footage," says Cho. For the interior, "modern but not cold" was the mandate, with Cho and Murnane using materials like brass and lush, colorful velvets to warm up the clean-lined, Scandinavian-tinged rooms.
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