Jordan Neman was ready for a career shift when the pandemic hit in 2020.

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Feeling lackluster about his day job in real estate development, he yearned to pursue his lifelong passion for design. Friends who had seen his apartment on Instagram had started asking him to decorate their own and a side hustle was born.

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After scouring the web for affordable furniture, Jordan noticed an unsettling trend. Many companies bought the same pieces from the same manufacturers and then rebranded them as their own. “That was an aha moment,” he says. “I wanted to produce the types of pieces I wished to put in my friends' homes.”

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In 2021, Jordan and his twin brother, Steven, launched House of Léon with an outdoor collection inspired by their parents’ verdant home. A Los Angeles showroom followed in 2023, and Jordan hopes to open another in New York.

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Each sibling brought their unique strengths to the business, and in time the public—led by trendsetters like British-Bahrani fashion designer Misha Nonoo (and her designer, Expert Andre Mellone) whose dining table appeared in Architectural Digest—caught on.

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“I felt like an outsider with imposter syndrome in the beginning,” says Jordan. “But I think my fresh perspective has made me look at things differently and ask different questions because I wasn’t trained to think and understand the industry as it is.” Here’s what else Jordan says sets House of Léon apart.

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Where we turn to for inspiration

I get a lot of design details from jewelry. For a bar cabinet in an upcoming collection, I was inspired by a clasp I saw on the back of a pearl necklace. I made a ceramic mold and fired it, and then we sent it to Vietnam to be cast to become the lock on the doors. It’s always fun to take shapes from things that have nothing to do with furniture and weave those in. Our Provence collection is based on a staircase.

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What sets House of Léon apart

Steven and I pride ourselves on designing all the pieces in-house. We’re also really proud of the quality you’re getting for the price. We’re a lean team and don’t have a lot of retail stores, so we have the margins to put the quality into our products. We’re super proud of the people we work with—the carpentry team, the masonry team, the metalworking team—and the longevity of our pieces.

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What makes an excellent outdoor furniture collection?

Most people in America don’t have cushions on their outdoor furniture for eight of the 12 months. How does it look the rest of the year? We chose dainty frames for the Provence collection for various reasons: they visually disappear and don’t get picked up by the wind. Water doesn’t sit on the frames because they are so thin. When pieces look sculptural rather than bulky, they look finished without cushions rather than incomplete.

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The colors and materials we’re loving right now

We focus on a mix of old-world and new-age materials: stainless steel, glass, aluminum with wood, stone, and iron… Lately, I’ve been obsessed with white oak wood with powder-blue fabric. Every time I see the combination, I think they pair so well together.

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The heirloom pieces we’d love to pass down

The Teddy Dining Chair. The frame is timeless and the seat can be reupholstered easily. Flip it over, unscrew the seat, rewrap it in a different fabric, staple it, and you have a brand new chair.

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Our idea of ultimate luxury

Luxurious, high-grade upholstery fabrics from Italy and Belgium that are not majority polyester, thicker stone slabs of stone that feel substantial, and solid wood (as opposed to layers of laminate). Our chairs all have solid wood frames. You feel it in the weight.

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What we’d love to add to our assortment

I would love to create furniture for ceramists, painters, and sculptors who want a beautiful studio and not a stainless steel metal table. It would be wood-heavy.

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What’s next for House of Léon

I’m excited to take more risks and introduce collections that are a little bit different than what we’re known for. We have our first collaboration with a director of photography in the fashion industry launching this fall, which will be introduced alongside our upcoming Milan collection. I love tapping into creatives who aren’t necessarily in the home space and getting their perspective on furniture or home accessories.

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