Teaming Up to Design L.A. Look : Husband-and-Wife Duo Gain International Recognition

The kitchen that environmental designers Deborah Sussman and Paul Prezja have created in their 65-year-old Spanish villa is a perfect example of the vivid, collaborative style that has brought this husband-and-wife partnership international recognition.

In a room that looks like a cross between a Mexican hacienda and a high-tech workshop, the couple’s distinctive design signature comes alive.

An open fireplace with an exposed metallic flue is surrounded by wall niches displaying painted wooden peasant animals and votive altars.

Steel windows outlined in red are set off by Mexican and Indian prints in a heady mix of mannerisms.

Fusing it all is a peasant-inspired color palette of sleek pastels and hot primary colors that have come to signify the L.A. Look, a style Sussman and Prezja helped define with their festive graphics for the 1984 Olympics and San Diego’s Horton Plaza.

Fusion of Styles

This mixture of urbane gestures and vernacular idioms in their Hollywood Hills home is in tune with an international design trend toward a romantic fusion of futurism and nostalgia.

“The L.A. contribution to this forward-backward dance of fashion has been skillfully encapsulated by Sussman Prezja,” says architect Craig Hodgetts. “Its high-gloss mock-ethnicity melted in with media mannerisms makes (Sussman and Prezja’s style) commercially successful and artfully appealing. It is very L.A.”

The couple’s contribution to the design world has not gone unrecognized. Last year Sussman was made an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects. And earlier this month their firm, Sussman Prezja & Co. Inc., was awarded AIA’s prestigious Institute Honors for “defining the new discipline of urban enhancement,” described as “a collaboration of clients, planners, architects and graphic designers reworking and enlivening our urban centers and streetscapes.” The firm’s style is “a marriage of graphics and architecture,” according to Sussman, who has “a passion for making images, not in the abstract, but as a reinforcement of a feeling for the context. We are total designers, and try to go beyond mere decoration into the fabric of the architecture itself.”

Current projects range from a traveling exhibit for New York-based toy-maker Hasbro Inc. to a project image for Chicago Place, a multistory mall on Michigan Avenue. Also in the works are graphics programs for New Orleans’ Aquarium of the Americas and for the Library Square project in downtown Los Angeles.

Sussman, 56, and Prejza, 49, met in 1967. Sussman was about to strike out on her own after working in Paris and Milan, and for modernist pioneers Charles and Ray Eames in Pacific Palisades. Prezja was an urban designer with the Los Angeles city planning department.

It was an attraction of opposites, both physically and temperamentally. Sussman is tiny, small-boned as a sparrow, with large, emotional, dark brown eyes. Prejza tends to the plump, with a cheerful, big, round face to match. Sussman is intuitive, mercurial, quick-tempered. Prezja is thoughtful, deliberate, slow to anger.

“I was fascinated by Deborah’s short fuse,” her husband says. “If she feels something, she expresses it, without fear or favor. That is sexy.”

‘Really Thinks Things Through’

“Paul seemed so stable,” Sussman recalls. “He absorbed a lot of my electricity without getting thrown. On top of that, he has an intellectual capacity I lack. He really thinks things through.”

Their backgrounds are also dissimilar. The daughter of a Russian-born New York City commercial artist, Sussman studied at the Institute of Design in Chicago before “drifting West.”

“I hated life in Los Angeles in the 1950s,” she says. “There was no art scene, no public life. Fortunately I became part of the Eames family in the Palisades, otherwise I think I would have left town. Now it would be strange not to be here.”

“Deborah was like a daughter to Charles and me,” Ray Eames recalls. “She was so bright, and such a terrific worker. In the studio in those days we tore everything apart with a passion, never holding back. She always held her own in these tussles, right from the start.”

Prejza, the son of a Czech-born businessman from the outskirts of Pittsburg, came to Los Angeles soon after graduation from the Carnegie Institute of Technology. There he worked for North American Aviation as an engineering planner for the Apollo moon shot program.

“I always felt I was in the wrong latitudes in Pennsylvania,” he says. “I came here to visit a friend one summer, and never left. I guess I always felt the tug of the wind blowing from the West.”

Now there is a total fusion of work, marriage and social life for the couple, says Prezja: “Deborah and I talk about work all the time, even after 12-hour days in the office. We really can’t think about anything else.”

But in the division of roles a busy practice has imposed, Prejza tends to be the organizer, Sussman the inspirer.

“Deborah is deeply intuitive,” notes architect Jon Jerde, whose office coordinated the design of the 1984 Olympics. “She is the only graphics designer I know who goes deeper than the merely physical aspect of things into the experiential--what it really feels like to be in that particular space.

“She is very intense, often arrogant in her passion, and can be incredibly difficult to work with,” he adds. “But she is always worth the trouble.”

“My gripe,” Prejza says, “is that I’m forced into the position of the man who makes it all work, after the designers have run riot. It makes me crazy if I don’t have time for my own creative work.”

April Grieman, a 40-year-old avant-garde designer who often collaborates with Sussman and Prezja, remarked on the age gap between the partners and the 20-plus young people in their Santa Monica office, collectively known as “the kids.”

‘They Lack the Confidence’

“The kids are talented,” Grieman says, “but they lack the confidence to really challenge or innovate from within. Calling them ‘the kids’ highlights the rather paternalistic attitude prevalent in the practice.”

“It’s true I feel like a father towards the designers in my office,” Prejza confirms. “Lacking children of my own, I enjoy seeing young minds grow under my tutelage. It fulfills a vital part of me absent in my private life.”

Says Sussman: “We never had children of our own because we’ve always been so immersed in work. The truth is, I don’t feel any older than the youngsters in the studio. I’m still a kid at heart myself.”

The roster of distinguished architects who sponsored the firm for AIA honors included Barton Myers, Cesar Pelli, Skidmore Owings & Merrill and Frank Gehry, and historian Esther McCoy.

“Deborah Sussman and I worked together on a series of projects during the late 1960s and early 1970s,” Gehry wrote in his letter of sponsorship. “I am impressed by her elegance, care and incredible attention to detail.”

Many who have worked with Sussman Prezja applaud the firm’s capacity to enhance the architecture by getting under the skin of the design.

‘Essentially Complacent’ Work

“Their popularity with architects is one of the keys to their success,” Hodgetts says. “And it is a prime reason why their work is so essentially complacent.

“Sussman Prezja is the Baskin Robbins of design. They are inventive with a variety of flavors, all of them superficially flashy yet essentially bland and ungritty,” he continues. “In that sense they are typically Angeleno. They are certainly never avant-garde in any real sense of pushing out the boundaries of the art.”

Says Prezja: “We are part of the endeavor to figure out L.A.’s true spirit. Though we are working all over the country, this city remains our home, the place where our style was formed and developed to its current fruition.

“Los Angeles helped invent us,” he adds, “and we have helped invent L.A. in the eyes of the world.”