As a girl in Melbourne, Australia, fittingly, Zoë tended a kitchen garden. It was attached to a larger plot filled with snapdragons, granny’s bonnet, love-in-a-mist, pansies, hydrangeas, and peonies grown by her mother, an academic and a talented hostess who also took care with the home’s interiors. “We’d tease her that the minute she finished decorating one end of the house, she’d go back to the other end and start again,” says Zoë, who credits her mother with instilling a respect for nature, music, ballet, literature, and French in her from a young age. “All of these things gave my childhood a sort of romance, and I’m eternally grateful,” says the designer.

Starting at eleven, Zoë attended an all-girls’ boarding school in Hobart, Tasmania, but she made regular sojourns to Europe, as her parents were Francophiles and her grandmothers were British. After university, she moved to London, where she founded her own public relations firm and met her husband, thanks to him boldly cutting in on the dance floor of a wedding at the Carlton Club. (“I thought, ‘Who is this handsome devil?’” she says.) When the couple decided to move to Los Angeles — Olivier, who works in banking, had received a job offer — they assumed “it would be this fun little chapter, that we wouldn’t be there beyond a couple of years,” Zoë says. But they fell for the place, “this pulsing, vibrant metropolis on the edge of the ocean.” A decade later, they’re still there.

Of course, the style in California is rather different than in London. “That’s the story of my life. Yin and yang, you know, complementary opposites,” says Zoë, though she thinks strict stylistic lines are blurring as more people mix the classical with the modern. This is something Hubert did well. Think “an early 18th-century commode beneath a contemporary picture and George III silver candlesticks,” she says. Perhaps even more crucially, in Zoë’s eyes, he appreciated the humble along with the grand: Take the pebble wrapped, per the Japanese craft tradition, with twine that used to sit on a stack of books in Hubert’s French country house and now sits on a stack of hers in California. “It almost couldn’t be simpler, and yet it totally sums up beauty to me,” she says.