Inside Jesse Tyler Ferguson & Justin Mikita’s Delightful L.A. Home

Hi AD, welcome, oh sorry, sorry. [chuckles nervously]

Hi AD, I'm Jesse.

I'm Justin.

Welcome to our home in L.A.

Come on in.

[upbeat dance music]

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So this is our dining room.

It's one of the first spaces you see in the house.

[both laughing heartily]

[censor bleep]

So this is our dining room.

It's one of the first spaces you see in the house.

I see how I made it my own.

We worked with Mandy Chang as our designer.

I saw my friends, David and Emmy,

on the cover of Architectural Digest,

I was like, Oh, I love this designer.

We had just moved and so I thought we'd reach out to Mandy

and ask her to work on this space with us.

So this is a space that we have done a little bit

of customization, mostly with the lighting fixtures,

there was a different lighting fixture above the table.

I love these pieces because

they're also really great for selfies

when you're having a dinner party, 'cause it's like

[indistinct] this concave thing. for selfies.

So we have a lot of pictures

of dinner parties from a weird angle, we love 'em.

This art, talk about this Justin.

Aunty Callevy, he designed this for us, custom design.

Justin thinks it looks like a chicken,

which it kind of does.

It's sort of up for interpretation.

[upbeat dance music]

Welcome to the great room.

[laughs] Okay, I'm gonna do it then.

If that's how you're gonna do it, then I'm gonna do it.

I'm gonna have to do it all. Yeah, you do.

If that's how you're gonna do it,

I'm gonna have to do all of 'em.

I understand. I'll just be your...

Welcome to the great room. [laughs]

So this is our great room because it's great.

This is a room with a piano,

every great room has a piano, at least this one does.

There is a bar, so drinking sometimes happens.

It's interesting, when we bought this house,

the guy who built it, he's a wonderful architect, obviously,

but he's a straight guy [Justin laughs]

and he had two televisions above the bar,

and so we took those down and just put more booze up there.

We also added lighting fixtures.

This was designed by Lindsay Aleman.

It's custom and I think it looks like martini olives.

So that's why I like it by the bar.

We love to host, sit around.

Some of our friends have crashed on the sofa,

but mostly it's a good indoor-outdoor space

for hosting and hanging and drinking.

This is our cake topper from our wedding.

That's Leaf, our firstborn child.

We don't have a lot of stuff from our wedding

in the house, just 'cause that's not our vibe,

but this is actually our favorite picture from the wedding.

We got married in SoHo.

There's Justin and me, our friends,

Eric and Andrew, and then Padma Lakshmi,

because, you know, she was there!

[Justin chuckles]

[upbeat dance music]

We are in the family room.

This is definitely one of the main spaces for us.

Breakfast and dinner and stuff happens.

The kitchen is behind you, and so we really

spend a lot of our time hanging out in here.

In our home that we had before we had kids,

there was no space that was attached to the kitchen.

And as a family now of four,

it's really wonderful to be able to have space

that you could spill into,

if the kids wanna watch morning cartoons on Saturdays

and you can have breakfast here together,

it feels very communal

and it's something I really didn't know

I wanted until I had it.

So I really do love

that this is a shared living and dining space.

[Justin] It's really warm and cozy and- Yeah.

It's one of my favorite areas of the entire house.

This really interesting piece back here

was actually in the house when it was staged

and we looked at it initially

and it was one of the few pieces

that we really wanted to hold onto.

I just think it's so unique and interesting

and has so much texture.

I'm, like, waiting for the day, though,

that my children start to climb it.

Yeah. And you know,

that's gonna be a day that we have to rethink that piece.

[both chuckle]

Or trim it.

Or just trim it back.

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So this is obviously our bedroom.

Sorry. I'm so nervous.

Our kitchen.

Some things that we did to customize this space,

and one of the things I actually resisted,

was the Roman clay on the stove hood.

I just didn't think it needed it,

I was like, it was black, I thought it was fine,

it sort of matched the accents of the room

and Mandy was like,

I just think it would really add some movement

and some depth to the space.

And now I love it.

So that's why she's a designer and I am not.

I know that a lot of times

when you watch these Open Door tours,

there's a lot of staged food in the kitchen.

But these peppers actually all are from our garden.

This is actually ours, this is real.

[chuckles] Some of it.

The cakes are not real.

[Justin] Yeah. Well they're real,

but like, I did not do anything to make those.

But they are edible.

There's tons of traffic in here at all times.

Jesse's a great cook.

His cookbook is right over there on the ledge.

Oh, how did it end up, like, right there?

Hm, odd. Hm, that's interesting.

We also do a lot of family-style dinner parties in here.

In the morning it's a lot of school lunches

and making breakfast for the little ones.

It's definitely a space that gets a lot of wear and tear.

[upbeat dance music]

[Justin] We love small powder rooms with fun wallpaper.

It seems to be a trend in our life.

It's actually the first wallpaper

that went up in the house.

The first wallpaper that we told Mandy that we love.

I like a dark, sexy powder room.

I like a powder room that also has a place to play music.

So like, you know, we have a Sonos in here.

It's like, when there's music in the house you have,

and sometimes I also like to put on

different music in the powder room,

so when you shut the door it's like a different vibe,

like jungle sounds or something. [imitates jungle monkey]

That's always kind of fun.

[Justin] Mm hm.

So anyway, I will be right out.

Okay, come on upstairs.

This is where they make it all fast.

Where it speeds up and they go

[imitates fast forward sound effect]

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My eyes are up here.

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So this is what you call a landing, apparently.

This is another area where we have a TV,

Sunday morning cartoons.

This painting is by a queer artist named Marco Lorenzetto.

We have a couple of his pieces and we really love his work.

He made it for our last house in Los Feliz,

and we found a place for it.

So over here, this is our coffee station for the morning.

So here we have, this was a gift that I had made

for the cast of Modern Family for the final season.

I think Sophia thought they were cookies.

This is an art piece from the human rights campaign auction.

And it's the YMCA guy.

The Village People.

Oh, sorry. The YMCA guy.

This is where our age shows. [Justin laughs]

10 years, 10 years age difference, right there.

That's an example.

Okay.

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So this is technically a bedroom that we took over

to be our office space.

Justin has been producing a lot recently

and so we wanted a space where he could work on,

you know, taking phone calls.

We wanted a shared space as well.

I'm started doing a podcast,

so I sometimes record pickups from this room.

Mandy had this great idea to build a desk against the wall,

so we maximize the center of the room.

You know, Justin's looking at the Tony Awards,

so I think that's where he wants to go next, go ahead.

Sure.

These are the Tony's.

Two for me, one for Jesse. [chuckles]

It's always a competition.

I think when we were in New York doing the Open Door,

you had one Tony Award, That's right.

And I was saying I'd never even been nominated for one.

So now I have been nominated for one and I won it.

And so this is something that only, like,

five people watching will understand,

but we're halfway to an Audrey McDonald,

'cause she has six.

We have some other cool pieces that we've collected.

We like to collect art from travel.

Oh, this is, this is a [indistinct] present

from Eric Stone Street.

When you're on a TV show,

you have these little marks on the floor

to tell you where to stop.

And every character had their own color.

And so Eric had us sign this wood panel

and we didn't know what it was for.

And then at the end of it, he added the tape.

And so we've each basically signed

next to the color of our spike mark,

which I think is really sweet, very unique,

we all got very emotional when he gave that to us.

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Oh, it's weird that you're already in our bedroom.

Um, okay, hi.

What I love about this room is, I love sleeping.

I do, I love sleeping and this is a great room to sleep in.

It is a very large space.

And so Mandy said, you know, there's this company

that creates custom-sized beds

and you can get as large as a double king.

And I said, Well that sounds crazy

and sounds like something that,

I do like to know that he's in the room with me,

like, I don't need him that far away.

So we settled on a king and a half, which is great.

You know, you could put all the dogs in here, all the kids,

and everyone has their own space.

And Mandy created the headboard and the side tables.

And what I do love about the fabric

that we chose for the headboard

is that it sort of echoes the paneling

that was already here, the wood paneling in the room.

I love throw pillows, I love a lot of them.

The thing is, at the end of the night,

Justin really won't deal with them.

Mm mm.

So what he does-

I get in around them.

You get in around them, and it's like,

I come to bed and it's like the set of Les Miserables

is on the middle of the bed, like just a barricade.

This is for when you just want to take

the tiniest little nap.

Just like a three-minute nap.

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[Justin] This is our primary bath.

We painted the walls pink, it's clay.

This was a room that we had some challenges with

because we wanted to make it feel like

it was a space that we created.

And it's hard, I think, for the bathroom, to do that.

So, you know, we added these rugs,

we changed up the lighting fixture above the bathtub

to be this beautiful piece.

Added some plants.

[Justin] Cushion.

A cushion.

Mandy was like, Do you think you'll ever really sit here?

I was like, I don't know, maybe,

if there's a cushion I will.

And so I've actually lied down here

and then I just get that tiny little pillow

that I was talking about earlier

and I just put it right here

and I'll take a little 10-minute nap.

[Justin] Tiny nap.

[Jesse] Mm hm.

This patio is a Zen patio,

but also because it's right off of the primary bedroom

with a fire pit, and has space for about 30 people,

we lovingly call it the orgy deck.

[both laughing]

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So this is a bonus room that we call the game room

[Justin] Or pool house.

Or pool house.

I mean we didn't have a great inspiration for this,

because we just like kind of let Mandy go wild out here.

And she did suggest a big game of some sort down here.

I really advocated for the pinball machine,

which I really do love.

I think it'll be more of a game room

when the kids are a little older.

[Jesse] Mm hm. But for now

it is more of a pool house.

I don't love being in the sun.

Jesse shouldn't be in the sun.

So people like us come sit in the air conditioning

while others are swimming.

This.

First of all, if you're upstairs

and you hear someone playing this game, it sounds like,

My God, the house is falling down, because

[Connect Four disks dropping]

I mean that's a horrible sound.

And then you're like, Oh God, what's happened downstairs?

You're like, Oh someone's just playing Connect Four.

But I mean this is not something that's pleasant

to listen to upstairs, but it sure is fun down here.

I guess he's just playing on his own.

I guess that's not how you play Connect Four, is it?

No. [laughs]

But I'll just connect four.

Yeah, there you go.

[Connect Four disks dropping]

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You're in the backyard.

Do we call it the backyard?

I guess I would call this the garden

and this was just all grass.

And one thing that I knew I wanted was a garden.

So my friend Reed Newman came in

and put in these garden boxes

and he has this great passion fruit vine that he put in.

When we throw parties, we just open these doors,

people spill out into this area.

A lot of dinner parties have been had

at this big table here.

We have a couple of pieces out here that I've named.

I like to name a few statues.

This is Joe Jonas Mm hm.

And that's Peter.

Peter's from our last house.

He was the first thing that we bought

in our last house, in a big empty living room.

[Jesse] Yeah.

And now we've put him out to pasture.

Yeah, but we like that he's out here.

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So this is a piece that Mandy commissioned.

[both laughing]

And this is our pool.

We're hosting weekly toddler swim classes here right now.

So you're seeing a few remnants of pool toys.

And these umbrellas are beautiful.

They remind us of being at Lake Como

in Italy at the Papassalacqua Hotel.

Wow, wow.

That's right?

Like doesn't it feel like we're there?

Yeah, it feels like we're there.

Feels like you're there.

I love being in the pool,

Justin, not so much.

So he usually sits in the shade or purchase here

and has a drink and then I will be in the pool.

We have had a few pool parties-

[Jesse] A few.

and look forward to hosting kid pool parties-

Yeah, for sure. As they get older.

I've always wanted chickens.

So Justin got this chicken coop when we

first bought this house and we still don't have chickens.

That's what it's gonna look like

when we eventually get the chickens.

And the chicken's name is Victoria Beckham,

and we're gonna get four more,

and I am sure you can guess

what the other four names are gonna be.

Mm hm. It's the Spice Girls.

Okay, so anyway.

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This is the, what, what?

She's saying, No.

[producer laughing in background]

If you think that AD just shows up

and everything's ready-

It's not true.

It's a lie.

So this is the deck that's off of our ADU,

which I always called a guest house,

but now I guess people call it an ADU?

We added a fire pit over here.

We're not out in this area a lot,

so I wanted it to sort of feel like an upscale campground.

And I think once we kind of landed on that

as our theme, it made sense.

And this is perfect. I love it.

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This is the ADU.

We added a lot of wallpaper and color to the space.

This was an art piece that was in the main entry

of the home when we toured it.

And I loved it so much.

I thought it was really wild.

We have two small twin beds

and it's like a loft, which I imagine

will be really fun for the kids

when they're a little older and can climb the ladder.

And I think we've done a really great job

of making it really eclectic.

It's also one of the only spaces

that we could find to put all of our books.

And of course I color coordinated them 'cause I'm crazy.

[laughs] True.

[Jesse chuckles]

[upbeat dance music]

Bye AD, thanks so much for stopping by.

Yeah.

We gotta get going, right?

Yeah, we're going to Vegas to see Kylie.

Oh, okay, well there you go.

Okay, bye, see you later.

[door closes]

That went well.

[Justin] Who actually lives here though?