December 4, 2023

Bridgid Coulter’s mindful, sustainable interior design

Jennifer E. Mabry Looking back over her life, it could be said that Bridgid Coulter…

Jennifer E. Mabry

Looking back over her life, it could be said that Bridgid Coulter was destined to design.

The artist, entrepreneur and principal of her eponymous residential and commercial boutique design firm in Los Angeles traces her interest in the field to Berkeley, Calif., where she was born and raised. Her parents purchased a home across the street from her maternal grandparents, who left Louisiana to escape the racial and socioeconomic segregation of the South during the Great Migration.

Creativity was abundant in the family. Coulter’s grandfather was a blues singer, her grandmother a quilter “who could have been a master chef,” she says, adding, “There would be a can of string beans and a lightbulb in the refrigerator, and we’d have a gourmet meal.”

The house was an exquisitely detailed 1908 mini-Craftsman that Coulter says was built “with dark mahogany walls, beautiful light fixtures and Batchelder tile around the fireplace.” She thought the aesthetically luxurious setting in a working-class neighborhood was a residential standard until she reached adulthood and discovered tract homes were more the rule of that era and her childhood home was exceptional.