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Singer-songwriter Tamar Kaprelian has had the door to the music industry opened for her by some of the biggest names in the business, including Clive Davis and OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder, but the door that’s led to her most creative space is one she designed at her artfully curated California home.

The 1963-built, classic Southern California Mediterranean Revival-style abode in Malibu and its surrounding property is where Kaprelian, 39, recently shot two music videos.

And it’s where she feels most at home honing her craft alongside family life after years of trying to find her place in the industry, she reveals to Realtor.com® in the latest Celebrity Sanctuary.

“The space serves as a very formative space for me,” says the American-Armenian artist, whose career has taken her around the world, from starting out in Los Angeles to getting her big break with Davis in New York and competing on “Eurovision Song Contest” when it was held in Vienna.

Kaprelian’s first major record deal with RCA Records came after a high-stakes performance for Davis in the Big Apple when she was still a teenager.

“It was actually a really cool and very intimate showcase for him,” she recalls. “I went up to New York … and it was in a tiny, little room with a tiny, little piano, and he sat right next to me as I played my songs, like, on the bench. It was the weirdest experience, and it was so nerve-wracking.”

While she remains grateful to have worked with the legendary music executive, Kaprelian admits she craved more creative control over her work and was eventually dropped from the label.

“Clive [had] a very specific way of doing business,” she explains. “He [loved] someone who [would] come in and he [could] kind of mold the vision and the songs that [were] given to the artist.

“My idol was—and still is—Billy Joel, so I wanted to sit at the piano, write my own stuff, and write from a place of truth for me personally, so that didn’t mesh really well.”

Once Kaprelian felt free to showcase her personal artistry, she recorded a raw, vulnerable version of OneRepublic’s hit record “Apologize,” which she submitted to a cover song contest put on by the band in 2008.

Her take went viral and caught the attention of Tedder, who then helped Kaprelian get signed to Interscope Records.

Yet, the new label was still not the right fit, Kaprelian shares, so she pivoted from performing as an artist to advocating for other musicians, including Armenian singer Rosa Linn.

In 2022, Kaprelian returned to the “Eurovision” competition, not as a singer, but as a co-writer of the song Linn performed, “Snap,” which became wildly popular on TikTok and went on to rack up “over 4,000,000,000 streams.”

By this time, Kaprelian had also teamed up with her Malibu neighbor and fellow songwriter Ali Tamposi, to launch an education series for artists on Spotify that featured Charli XCX, John Legend, and Camila Cabello. However, the two collaborators fell out of touch when they were both taking time to grow their respective families.

Though Kaprelian spent years “trying to be out of the spotlight,” once she became a mother to her son, Sevan, now 3, she was inspired to reunite with Tamposi and write new music about the major life change.

The three-bedroom, 3.5-bathroom, two-story abode that Kaprelian bought in 2022 with her husband, Chris Stang, is where her creative rebirth was nurtured.

“Our house really served as a place where Ali and I really … came back together and rekindled our friendship, so there’s a lot of reasons why that space for me is really important,” shares Kaprelian, who recently released the singles “The Only” and “Mirror.” 

In this installment of Celebrity Sanctuary, Kaprelian breaks down the cosmopolitan influences that informed her vision for her remodeled residence.

She also shares how she’s composed the home’s sunken living room to serve as both a professional and personal sanctuary that supports her daily rhythm of flexibly toggling between music and motherhood.

It was owned by an artist, [Katie] Register. Her father [John Register] was a really, really famous painter, and she is a painter as well. She was moving to New York.

We saw the space—it was decorated in her furniture, in her style—and we fell in love with it. We wanted to rent it at the beginning. She ended up not letting us rent it and rented it to someone else, and those people, like, destroyed the home.

Then she put it on sale, and we were like, “Oh, my God, we remember this house in its glory and its beauty.” Really, you walk in and you felt like it was a creative space, so we ended up convincing her to sell it to us.

We’ve been in it since 2024. We bought it in 2022, but it took two years to get permits—Malibu’s permits are so crazy.

We did pretty much bring it to studs. We had this amazing architect and designer, Peter Harper, and he did the whole thing. Peter is known for his work in Los Feliz, and funny enough, we almost bought one of Peter’s homes in 2021 and didn’t end up getting it.

Then when we bought this one, we asked him to help us do the renovation.

We didn’t really move any walls. We just brought everything down to its studs and kind of rebuilt it in our style. We had specific references that we really wanted to play on.

There’s a hotel in Stockholm called Ett Hem that we love, and that was a huge inspiration for us, and there is a Belmond [Hotel] in Mallorca that was a huge inspiration for us. So, like, dark woods, antique, dark wood furniture mixed with oak furniture mixed with vintage antique pieces, some terra cotta.

Ett Hem’s really the inspiration, but then [it’s] mixed with a couple of more antique pieces.

Sanctuary to me is where you can be your truest, most vulnerable, safest self, and I think that there’s two spaces in the house that serve that for me. Personally, when I’m done mothering for the day and I need to just have a moment to myself, my bathroom is my sanctuary.

We have a really beautiful bathroom. It has heated floors. I love taking a bath at the end of the day when I can, so that space to me is really my sacred space. 

But I would say that our living room [is a sanctuary], too. You go down a little series of steps. That’s really where, for example if I do a writing session, it’s an indoor-outdoor space. So I’ll open up the doors and we can do this collaboration outside, inside, and we kind of move between spaces, which I think is really beautiful, especially since Malibu is one of these cities where the weather year-round is conducive to leaving the doors wide open.

The house and that specific room faces the ocean, so it’s really nice to be able to get that reception back from the water, too.

I would say every single piece in that room was chosen very deliberately. One of my favorite accents in the room is around the fireplace. We had this really beautiful tile chosen, and that to me, when you walk in the room and you see the fireplace on the left and you see the tile around the fireplace, is just so unique. It draws you in.

The colors are warm woods, but also creams—cream couch, dark wood table, yellows, oranges, kind of darker greens in that space. Most of the stuff was custom-made. We found that custom-making it just fit the space better. 

I have a big crystal that I bought from New York, and I hauled it all the way over to L.A. It’s an amethyst, and it’s almost like a half-moon-cut crystal. I’m very into crystals. I’m very into psychics. I’m very into all that stuff. Having that in the room really grounds the space in a way that feels special.

It’s been important to me as I’ve transitioned and added motherhood as an identity to what I already do. I wanted to make sure that I could step away from work and have a moment with my son. Him still being very young, teaching him the Armenian language was really important to me, so this ability to blend work and home and this space has just provided me the ability to do that.

It allows me to break up the monotony of a work day, when I can just take a moment and my son helps me refocus and rebalance and I try to show up in the best way. Regardless of whatever s–t call I’ve had or meeting I’ve had with whoever, I can find focus and centering in being able to reconnect with him, even if it’s for a couple minutes.

Sev loves his house, and he has a very cool little space for himself. His room is really interesting. We have an Ett Hem–style bookshelf in his room that was a big reference for us for that specific space. I think he loves being able to just be in nature.

We have some interesting art in the house. There’s a gallery in the U.K. called Portland Gallery that we really love, and we’ve gotten a handful of pieces from there.

There’s an artist in particular named David Spiller, whose pieces we have in the home. There’s this amazing Moroccan artist, too, whose piece that we have and that’s a prominent art fixture in the house. We have a beautiful Ethan Cook piece, who’s an artist based out of New York City.

My husband and I, art’s a big, important piece to our lives, and the way we’ve integrated it in the home, I think it’s really cool.

We’re going to add on. We bought the lot next door, so we’re going to build on the lot next door. Right now we’re in New York, so we are going to take the time that we’re in New York to start really working and renovating the house.

It’s a three-bedroom right now. We want to convert the garage. We want to make a little play place for Sev below the deck. We want to add a house next door so that my parents or his parents can come and stay. 

Sanctuary is a good word because I know that my husband and I both feel like [the] house has that energy top to bottom for us, so we’re excited to keep building on it.