Freida Pinto had her dream home designed by "Queer Eye" star Bobby Berk

This is how actress Freida Pinto and photographer Cory Tran live in Los Angeles. AD took a peek inside their midcentury abode.

Actress Freida Pinto and photographer Cory Tran live in a house that Netflix star Bobby Berk furnished.

In early 2020, still beyond the pandemic, interior designer and Netflix star Bobby Berk went for a walk with his husband in downtown Austin. Here, they were filming the new season of "Queer Eye." "All of a sudden, a good-looking man in a pickup truck pulled up and called over to us: 'Hey, Bobby!" recalls Berk, "Dewey and I thought it was a fan, so we just waved back and kept walking. But then he said: 'No, it's me, Cory!"

Berk recalled meeting photographer Cory Tran several years ago when he was still involved with his good friend and "One Tree Hill" star Sophia Bush. However, the interior designer did not know that Tran had recently become engaged to actress Freida Pinto. It later turned out that both couples lived just a stone's throw away from each other.

This is how Bobby Berk came to design Freida Pinto's house.

With the onset of the Corona pandemic, the world took a break, as did the film, and both couples spent that time in Austin. They began meeting more often, taking daily walks along the river and supporting each other. "I think a lot of us either got very far apart or got very close during the pandemic," the Netflix star tells us, "and Cory and Freida were just among the latter."

That same year, as public life resumed its course, Pinto and her fiancé shared that they had just bought a midcentury home in Los Angeles. A flat roof with a large garden and light-filled rooms. The couple asked Bobby Berk to design their new home, "Normally, I wouldn't have even considered it. You see, I have a rule that I don't work for friends, but these two were able to convince me to make an exception. On the condition that I would develop the design concept and do all the important planning, my team would act as a kind of buffer in this," the designer tells us.

Freida Pinto and Cory Tran in their new home. Bobby Berk went for patterned pillows by Surya, wood sculptures by Four Hands and a chandelier made of hand-cut wooden beads.

Tran had renovated and designed the couple's other two homes himself. But for Bobby Berk, the design process was all about the actress: "I was all about impressing Freida. To do that, I had to think outside the box, because she loves color, and I usually work with muted tones. I wanted to bring home to her the colorful India of her childhood and interpret it in a modern way," says the TV star, describing his project.

This is how beautiful Freida Pinto and Cory Tran's new home is.

Aside from wanting their new home to exude warmth, familiarity and tranquility, Pinto hadn't specified anything more specific. So Berk opted for mossy greens, a cornflower blue and bright white. The composition is meant to convey the feeling of living outdoors. Upon entering the living room, the two chairs with their Viennese wicker immediately catch the eye. The cane weave is meant to bring in a piece of India. "The whole time I was always talking about Indian inspiration, and then Bobby would just say one word: 'rattan,' a very common material in India," Freida Pinto says. So to reinforce the feeling of home, Berk used at least one object with wicker in practically every room. To do this, the TV star combined a large indigo rug, walnut and oak side tables, a teak chair and a fig tree. He left the exposed ceiling beams in place.

In the bathroom, Berk replaced the pink tiles with white-and-blue mosaic tiles and had a generous bathtub installed. The room became one of Pinto's favorite spots in the house, as did the guest bathroom, which is entirely lined with Schumacher's "Birds & Butterflies" wallpaper.

The parlor is painted azure and exudes an intimate library aesthetic with its lush seating, all the books and art. "I love dark walls," Berk enthuses. They had one wall in the kitchen removed to make the space more spacious and open. With labor costs skyrocketing during the pandemic, they decided to paint the existing kitchen a sage green themselves.

Although the project took three times as long as Berk had planned due to Covid-19, Pinto is more than pleased with the results. Over the phone, she enthusiastically describes her new home to us as a place where she feels she can relax and just be herself. "And I'm not telling you this because you're writing an article," she jokes, "I told Cory almost every day that we couldn't have done anything better than buying this house and making it feel really like home."