Step Inside Emmy Raver-Lampman and Daveed Diggs's Colorful Southern California Home

Step Inside Emmy Raver-Lampman and Daveed Diggs’s Colorful Southern California Home

Two years ago, long before the COVID pandemic sequestered the world at home, actor Daveed Diggs would return to Southern California every few weeks from filming the TNT series Snowpiercer in Vancouver to find that his house had been ever so slightly altered. One week he encountered a strip of photo-booth snapshots that had been lovingly framed and placed over the fireplace. Another week he discovered his treasured record collection tucked into a nook under the stairs in a room specially carved out for him. And yet another visit revealed a pair of prints of Barack and Michelle Obama from the comically ironic “Celebs on Sandwiches” series hanging above the primary bedroom’s nightstands. CovetED brings you all the details on the Emmy Raver-Lampman and Daveed Diggs’s Colorful Southern California Home. Get ready.

“Every time I showed up, there seemed to be some sort of surprise waiting for me,” says Diggs, who’s best known for his roles as the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the landmark Broadway musical Hamilton. “Whole sections of our home were being created without me—yet clearly with me in mind.”

That home is a 3,500-square-foot new-build property on a quiet Los Angeles street that Diggs and his partner—The Umbrella Academy star Emmy Raver-Lampman—bought following a weekend-long house-hunting blitz in 2018. At the time, the couple had been living in a West Hollywood rental and realized they were ready for a more grown-up family home.

“My dream was to live in a place with a swing chair hanging from the ceiling,” laughs Raver-Lampman, who oversaw her home’s transformation alongside interior designer Mandy Cheng of Mandy Cheng Design. “And that just wasn’t going to work in a Hollywood apartment.”

But fate intervened when Raver-Lampman encountered an image of a residence Cheng had designed, anchored by a whimsical swing chair. A bond was instantly cemented, and Raver-Lampman tasked Cheng—a former set designer who worked as a graphic designer on projects like the film Lady Bird and Beyoncé’s “Hold Up” music video—with bringing a similar level of levity to her own place.

The home itself required little in terms of architectural upgrades or structural interventions. With so few renovations to tackle, Cheng and Raver-Lampman could immediately focus on the interiors. But this also meant that the couple—along with a rotating cast of family and friends on visits to L.A.—were squarely in situ throughout the 18-month-long process, which began while the house was still in escrow.

“Because we were living there, every piece, every decision had such a deep sense of meaning,” explains Raver-Lampman, who first met Diggs when she joined Hamilton’s ensemble cast before going on to star in Netflix’s popular The Umbrella Academy. “I loved every moment of it—though I’m not sure Mandy always felt the same way.”

What Cheng did feel was a strong sense of what the couple truly wanted—and that was colour (though Diggs and Raver-Lampman weren’t entirely sure). “They were really just in denial,” Cheng chuckles. “And who can blame them? So many folks are influenced by the whole whitewashed California-modern look.”

But then a surreptitiously placed doormat proved to be a game-changer. Cheng picked up that mat—a handwoven vintage kilim with frayed edges—at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl Flea Market for barely $20. It was the first of many pieces Cheng would leave in the couple’s home when they were both travelling. Despite its modesty—and subtle grey-and-brown colour scheme—“the doormat made us realize we were going down a route of white palettes that simply didn’t represent who we are,” Raver-Lampman recalls.

Inspired by this awakening, the colour was quickly allowed to reign supreme. Take the so-called Monkey Room: Its once stark-white walls were given new life with the application of a strikingly bold Cole & Son wallpaper festooned with verdant forest scenes teeming with monkeys, birds, lizards, and assorted flora. Close by, a guest room is anchored by an abstract cerulean inkblot from feathr.com that dramatically salutes a similarly hued macramé wall hanging made by Raver-Lampman herself.

Similar colours appear in a powder room whose walls are swathed in Flavor Paper’s “Bay Area Toile” pattern, which features silhouettes of iconic Bay Area celebrities. It’s a nod to Diggs’s Northern California roots “and the only decision in the entire home I can truly take credit for,” he says.

Along with colour, craft forms the home’s other key touchpoint—much of it conceived or created by Raver-Lampman herself. Perhaps her most ingenious invention adorns the staircase wall. Faced with a seemingly monumental blank slate, Raver-Lampman covered the expanse with grandly sized burlap coffee bags stamped with their contents’ countries of origin, which she found at London’s Brick Lane market.

Three years after deciding they finally needed to upgrade their living situation, the actors not only have a home—they deeply feel at home. “This may be our first house together, but I already see us and our families and our community and our passions everywhere I look,” says Raver-Lampman. Adds Diggs, who still returns from sets to find subtle new design changes, “Having a home like this definitely makes it harder to be away. Now I really understand what it means to miss home; because there is really no other place I want to be.”