When Ashley Tisdale first revealed her baby’s nursery on Instagram, the room was decidedly minimalist with its white walls, white rug, and streamlined wood crib from Kalon Studios. The singular piece of art by Stella Maria Baer perfectly echoed her daughter’s celestial name, Jupiter. But now that Jupiter has been exploring Earth for an entire year, her surroundings look very different, thanks to dark green paint and a patterned pink rug. “I started to get to know her, and I was like, okay, this is a little bit too vanilla-y for her. We need to pump up the funkiness because she just has a cool, fun personality,” Tisdale says. “I think she has a design eye to be honest.” Without diving too far into the science of talking to your baby in utero, this makes total sense. After all, Tisdale and her composer husband Christopher French moved into their current home when she was around seven months pregnant, at which point the High School Musical alum dove headfirst into decorating. The talented Tisdale was well prepared for the undertaking, considering she launched her design passion project, Frenshe Interiors, last year.

An aesthete who has worked with AD100 talents like Jake Arnold and Pierce & Ward on past homes, and who also enrolled herself in Kelly Wearstler’s Masterclass, Tisdale had never furnished an entire house by herself. Nonetheless, she felt up to the challenge after successfully tackling an extensive kitchen remodel with her contractor father for her previous home in Los Feliz in Los Angeles.

Aside from the fact that her new home was move-in ready, its lush foliage was what drew Tisdale in. “I was pregnant, and I feel like Jupiter was a part of picking this house because [now] she loves looking at the trees. She loves nature,” says the singer and actor. The interiors, especially the kitchen, lean a bit more streamlined and modern than Tisdale’s past dwellings (AD toured her former Hollywood Hills Spanish colonial home in 2018). However, they provided the perfect canvas, especially considering that Tisdale’s design philosophy is to always look to the home itself for inspiration. “I have a style, but I don’t stay so close to that style that it doesn’t work in a house,” she explains.

As with so much else these days, the pandemic also factored into Tisdale’s process. “I pretty much designed this whole house through Instagram,” she says. “We weren’t really going to stores and stuff, and we weren’t going out. I was pregnant, so I was being super safe.” It is no huge surprise, then, that there’s an Ettore Sottsass Ultrafragola mirror, a model that received positive attention on social media in recent years. But it’s clear that if Instagram’s algorithm influenced Tisdale at all, it curated an explore page for her that is full of the kind of popular pieces that are also savvy investments. “I went with the mentality of falling in love with every piece,” she says. “With how much I have moved [in the past], for this home I specifically decided to get real designer furniture and vintage pieces.”

So, would Tisdale work with herself again in the future? Yes, but for now, she’s content to stay put in the home she’s created. “What I realized while working with designers is that I’ll have a vision, and they have a vision,” she says. “But they’re so good at what they do. It’s beautiful. You’re like, Well, I love it.” This time though, not only are her surroundings beautiful, but they’re also exactly as she envisioned them. “I fully love this house. I love every piece of everything I’ve done here, and I’m really proud of myself.”