Inside Johnny Galecki’s Whimsically Gothic Nashville Mansion (2024)

When a friend asked Johnny Galecki to describe the style of the Tennessee home he was renovating with AD100 designers Louisa Pierce and Emily Ward, he was stumped.

Then Pierce offered a solution: “She said, ‘Tell him it’s the inside of Johnny’s brain,’” recalls Galecki. “She’s right.” Pierce was referring to the eccentric ephemera Galecki has been collecting for years, which now live among a darkly whimsical mix of textures and patterns.

Best known for his role as Leonard on the CBS megahit sitcom The Big Bang Theory, which ran from 2007 to 2019, Galecki purchased the home in 2018 to fulfill a longtime dream of moving away from Hollywood. Born in Belgium and raised in Illinois, the actor, who first came to national attention as a member of the cast of Roseanne, moved to Los Angeles for work, living alone there at an age when most people are still in high school. “I never felt like much of an Angeleno,” he now admits. “And I did try. I say that with sadness, not with snobbery. Thirty years is just a very long time to live in a city that you’re not all that comfortable in.”

After years of entertaining “many fantasies of living in all the places I would travel, from Austin to Reykjavík,” he says, Galecki settled on the Nashville area. “Everywhere I looked, around here, felt like the scene of a future memory.” He fell in love with the first house he toured, and after numerous return visits—“I may have been showing my cards,” he admits—purchased this distinctive place.

Galecki has been told conflicting information about the provenance of his home, but this is what is known: It started as a log cabin built in “either 1801 or 1811—I’ve heard both,” he says. Then 1929 saw one addition, 2012 another, creating what is now a 12,000-square-foot, five-bedroom manse sitting on approximately 30 acres in an area just outside the city.

“While most remodels want to make the old new, our goal was very much the opposite,” says Galecki, explaining that the most recent addition received the “most drastic aesthetic transformation” and generally needed the most work. “Sadly, much modern workmanship and materials simply don’t compare to that of a hundred years ago.”

Galecki welcomed his first child, a son named Orbison, with former partner Alaina Meyer in November of 2019, and moved into his new home right before COVID hit. (He is now married to Morgan Galecki, who was expecting a child at the time of the photo shoot; daughter Oona Evelena was born soon after.) He’d never hired an interior designer before, and was always hesitant about a professional coming in and sterilizing his Gothic-leaning tastes, but he realized that the same quirky history that made him fall in love with his new home would also make it difficult to renovate and decorate on his own.

“With very limited knowledge of the area, resources, and relationships, and a little one running around, I thought, This is going to take me at least seven years to try to do by myself,” says Galecki. “Funnily enough, a friend saw the Pierce & Ward book, A Tale of Interiors. She had visited my farm and thought, Well, that looks like Johnny’s taste and perfect for that location.”

The friend hit the nail on the head with the recommendation of the design team. “I think this is the first interview I’ve agreed to do in almost four years, and it’s purely because I’m excited to rave about Emily and Louisa,” says Galecki. Known for their eclectic and moody spaces, the Los Angeles–and Birmingham-based pair admired that Galecki saw enough potential in the idiosyncratic home to even purchase it, and they soon learned that, unlike many clients, he’s a risk-taker.

“There was not a part of the house that wasn’t touched in the renovation,” says Pierce. But amid the completely new bathrooms and moving “every wall” of the primary suite, they honored the history of the home—bringing a curved sofa into the foyer to play off of the existing curved staircase, extending the stone that already existed in the kitchen and family room—while also bringing to life Galecki’s unique “haunted” sensibility. “We repurposed a lot of his stuff. He also just has really cool taste,” says Ward. Some of his most prized possessions, now on display, include an Italian foosball table from the 1950s, a vintage surgery kit, a collection of vintage glass eyes, and wax molds of Charlie Chaplin’s hands.

Galecki came to Pierce and Ward with an unusual vision for the primary suite. He wanted the bed to float in the center of the room, which they delivered, and he also told them he wouldn’t mind if they were to forgo bathroom walls. “I was like, yeah, but you want some kind of division, so let’s have this gorgeous window where you still feel totally connected, but you can have some separation,” says Pierce. Behind the custom-made bed is a dressing area with a dresser and mirror, opposite which is an oil painting facing outward, above the headboard.

“To get a client who lets you execute these crazy notions, it’s just such a dream,” says Ward, who calls the high-ceilinged space with board and batten walls “our favorite thing we’ve ever done.”

The final room completed in this funhouse of a home is also the actor’s favorite: the library. When the original plan for the room, distressed wood, simply wasn’t working, the designers showed Galecki “inspiration pictures of really bold-colored, high-lacquer-painted rooms,” explains Pierce. He fell in love with one in the Maison de la Luz Guest House in New Orleans, designed by Pamela Shamshiri of AD100 design firm Studio Shamshiri, and the next thing everyone knew, every inch of this last room was being painted fire-engine red.

“Johnny is just one of those people that forces you more outside of the box than you already thought you were,” says Ward. Pierce agrees: “I’d say he’s one of the only clients that we’ve ever had that has been like, I want this to be more interesting.”

Johnny Galecki’s Nashville home appears in AD’s March 2024 issue. Never miss an issue when you subscribe to AD.

Magazine

The Hollywood hitmaker curated decor from a range of eras to contrast with the clean lines of his famous abode, Richard Neutra’s 1955 Brown House

Architecture + Design

And yet, somehow, comfort reigns supreme

Magazine

The in-demand actor worked with Soho Home to decorate her first apartment

Magazine

The founders of rug brand, Nordic Knots, crafted a cozy base for curling up in during Swedish winters