Browse the home images Sarisa Munoz has posted on her Instagram page, @IndigoLeopardHome, and you’ll be shocked to learn she ever decorated in neutrals. Turquoise, sunny yellow, fire-engine red, coral, navy and emerald green flow, surprisingly seamless, from room to room.
“My husband and I don’t want cookie-cutter,” Munoz says. “There’s a time and a place for that in people’s lives, and if that’s what you like, there’s nothing wrong with that either. For us, we just like a little more daring, ‘out there’ look.”
With husband Brandon’s blessing, Sarisa mixes intense color schemes with animal prints, black-and-white-patterned tile and bird-themed wallpapers. It’s a lively boho style that has evolved over time.
When they purchased their first home in 2005, their neutral, play-it-safe décor resembled a Pottery Barn catalog. Then Munoz started experimenting with bolder design choices, and she loved the outcomes. In her last home, located in Corpus Christi, she and her husband ripped out the bedroom carpet and applied a Moroccan stencil design to the concrete floor in white and electric blue.
“That started my wild streak,” Munoz says. “I think it’s just me getting older and coming into my own – not having to fit into this mold of, ‘This is what your house should look like.’”
Munoz says she found courage, ideas and inspiration by following designers online. (She especially loves Johnathan Adler.) Today, in a pay-it-forward-kind-of way, she posts her own decorating projects on social media. Her @IndigoLeopardHome page has more than 91,000 followers.
“Sometimes if I write a caption that’s meaningful and heartfelt, people will write me messages,” Munoz says, adding that others reach out to tell her how her photos have influenced their own home design choices. “There’s this connection with people who I don’t even know. I think it’s cool. I love that people want to follow me and see what’s going on.”
There is a strong community of design aficionados posting regularly to Instagram; a community Munoz once followed and now has joined. When she moved to Edmond in 2020, she connected with Oklahoma City-based Daniel Mathis of @NotaMinimalist. The two met up downtown on a COVID-friendly sidewalk.
“She was looking for vintage portraits, and I had picked up a bundle of them at an estate sale, so I gifted one to her,” Mathis says. “We both have very eclectic styles, and so we clicked immediately. Since then, we enjoy supporting one another on Instagram and talking about our favorite places to thrift and antique.”
Munoz had quite the challenge redesigning the family’s new suburban home. She decided to change several aspects of the home – including the tilework, paint colors, wallpapers and upstairs flooring – but she was orchestrating it from Texas.
“I created a laminated flip book for our contractor,” she says. “For every single room, it showed, ‘This is the tile I want, this is the paint I want, these are the colors.’ Everything was lined out.”
It was an approach that worked well … for the most part. However, not being able to see the full effect immediately and in person proved problematic in the laundry room. Munoz had the cabinets painted Sherwin Williams Untamed Yellow, and she hated it. The paint sample she found in Texas did not translate well to the space. Rather than start over, she decided to balance it with a citrus-themed wallpaper called Amalfi Umore by Graham and Brown.
“Once that wallpaper was up, it transformed the room. Now, it makes me happy to go in there,” Munoz says.
Interior decorating is Munoz’s creative outlet, and home is her canvas. She loves decorating with plants, and frequently shops Live Boho. However, most times, she sources items from thrift shops, antique stores or Facebook Marketplace. She may not know whether her “treasures” will end up displayed in her home or stashed in storage until the next redesign, but her process appears to work. Half of the furniture and accessories – and almost all of
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the artwork – displayed in the home are one-of-a-kind items she’s curated over time.
“A lot of times, I’ll do some kind of arrangement and look at it a day or two, and then I’m like, ‘No.’ Then I’ll take it all down and re-do it. My poor walls! We have so many holes and patches,” Munoz says with a laugh. “It’s not methodical. It’s more of an evolution. I just play around a lot.”
Of course, @IndigoLeopardHome followers enjoy viewing Munoz’s beautifully arranged and ever-changing results. Mathis believes the Instagram platform is popular for designers and decorators because it provides a way to experience their design journeys with them. Mathis said he received positive feedback when he posted a photo sequence showing the evolution of his gallery wall over the past 10 years.
“People like to see where you started, what you did in the middle, and where you ended up,” he says. “Sarisa has taken what was a fairly basic suburban home, which had good bones, and turned it into something special. There’s just something fun and fresh about her designs, and that keeps me wanting to see what she’s going to do next.”
Designs within the Munoz home may be ever-changing and unpredictable, but one thing is for sure: They will be colorful.
