Several years ago, while shopping for a place to live, the Rothbarts looked at a house owned by Wearstler and Korzen, which was then on the market. They gathered around a central island, the surface of which was stacked with “vibe trays” containing moldings, fabric swatches, wallpaper samples, and pieces of marble, each representing a room in the Rothbarts’ future home. Mother and daughter were dressed identically, in black T-shirts, black leggings, and black boots. The Rothbarts-Stan, a developer of suburban shopping centers Miriam, the founder of an independent record label Gabriella, a member of a band called the Young Rockers-arrived at Wearstler’s offices, in a large building that she shares with the hairdresser Sally Hershberger, on La Cienega Boulevard, in West Hollywood. One recent afternoon, Wearstler had a design meeting with Stan and Miriam Rothbart and their daughter, Gabriella, who is twelve. It’s not ‘those match and those match and everything feels the same.’ ” A Kelly Wearstler room, the local interior decorator says, is like an overstimulated child: “You just want to say, ‘Quiet, quiet. “I think I have a very European sensibility,” she says. Lately, Wearstler has been experimenting with a highly eclectic concatenation of vintage pieces, including swinging-seventies French and Italian furniture, in an early-eighties palette of lavender, mauve, gray, and robin’s-egg blue, with brass and nickel. Wearstler and Korzen’s collaborations include the Avalon and Maison 140, a pair of boutique hotels in Beverly Hills the recently renovated Tides, in South Beach and the Viceroys, in Santa Monica, Palm Springs, and Miami. But Wearstler is best known for the palm-belt hotels she has designed for the Kor Group, a large real-estate and hotel-management company owned by her husband, Brad Korzen, who is also small and good-looking-“sexy little Halflings,” one design critic calls them. Her preferred scale is oversized: one of her signature pieces is a capacious chair, hooded like an upended pram and available in leather the color of blue Wedgwood china, which she sells for eighteen thousand five hundred dollars at her retail shop, in the home-furnishings department of Bergdorf Goodman, in New York. She uses intense colors, David Hicks-like graphic patterning, and contrasting textures (lacquer, parchment, shagreen). (A local interior decorator calls Wearstler’s aesthetic “anti-taste.”) In a decadelong career, her style has evolved from mid-century modern to glammed-up Hollywood Regency to an ornate, layered look inspired in part by the late Hollywood set decorator and interior designer Tony Duquette. Wearstler represents the uninhibited side of Los Angeles, the part that celebrates how far the city is from strict East Coast notions of good taste. “I just do how it feels.” Her smile-insouciant, good-humored, faintly ironical-is always on the verge of suggesting that she’s not altogether serious. “I don’t have time to think things through a lot,” she says. Things she likes she deems “edgy,” “cool,” “sexy,” or “sophisticated.” What she doesn’t like she dismisses with a quick “Oh, God no.” Her choices are governed by instinct rather than by intellect. In contrast to the great ladies of interiors in generations past, Wearstler issues dictums-in a pinched, South Carolina twang-that are as unassuming as a teen-age girl’s. After an episode in the second season when she appeared, like a California Raisin, in a thigh-grazing purple ruffled dress and a green silk turban, with purple ankle socks and green pumps, one of the authors of the fashion-watchdog blog Go Fug Yourself posted, “I kept expecting her to grab someone’s palm and be like, ‘I see a trip over water. Her movements are chronicled exhaustively on real-estate and fashion blogs, where she is known as the “hair crimping queen,” “kooky Los Angeles interior designer extraordinaire,” or, simply, “the Wearst.” In 20, she served as a judge on “Top Design,” a reality show on Bravo (tagline: “See ya later, decorator”) most people, including her fellow-judge Jonathan Adler, say they watched just for Wearstler’s getups. To a party that Wearstler (pronounced “Worst-ler”) co-hosted at Chateau Marmont in June, she wore a vintage dress with sea-green polka dots, backward. She is forty-two, petite and beautiful, with lynxlike green eyes and long chestnut-colored hair, and an outré fashion sense that accommodates the wearing of crinolines, beehive hairdos, and fingerless gloves. Kelly Wearstler, the presiding grande dame of West Coast interior design, is a celebrity decorator, in that she herself is a celebrity. Wearstler, who likes her rooms “edgy,” in her office.
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