Beach chic turns surf noir
AFTER spending almost 20 years as head of visual merchandising and store design for Quiksilver, Steve Jones can say without much exaggeration that the surf is his life. The Laguna Beach apartment where he lives during the week is classic coastal modern, a bright white cube with punches of sunny color. A wall of plate glass bathes the home in summer sunlight to a concert of rustling sea breezes and crashing waves.
But if the Laguna space is a celebration of light, Jones’ weekend house in West Hollywood is an exploration of the dark. The interiors still reference the beach and beach culture, but there’s not a hibiscus print in sight. Traditional seascapes and sea horse tchotchkes give way to off-kilter paintings of mermaids and animal dioramas that look as if they’re on loan from a natural-history museum.
“The objects that I’ve put in this house,” Jones says with understatement, “are all a bit skewed.”
Jones’ decor, much like surfer style in general, is letting its dark roots show. Call it the dirty-blond movement: a moodier, irreverent, urban-tinged aesthetic that can be seen across pop culture, be it the skull motif that’s so ubiquitous in fashion or the art direction of HBO’s new surf-themed series, “John From Cincinnati,” which explores the gritty underbelly of beach culture.
Translating the dirty-blond vibe to interiors was a natural for Jones, who admits that he doesn’t exactly think like everyone else. “I’m like the reverse guy,” Jones says. “Most city people escape to the beach or the mountains on the weekend. I flee to the city.”
ABOUT four years ago, Jones was living in Laguna and visiting L.A. when a morning jog from his hotel changed everything. “I’m running up and down the streets in West Hollywood, and I’m looking around, and it just hit me,” he says. “I knew I wanted to live here.”
He says he looked at a hundred properties but was smitten with three small, run-down houses on a single lot just south of Santa Monica Boulevard. “Hansel and Gretel on acid,” Jones says. “It was completely falling apart when I bought it. Everything was overgrown.”
As he went about remodeling, however, Jones was careful to maintain what he calls the “gloomy” aesthetic.
“I didn’t try to lighten it up, I didn’t try to add light to the place,” he says. It was dark with a touch of melancholy, and that was just fine with him. West Hollywood would be the yin to Laguna Beach’s yang, and together the two homes began to make complete sense. The key, Jones says, was the collection of belongings he brought into each space.
“The objects I love and the places I design have one foot firmly in the past and one foot somewhere else -- though I don’t always know where that is,” he says, laughing.
Jones rents out two of the West Hollywood units and lives in a 1,200-square-foot house at the rear of the property. The Spanish-style structure looks unassuming from the outside, but inside the surprises are immediate. Rich oak floors stained black flow from one room to the next, like an inky sea.
“I didn’t want to see any grain coming through, so we added color to the clear coat so the grain didn’t pop up as much,” Jones says. “People think black makes things look smaller, but it makes things look bigger because it’s hard to see where it ends.”
The home makes efficient use of its compact footprint. The front door opens onto a living room enlarged by a double-height ceiling, with the dining room and kitchen beyond. Rough-hewn stairs lead to a catwalk overlooking the living room, then two bedrooms, a bathroom and a small office.
Throughout the home, Jones’ mix of contemporary designer pieces and flea market finds is in full effect -- dark, yes, but in a tongue-in-cheek way. His 1960s oil paintings of Southern California beach scenes are joined by a naive nude, hung over a boxed diorama of sandpipers behind glass.
“It’s a nude woman in a seascape, but she’s kind of weird looking. She’s beautifully painted, but she’s strange -- everything in the painting is just a little bit off,” Jones says, as he moves on to another piece. He flips a switch, bringing to life what he calls his “fox in a box,” a 4-foot-wide shadowbox with vintage taxidermy slinking through a faded mountain scene.
“People’s homes are like dioramas for living,” he says. “I approach design the same way someone would approach creating a diorama: Which background best suits the person living inside?”
For his own habitat, Jones kept the original wood beams and other structural features while replacing practically everything else. New touches that might seem overly quaint in another home -- arched, rough-hewn pine doors, bottle glass in some windows, custom stained glass in others -- give the place a storybook feel.
The interiors may be a paean to flea market chic, but eventually the eye catches the touches of sophistication that Jones has purposefully played down. In the living room, Hermès cashmere throws are tossed over the couch and on the back of an easy chair upholstered in fabric by Paul Smith. The beige beach cruiser leaning against the dining room wall? It’s Hermès too.
FRENCH designer bicycles are a far cry from the world of George Freeth, the man most often credited with bringing surfing from Waikiki to California 100 years ago. From surfing’s earliest days, popular notions of surfer style took their cues from Hawaiian-inspired floral prints and lighthearted Polynesian imagery -- what Jim Heimann, executive editor of Taschen America and author of several books on surfing, calls “the aesthetic of the optimistic Roxy girl.”
But Heimann, an avid collector of surf-related prints and drawings, says there has always been a duality to the culture. “There was always a darker side to surfing,” he says, adding that Mickey Dora, Bunker Spreckels and other mythic antiheroes of the ‘60s and ‘70s typified an anti-establishment bent to surf culture that lives to this day.
More recently, designers began looking beyond the old florals and tiki motifs that had long defined surf clothes and gear.
“The aesthetic that Steve developed at Quiksilver did influence the direction of the surf industry for a long time,” says Tom Adler, author of several books on surfing history and a longtime friend of Jones’. “Steve was far and away more interesting than other people doing the decorative surf thing.”
Craig Stecyk -- writer, artist and former member of the legendary group of surfers and skaters known as Dogtown -- says Jones’ “uncanny” designs were as smart as they were subversive.
“On the surface, his work looks sunny and bright, but if you look at the content, it’s really critical,” Stecyk says. “He has an anarchic sensibility.”
Jones, a Laguna Beach native, grew up surfing but always felt different. Most surfers, after all, didn’t concern themselves with finding just the right buys at the flea market.
“I started going vintage clothes shopping with my friends Larry and Jim, who at that time owned a vintage clothing shop in Laguna called Locals Only,” Jones says. “They dragged me around to this vintage world, and getting immersed in that really trains you. It’s the stuff you don’t realize that you are soaking in by osmosis. It trained me to know what I like and what I don’t like.”
Part of Jones’ skill as a designer in the surf industry lay in the fact that he wasn’t quite like everyone else.
“I was always the kooky, weird ‘creative’ one,” he says, adding that to truly understand the world of surfing, you have to sit outside of it.
“He’s an outsider, even though he grew up in the surf culture,” says Bob McKnight, founder and chief executive of Quiksilver. “That is what makes him so good at what he does. You tend to be a little inbred if you are too immersed in a culture.”
JONES still works as a consultant to the company, but his energy is largely focused on a new company he formed called Better Shelter. The Costa Mesa firm designs and builds homes aimed at the kind of people he works with in the surf industry -- laid-back but still driven, with a discerning eye for the unconventional.
The vibe he creates in his projects comes from the sunnier side of Jones’ aesthetic, best exemplified by his five-unit apartment building above St. Ann’s cove. By the time Jones bought the building in 1999, previous owners had done everything they could to hide its architectural essence.
“They tried to make the building country French, and I saw it as a stucco box on the beach,” Jones says. “It is what is. Why try to change that?”
So Jones gutted the building, moving from one apartment to the next, painstakingly returning the building to its boxy roots. Enter his ground-floor studio, and the first thing you notice is the ocean view.
“This is as good as it gets,” he says. “Brooks Street [Beach], which is just next door, is the best surfing in Laguna. When the big south summer swells come rolling through, you are looking right through that wave from these windows. It’s the most incredible thing.”
The space is small -- just 400 square feet -- so the bed is pushed right up to the plate glass window.
“I don’t bring a lot of people down here,” Jones says. “I don’t entertain here. It’s too small. A lot of my friends haven’t seen this space.”
Living in one room, he says, takes discipline, especially for a collectibles addict.
“Something comes in, something has to go out,” he says.
What remains are small collections of beach-themed paintings, sea-related carvings and flea market gems, including a pair of chunky resin tables with abalone shell and onyx inlays -- pieces that he says are getting harder to find because of the rising popularity of ‘60s and ‘70s beach décor.
“I decided to use lots of blues and greens, lots of natural things, and the linens are white and fresh,” he says. “I was looking to give it a timeless feeling.”
It’s a look he loves, but one that perhaps says more about where he’s been than where he’s headed.
“When I moved to the city, I finally felt like there were lots of people like me,” he says with another laugh, referring to his house in West Hollywood. That surfer’s lair may be 10 miles from the coast and only used on weekends, but these days, it’s what feels like home.
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Have board, will decorate
TO see how surf and skate culture is beginning to infiltrate home interiors, look no further than the furniture studio Bottega Montana.
Francesco and Marco Gillia have gained notoriety for carefully crafted wood furniture that uses an interlocking joint system rather than glue or nails -- “really beautiful and amazingly cool,” says Tim Clarke, who carries the designs in his Santa Monica store.
On something of a lark, the Gillias produced a skateboard with the same kind of tongue-and-groove construction used in their tables and stools. The response surprised even the brothers. It wasn’t long before they had signed a deal with Paul Smith to create a limited-edition line of black walnut and white oak long boards with wheels in the company’s signature hot pink. At the Paul Smith boutique on Melrose Avenue, the boards sell for $320 to $378.
Who are the buyers?
“They’re 40 or so, with money,” Francesco says, adding that some buy the boards as art pieces. “They see the craft and connect with their youth.”
One former skater in New York uses a Bottega Montana board as his coffee table. For such grown-ups who insist on making skating part of their style, the brothers have another offering: a 6-foot-3 bookcase with a built-in slot to stow a board. Prices start at $3,200.
-- Craig Nakano