By Nancy Keates / Photography and Video by Michal Czerwonka for WSJ
Wicker monkeys dangle from the sconces in their Palm Springs, Calif., house. Their Hollywood Hills estate has bright green Gucci wallpaper with a flock of giant herons in the main bathroom. And red, yellow and teal vintage ceramic plates line the walls of their Malibu home.
"I've always had an appreciation for what's new and different," says 56-year-old Tom Ryan, a serial entrepreneur and founder of free streaming service Pluto TV, who is now president and CEO of streaming at Paramount Global.
He says his wife, Anjannette Padilla-Ryan, 50, a clinical psychologist, was also a catalyst for the eclecticism of their three California homes.
One look at Padilla-Ryan's large walk-in closet in the Hollywood Hills house is confirmation enough. Filled with dresses and shoes in bright colors and bold prints, there isn't a black boot or a gray item in sight. "My style is joyful, fun, interesting and lively," she says.
The couple chose a design company called Lala Reimagined to lead all three home renovations in the past six years. Based in L.A., founders Azar Fattahi and Lia McNairy state their mission as "pushing boundaries and defying norms." Fattahi says the couple were a perfect match for the firm because they were so open to adventurous ideas. "At one point they said 'more wallpaper, more wallpaper,'" Fattahi says. "It was a dream."
Hollywood Hills estate
The Los Angeles home was the first project the Ryans tackled. Called "La Granada," the 5,158-square-foot, five-bedroom estate sits on half an acre in the Hollywood Hills. Ryan and his wife bought it in 2019 for $4.187 million. After a two-year, $1.8 million renovation, they are constructing a guesthouse that doubles as a pool house and redoing the landscaping, something they estimate will cost around $1 million.
The renovation began with the kitchen, taking out dark wood beams, putting in two windows, adding custom cabinetry and replacing the terracotta floors with oak. What was a breakfast room became a family room with Hermès wallpaper depicting monkeys and tropical birds swaying on tree branches. A striped marble coffee table in the formal sitting room has greens, blues and browns that play off a green mohair Pierre Augustin Rose curved sofa and a fireplace of light blue quartzite with brown veins.
One large room is divided into living, dining and bar areas, with a built-in window seat and doors that open to the back patio. The ceiling over the egg-shaped marble dining table, surrounded by rust mohair curved chairs, is high, with white-painted beams; a chandelier with various shaped lights made from copper, brass and glass hangs from ropes. There's a pink onyx bar with scalloped edges that's lighted from underneath.
Upstairs there is an office painted all in teal (which makes for interesting comments during Zoom calls, says Ryan), the green Gucci heron-dominated wallpaper in the main bathroom and two large rust mohair chairs in the main bedroom.
Malibu retreat
In June of 2020, while the L.A. house was being renovated amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the couple bought a house in Malibu called "Rancho Pelicano" on 5 acres for $2.4 million, making it their full-time home with their three children for almost two years. They spent around $1 million redoing the interiors and plan to spend another $200,000 over the next year to renovate the pool, pool area and garage and change the landscaping.
Like the L.A. house, the Malibu home has a lot of curved furniture, jewel-toned mohair and colorful tiles. But it is more summerlike, with terracotta floors and lots of wicker furniture. Lala Reimagined's Fattahi and McNairy found the plates on the wall from flea markets and online sites like Etsy and eBay. A dining area with a circular ceiling has a chandelier made from rope-wrapped globes. In the main bedroom, a teal bed pops against an arched purple wall, and bright-colored terracotta tiles on the kitchen walls came from Italy.
Palm Springs hacienda
The couple already owned a house in Palm Springs that was being renovated after a flood, and they had an empty lot there they were thinking about building on. But in June 2021 their plans changed after they saw a compound in their neighborhood called the "Pond Estate" that was for sale.
Ryan says he was blown away by its beauty. "I was excited by the challenge of doing something creative here," he says. "I saw so much potential."
They bought the 12,700-square-foot, hacienda-style mansion with indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a pond and a tennis court for $8.38 million. Set on more than 12 acres, the property includes two guesthouses; one is 4,000 square feet and the other 2,000 square feet. Since they were planning on building a new home anyway, they decided to take on the renovation project instead. They are spending around $2 million for the building renovation and interior design, including creating a game room and entertaining spaces out of former garages. "Not everyone would see this property and think it was a good idea," says Padilla-Ryan.
The transformation so far has been mostly just interior decor, but the wallpaper, lighting, tiles and other changes are dramatic, creating a clean modern feel to spaces that were dated and uninspired. The living room has three seating areas, with pink and green curved sofas and arched openings. A stairway on one side looks grand, but actually is just decorative, leading nowhere. The main bedroom suite, nearly a house itself, has a floor of handmade pink and green Spanish tiles, and a bathroom with a pink marble tub that opens to an indoor swimming pool. A den has pink walls and a collection of dainty lights made from wicker and recycled plastic bottles hanging from the ceiling.
The Australian-made wallpaper in the dining room bursts with spiky flowers and gum leaves. The space above the table is filled with handmade, ball-like pendants that look like hot air balloons. The outdoor pool, with its pink pavilions and perfect mountain views, resembles a luxury hotel.
Entrepreneur at heart
After graduating from Dartmouth in 1991, he passed on an investment banking job in New York and went to live in Brussels, traveling the world drumming up business for a metals trading company. During graduate school at France's Insead, he and two classmates came up with an idea for selling music online. That turned into a digital music startup called Cductive that they sold in 1999 for $38 million.
In 2008, Ryan, who was by then married to Padilla-Ryan, moved to Chicago to become CEO of Threadless, a design and e-commerce company. In 2012, Padilla-Ryan convinced him to relocate to L.A., where her family lived.
He decided to take the entrepreneurial route again, launching Pluto TV in 2014 and selling it to Viacom five years later for $340 million. When Viacom and CBS combined and rebranded as Paramount, the company asked Ryan to create a streaming division and launch Paramount +.
Ryan views the Palm Springs estate as his latest entrepreneurial project. "We bought it in the heat of the moment. Then I thought 'Why the hell did I do this?'" he says. Though he can see retiring there one day, for now he's looking at it as a business: a large-scale rental, which has 11 bedrooms and goes for around $8,000 a night in the high season around March and April.
"Clearly it's not just a weekend getaway for our family," says Ryan. "That would be absurd."
Write to Nancy Keates at Nancy.Keates@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 02, 2025 09:00 ET (13:00 GMT)
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