Designer embraces the bright, bold

“I like meaning,” Karen Frid-Madden declared as she walked through the downstairs of her one-of-a-kind Santa Monica home, which she designed in collaboration with family members. It’s a space that reflects lives deeply and thoughtfully experienced, and it’s a far cry from the detached minimalism that’s often splashed across the glossy pages of contemporary design magazines. 

It’s also a space that perfectly represents this designer, who has come to include so many different cultures in her work through Bikasa Designs — a business she created after starting her own line of shirts featuring pre-Columbian symbols. 

A collection of hamsas are mixed in with select items of children’s art inside a pale aqua niche by the front door. Opposite the home’s main entrance, a bronze-painted, Moorish-inspired pointed arch frames the de facto living room, which Frid-Madden, 46, more specifically calls “the music room,” in reference to an upright piano and jumble of instruments gathered on the floor atop assorted vintage kilim rugs. Ornately carved, stark-white wooden dining chairs upholstered in hot pink and turquoise fabrics surround a long dining table that’s ideal for large, festive gatherings.

Art on the multicolored and wallpapered walls includes pieces by her friends, such as renowned artist Patssi Valdez, who was a founding member of the groundbreaking Asco Chicano collective from East L.A. that made waves in the 1970s art world; and Larry Hirshowitz, whose black-and-white photographs of brooding Australian rock icon Nick Cave and Buena Vista Social Club singer Omara Portuondo are on display. The home’s open plan highlights the show-stopping kitchen in which Frid-Madden chose magenta countertops, lime green cabinets and tangerine-colored accent walls. 

“Architecture reflects who we are as a people and as a society,” said Frid-Madden, a native of Mexico City with a cascading thicket of long, curly, sandy-blond hair and hazel-green eyes. It’s a philosophy she’s learned through many channels during her eclectic career and rich family history. 

Frid-Madden is the daughter of Israel Frid, an architect in Mexico City; her brother, Alejandro Frid, is an architect in Tel Aviv. (The name “Frid” is the Spanish spelling of the surname more commonly known to Americans and Europeans as “Fried” or “Freed.”) Her grandparents were young children when they emigrated from Eastern Europe between the two world wars, during a period of what turned out to be major economic expansion in Mexico.

She grew up in a Spanish-Yiddish multilingual environment, with enough Hebrew to be admitted to Hebrew University. But her linguistic learning curve was steep when she arrived in Jerusalem as a college student. That said, she thrived learning Hebrew, as well as English and other languages. 

Living in Israel “was my experience translated to all these different cultures. What it is like to be an Italian Jew? To be a Honduran Jew?” She completed a degree in history and philosophy while traveling extensively, including spending time with Bedouin communities. This was essentially a continuation of her family life in Mexico, because her father, she said, “gave us the love of other cultures, and we traveled a lot.”

She returned to Mexico in 1994 to work with a government agency that protected indigenous people’s sacred sites. Encouraged by UCLA professor James W. Wilkie, whom she met in Mexico, she relocated to Los Angeles to pursue a doctorate in Latin American studies. She didn’t plan to stay in Los Angeles, but changed her mind when she met the man who would become her husband.

Frid-Madden didn’t complete the doctorate, but instead explored other avenues, such as joining the cultural affairs staff of the Consul General of Israel in L.A. and working at the Iturralde Gallery, which was an important dealer of Latin American art. She even dipped her toe into the fashion world, starting a line of shirts with bold color motifs and pre-Columbian symbols to tie into her ongoing cultural research into Latin American cultures. 

Broadly speaking, however, these professional experiences were all part of a wider search to “blend my artistic side with my academic side,”  she said. 

When her father encouraged his daughter and son-in-law in 2010 to replace their compact one-story Sunset Park-area bungalow with a larger home to better accommodate the couple and their two daughters, now 9 and 10 years old, and have room for guests, she agreed. It helped to have architects in the family; over the course of one weekend in Tel Aviv, Frid-Madden’s father and brother together designed what would become the framework of the new Santa Monica residence. 

Envisioning and logistically orchestrating the home’s interior design and exterior color scheme brought Frid-Madden to what felt like her calling. She thought about light and color, and, wanting to reflect her family’s heritages, shaped a home that recalls the brightly hued modernism of famed Mexican architects
Ricardo Legorreta and Luis Barragán, along with nuances of Jewish Diaspora and Israeli life.

Disappointed with the color choices in the U.S., Frid-Madden traveled to Tijuana to buy exterior paints that best matched the chromatic splash of Frida Kahlo’s famed La Casa Azul in Mexico City. After she finally found the traditional “Colonial blue” she was looking for, Frid-Madden then spent hours at the
Tijuana paint shop blending the right pink and marigold shades to bring back to California. 

Frid-Madden takes in the view from her Santa Monica home. 

Family members agree that Frid-Madden’s career path makes perfect sense for her: a woman who intensely engages with other cultures and individuals, whose skill set, sensibilities and curious eye dovetail perfectly in the field of interior design. “It’s a little bit of everything,” she observed. “You get to know people. You have to build for the client, because they’re going to live there. It’s a long process.”

Under the firm name Bikasa Designs (bikasadesigns.com), which she formed the same year she began planning the new house, Frid-Madden has created interiors for clients mostly on the Westside, as well as at properties in Echo Park and Highland Park. She also transformed her family’s weekend home in Pioneertown, an artistic desert enclave located near Joshua Tree. She makes a line of pillows and cushions using textiles from indigenous makers around the world, too. 

“You should live your life with integrity,” Frid-Madden said. From her standpoint, this means taking risks rather than prioritizing what someone else might like down the road to optimize resale value. 

“Be brave, and go for it. It’s scary.” She paused for a beat. “Well, for other people,” the designer said, as she stepped out onto her dazzlingly blue roof deck.