For Vogue’s April issue, we asked a wide-ranging group of creatives to show us—and tell us—how they’ve been spending their time, whether inside or outside, housebound or on the go. Here, we drop into Ziggy and Orly Marley’s colorful Los Angeles abode. See the full story.
Though Ziggy Marley and his wife, Orly, have lived in their sprawling Spanish Colonial since 2018, it wasn’t until last year that the house finally felt complete. First there was a manpower problem: Ziggy was on tour in Europe with his band, leaving Orly (formerly a vice president at William Morris Agency, now the head of Ziggy’s record label) to manage the move on her own; after that, the family was off to Israel (where Orly was born) for daughter Judah’s bat mitzvah. By the time they returned to Los Angeles—their house sits in charming Toluca Lake, near the Bob Hope estate—there wasn’t much time for finishing touches. “You move in, and you have all these dreams for your home, right?” Orly says. “But life started, and everyone went back to school and back to work, and we didn’t really get a chance to dig in.”
It took the disruptive force of stay-at-home orders to change all that. “We always set out to have this cozy, beautiful environment, but the lockdown is what really got us to tighten everything up,” Orly says. “We went room by room and just got rid of what didn’t serve us.” After that, Orly redid the guest bathroom (“It just didn’t feel vibrant,” she says, “so I went crazy painting and added art”); she swapped out the stools in the kitchen; and the playroom was fitted with custom cabinetry and racks for the kids’ guitars. “They have a creativity in them and a musical sensibility,” says Ziggy, whose own father, Bob Marley, may have had something to do with that. (On More Family Time, Ziggy’s most recent studio album, Judah and two of her brothers, Gideon and Abraham, can be heard on the final track, “Wonderful People.”) Elsewhere in the house, the floors are scattered with antique Persian rugs, and on one wall of the piano room hangs a suite of framed Hermès scarves collected by Orly over several years.
The family also spends a great deal of time outdoors—something their house is well suited for. “Every single nook and cranny opens to the backyard,” Orly says, “and there are French doors into every part of the house.” As the group’s de facto “activities director,” Ziggy oversees daily outdoor workouts, with the boys particularly fond of boxing. “I’m the outside guy, [Orly’s] the inside guy.” He points to the balcony off the master bedroom as perhaps his favorite part of the place. “That’s my space where I can go to and just chill out and do some good creative work,” he says. (Among his forthcoming projects: a collaboration with the children’s label Appaman, coming to Nordstrom in mid-April; and two children’s books—My Dog Romeo and Little John Crow—due later this year.) “It’s just a nice vibe there.”
For her part, Orly favors a smaller, somewhat less accessible terrace off the third floor. “I don’t talk about it a lot, because I don’t want my kids to come up there,” she says conspiratorially. “You can see everywhere, and you just feel like you’re on top of the world.” It’s a dreamy escape in what now looks like her dream home. “I feel like the house is—finally—really working in every aspect.”