More Than a Home: Inside the World of GRANADA with Sydney Wayser

What happens when a home becomes more than a place to live? For Los Angeles native Sydney Wayser, husband Isaac Watters and their daughter, the answer is GRANADA. Part family home, part creative studio and part neighborhood café, their one-of-a-kind space in the city’s Echo Park neighborhood is a living expression of their shared love for art, design and community.

For LA Design Week, Coyuchi joined forces with GRANADA to explore a softer side of the space, bringing natural comfort into the home's most private corners and transforming its exterior through a playful installation of color and movement. We caught up with Sydney to talk about the inspiration behind GRANADA, the balance between public and private life and what it means to create a home that makes room for it all.

Pictured above: Designer Sydney Wayser hosted Coyuchi tastemakers and influencers for a day of living deeply at their beautiful Echo Park home café, complete with a one-of-a-kind art installation and beautiful outdoor brunch.

Thank you for welcoming Coyuchi into your home for LA Design Week! For those who are unfamiliar with GRANADA, please tell us a bit about yourself and how you spend your time.

We’re so glad you could join us! I'm Sydney, a musician, designer and mom. My husband, Isaac, and I are both artists at heart, and we've always loved exploring different creative outlets. My background is in music, while Isaac comes from architecture and design. Together, we've found a way to combine all of those worlds through GRANADA. 

GRANADA started as our home and creative playground, a place where we could make things, host friends and raise our daughter. Earlier this year, we opened our doors to the neighborhood as a café, and it's taken on a whole new life. Now our days are filled with everything from designing furniture, commercial spaces and homes to working on creative direction projects to making coffee and welcoming people into our space. It's a constantly evolving experiment in what a home can be, and we're having so much fun with it!

Left: Sydney takes coffee orders at the GRANADA coffee bar. Right: Sydney relaxes in her artfully decorated living room featuring the Marshall Organic Pillow Cover in Tidal and Organic Relaxed Linen Decorative Pillow Cover in Pacific Blue Chambray.

LA Design Week just wrapped up. Could you tell us about your event and the art installation? 

We never let people upstairs into our bedrooms so it was fun to share our most private corners of our home for LADW. A way for people to see our softer side. Coyuchi brought bedding, blankets, towels and robes to outfit upstairs with extra comfort. We also premiered our lighting collaboration with Ceramicah, The Cast Collection. Where we sand cast their ceramic shapes into aluminum forms. Each one handmade and unique from the form itself to the patina and finish. These will be available online soon so stay tuned. 

We’re always excited to use our house as a canvas so when Coyuchi approached us about the event we thought it would be beautiful to see their gorgeous fabric swaying in the wind as an art installation. We wrapped our home with colorful tablecloths that we sewed together to make one continuous piece. The wind and plants did the rest and gave us a show of shadows, movement, texture and color. 

Pictured above: GRANADA's living room features the Organic Relaxed Linen Decorative Pillow Cover in Pacific Blue Chambray, Marshall Organic Pillow Cover in Tidal and the Toro Canyon Decorative Pillow Cover in Undyed/Pine.

How do you balance living in a space with opening it to the public? 

Balance is a forever work in progress for me but our daughter helps guide and teach me to be better at it. We have limited public hours to help with the delineation of private and public space. We eat breakfast as a family in the morning, drop off our daughter to school and when we return we open our home to the public. After the shop closes, we clean and reset the downstairs, pick up our daughter and transition back into family life. There is a cadence to each day. An inward and outward tide between public and private, introversion and extroversion. 

Pictured above: Los Angeles design tastemakers gather at GRANADA to celebrate LA Design Week and explore Coyuchi's newest home collection.

What does "functional architecture" mean to you in a home?

When we designed our home, we wanted to create subtle delineation between public and private space. We had no dream of the coffee shop yet as that law hadn’t even changed to make it possible. As artists we wanted an “indestructible” space where we could paint, throw pottery and have band practice. A place where we could make elaborate meals. A place to turn the music up loud and dance “our grumpies” out as our daughter calls it. A flexible mixed use space. 

The function informed the materiality choices. Open floor plan downstairs for reorganizing the furniture depending on the need. Cement floor for easy cleanability. The stairway acts as the transition space between work and rest. Downstairs is for action and upstairs is for inaction. It is warmed up by softer material choices. Natural clay tiles cover the floor and walls of the bathrooms. While our oak flooring is softened by antique rugs passed through generations of our families. 

Which corner of the house is the most personal to you?

Designing a house from the foundation up feels a bit like solving an intricate puzzle. We had all of our “musts” on a page and found a way to have each piece of the puzzle work to support them. My must was a large soaking tub. It is my happy place. I don’t know if it is my French heritage but I’ve been a bath person since I was a kid. A weekend afternoon with dappled light coming through our westward window. The orange glow from the sunset casting on our walls. A candle burning as I wind down with a book and a soak in the tub. That is my happy place. And now, thanks to Coyuchi, I get to enjoy a beautiful new robe to continue my relaxation and coziness after the tub.

Pictured above: Cloud Loom Organic Robes in Pacific Blue, Cloud Loom Organic Towel in Pacific Blue

Where does rest fit into a home that is so social? What does the quieter side look like?

Upstairs is our place of rest. Soft pillows, comfortable beds, cozy comforters. Giggles over bedtime books. The soothing weight of a heavy comforter that helps lull us to sleep. It is the place that (besides special events like the one we had with Coyuchi) no one goes to. It is our secret garden of sorts. A place where our introversion can live. 

Pictured above: Sydney invites us into the more intimate corners of GRANADA, showcasing the Organic Relaxed Linen Sheet Set in Doe, Organic Relaxed Linen Shams in Doe, Mirada Organic Matelasse Coverlet in Fawn Chrysanthemum

What's next for Granada? 

We feel a bit like we’re on the most fun fast speeding train every day. We wake up and ask ourselves “Who are we going to meet today”? We’re having a blast and enjoying the ride! We have many fun ideas in the works! Mostly I’d say we’re hoping to make smaller pieces of GRANADA that you can take home with you. We released a line of California’s Sensory Seasonal soap with botanicals from our garden. A way for people to connect with our native CA landscape from the comfort of their own home. Transport yourself to the Los Angeles wild with WIND FALL, CLOUD COVER, SUPER BLOOM and WILD GREEN. 

Shop Sydney’s curated collection of Coyuchi favorites here.