A peculiar kind of perfection

Something must have gone awry with the instructions. There can’t possibly be a residence here on this Venice street, at least not a three-story concrete contemporary, and brand new to boot. Surely there are restrictions: This is smack in the heart of an old Venice retail and restaurant district, several carefree blocks of mostly low-slung, charm-galore stucco and brick structures.

But here’s the address, all right, just past a hippie throwback shop in a tiny clapboard bungalow. Here are the numbers on a locked, rusted metal fence behind which is what could be a house, yes — a quietly forbidding rectangle with a poker-faced facade revealing nothing. No signs of life. No doorbell, either, or any hope of alerting its occupant by shouting up at the closed windows. (Wait a second, what’s that in the second-floor window? Are those legs? Six upside-down wooden legs?) Thank goodness for cellphones. The place suddenly holds promise.

After one ring, Blaine Halvorson, a 34-year-old clothing designer and manufacturer, answers and says he’ll be right down. The smoked glass front door opens and out walks a man who is as quietly forbidding as the exterior of his house, accompanied by a black dog whose piercing glint signals he’s fully prepared to take down the enemy. It’s unlikely that fangs will be bared any time soon, however, unless you want to test your luck against a big, buff, confident, abundantly tattooed guy wearing skull jewelry and no hair. Definitely not in this doorway, opened to a view of what appears to be another shaved-head guy — in an electric chair. Oh, my. Do come in.

“For some reason, I’ve never met a man or a woman not intimidated by me,” Halvorson says with not a trace of the disingenuous in his tone as he offhandedly pushes up the sleeves of his shirt. Two armloads of inked images flaunt a galaxy of stars, a naked girl on a guitar, John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever” posture, the words “Fast Cars” that he was going to pair with “Loose Women” but didn’t. “Yuppies Forever,” which he did pair with “White Trash” (“a sort of yin and yang,” he says). And so on.

He has been to tattoo parlors about 70 times, he guesses, as he willingly pulls up the front of his shirt to show “LUST” emblazoned on his upper stomach and pulls it down to show “ROCK ‘N ROLL” on his upper back. He lifts the legs of his jeans, ripped and shredded in carefully calculated spots, to show a bowler on one calf and Bozo the clown on the other. His right knuckles spell out “love.” His left, “hate.”

“I don’t mind that people are intimidated,” he adds, “but it’s definitely not what I try to portray. I’m much harder on the outside than the inside.”

He smiles, a transformative act that lends to his face an uncommon sweetness, and in that instant one sees the Bozeman, Mont., farm boy in him, the high school J.Crew-J. Peterman preppie he once was. Dirk the dog, a former Venice Beach stray who shadows Halvorson’s every move, has in turn assumed the gentle nature of a total pushover, a sucker for a kind word and a belly rub.

So, beware of letting first impressions distort your vision in this unexpectedly polished, carefully put-together residence, especially when it comes to the offbeat artwork Halvorson collects and creates. Despite the witty row of five Jonathan Adler canisters in the kitchen reading Quaaludes, Downers, Uppers, Prozac and Viagra, Halvorson says he has never done drugs or even smoked tobacco. And that death-row inmate visible from the doorway is in fact a crash dummy from the ‘50s in a B-52 pilot’s chair, oddly beautiful and regal as the sculpture it has become in Halvorson’s house. Only those gifted with the uncensored imagination of a child would have dared buy it and then put it in the living room, no less.

That Halvorson gave the name Junk Food to the $40-million-a-year high-end T-shirt company he co-founded with designer Natalie Grof should have been a clue that a certain what’s-it-all-about, sophisticated whimsy was in store at the house he moved into just weeks ago and is still refining. Workmen are busy outfitting the second-floor deck and breaking ground on an interior courtyard presided over by a massive stone Buddha, while Halvorson hangs and positions paintings, photographs, sculpture and antique objects that range from the highly unusual to the outright bizarre. Halvorson bought the house because he wanted “a large, modern space with tons of wall space: I’m gonna keep collecting art.”

A newly purchased silver gelatin photo has arrived from his favorite photography team, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, whose works suggest the subconscious come to life and occupy a realm between dream and nightmare that would make great fodder for in-depth psychoanalysis. There are also oils by California artists Mark Ryden and Camille Rose Garcia. Ryden’s work has been described as featuring “less-than-innocent children,” and “outré images of strange and disturbing beauty … at once intriguing, unsettling, baffling and enchanting.” Garcia’s cartoonishly direful paintings — with such titles as “Soft Head Pile” and “More Blood for the Castle” — are social commentaries that depict, according to her website, “creepy children living in a wasteland fairy tale.”

Doll molds and doll heads stare into space on every floor, in nearly every room. Headless child mannequins from the 1920s and 1930s flank the kitchen table. Mug shots and fingerprints dating to the 1940s fill shelves underneath rubber-glove molds cannily placed because they put Halvorson in mind of criminals being made to put up their hands. Everywhere the eye falls, there’s something that astonishes. Take those medical trays of human teeth — please, his friends might plead.

“His house is unique and artsy and cool and colorful and happy,” Grof says, “but what I find creepy are the teeth — and the strange wax doll head that reminds me of ‘Silence of the Lambs.’ ”

Be it ever so anomalous, there’s no place like home. Halvorson is not one to fall sway to majority opinion — or anyone’s opinion, for that matter, except his own. He doesn’t operate by any set of rules. The teeth and the wax head are staying put. Get over it, folks. So are the movie-production molds of Frankenstein’s arms, mounted on a wall in the second-floor corridor. His one concession is to refrain from putting a large human form of any type in his bedroom, potentially disquieting for a female guest. He’s gotta think ahead. For now, he’ll stick with the mounted brass knuckles and four ParkeHarrisons on the walls.

Halvorson sees past the surface of what so many others regard as freakish or absurd, straight through to the poetry and poignancy of the object, or to the simple, overlooked beauty. He’s not trying to shock — he collects what he loves. “I have an enormous infatuation with vintage mugs and crime shots,” he says. “I just love the way they’re sort of a portrait, a pure portrait, somebody at their most vulnerable. You have the person’s identity as art, you have their fingerprints.”

A shelf of 1930s blank-eyed doll head molds captivates him as much as the mugs. “Here’s this steel industrial thing, and what comes out of it is this soft, childlike face. You’re taking this hard material and making a beautiful, pure form. It’s like you get to what’s really underneath, or inside, something.” On the floor next to them sits a colorful carousel piece that he bought from screenwriter Patricia Knop and her husband, director Zalman King.

“I’ve always been drawn to childlike things,” Halvorson says. “I’m in love with Basquiat’s work, the early obscure work in particular. I love that innocent thing. I’m going to own one, no doubt about it. “

Passion, he says, is what drives him. “Once I get a passion for something, I carry it through. If I get an idea today, I’m making it happen tomorrow.” He is passionate — and exacting — about his interiors, as he is about his collecting, his business and his own after-hours life as a painter. “Visually, I’m an extreme perfectionist,” he says. “It’s almost like a borderline psychosis. I can stand for hours studying an angle where I’ve placed something. I’ll move it around 50 times till it’s right. My two crash dummies have probably been on every inch of this concrete floor.”

He generally works 12-hour days at the Junk Food offices, then, when the muse comes calling, shuts himself off from the world in his garage (hence, no doorbell) and creates art late into the night, usually with a good California Bordeaux and the full blast of indie rock. He doesn’t answer the phone; he doesn’t return calls.

“I think I’m a pretty giving friend, but I either need people or I need art, and there’s no mixing the two together,” he says. “I’m like the train that goes one direction. I think that’s one reason my clothing company is successful.”

Several of his 4-by-5-foot mixed-media pieces — pop culture images and themes, some with faces obscured and de-featured by graffiti-like swipes of paint or slogans — hang throughout the house. Three are part of a current exhibition of figurative paintings, circa 1930 to 2005, at Obsolete, a store and gallery on Main Street in Venice that is the primary source for Halvorson’s artistic findings. The crash dummies, the doll heads, the mug shots, the mannequins, the ParkeHarrisons — all came from Obsolete.

Talk about passion. Get Halvorson started on what’s so compelling about the place and its owner, Ray Azoulay, and his enthusiasm is that proverbially contagious thing. Out spill the superlatives, paragraph after paragraph: “What Ray is doing is revolutionary. He has a way of bringing 50 things together, all these elements from different time periods and places, and he makes it work. That’s what I think is his great expertise. You buy things you’d never buy if you weren’t in his store because you see the beauty in them that you wouldn’t see anywhere else. He takes the simplest functional thing and puts it on a wall and makes it a piece of art. It really is just this thing before he touches it. He has a museum, and he just happens to sell the pieces.”

Ever since Halvorson discovered Obsolete just over a year ago, he has gone faithfully “three or four times a week, every single week. I’ve only left once without buying something.” The first day he carted home $20,000 worth of items, clearing out the store window. That’s nothing compared to the purchases he made just last week: $70,000, without breaking a sweat.

“I’m not sort of financially responsible,” says Halvorson, smiling that disarming, clean-cut boy smile. “When I walk in and fall in love with something, it can be $6 or $6,000, I don’t cringe.”

He likens the discovery of the store to the first time a child goes to Disneyland. You pull up to a bland, boring parking lot, you walk through the gates and kaboom! Dazzlement. You’ve entered a magical paradise, you’re exuberant, you can’t get enough of it.

Halvorson is quick to credit Azoulay with strongly influencing, even shaping, the steady evolution of his aesthetic and the design decisions in his new house: “Ray is the reason I’m going to continually have to expand my spaces — or make him come re-do them so they don’t end up looking like a swap meet.”