While Joey and Barrett McIntyre were eager to embrace the opportunity to create a new family home in Los Angeles, they always planned to incorporate certain treasured pieces rather than take a tabula rasa approach. And in particular, they were keen to integrate a certain artwork depicting the word happy, intertwined within a network of utility wires by LA photographer Alex Hoerner.
“It embodies the spirit of what it’s like to be around them,” designer Staver Gray says about the work, which she and Christie Ward, founders of the NYC-based firm Ward + Gray, ensured was safely transported from Manhattan to LA. The photograph now presides over the kitchen dining nook like an organic, unforced motto when they cook, eat together, and entertain. “They’re a very joyful family,” she adds.
Gray and Ward’s insights into their clients’ disposition are well founded, given that the duo had worked with the McIntyres on their previous New York apartment. This time, the brief was to sensitively update a glamorous 1939 French Normandy Revival house in LA’s storied Hancock Park neighborhood designed by Arthur Rolland Kelly, the prolific architect responsible for notable commissions such as the Wilshire Country Club and a Bel Air estate that became the Playboy Mansion. The couple was already familiar with architecturally distinguished LA homes, having previously lived nearby with their three children, ages 12 to 15.
“We’re East Coast people. We love older houses and we love this neighborhood,” Barrett McIntyre, a Manhattan native, says. Joey McIntyre is a musician and actor from Boston whose long performing career began with the band New Kids on the Block. This particular property happened to have caught his eye during routine walks years ago. When it became available and the McIntyres made the leap in 2020, the designers were immediately inspired by “its beautiful bones. It was just so different from their place in New York,” Ward notes. “We were excited to go on this new journey with them.”
The aforementioned photograph wasn’t the only souvenir from their New York residence to accompany the McIntyres on their move. Despite the stylistic differences between an Art Deco–inflected Manhattan apartment building and an eclectic period revival house with whimsical storybook vibes outside, more key items bridged the two places. “They have a very timeless sense of style, so there was a lot of overlap,” Gray observes.