The Unruffled Designer : In a Turbulent World of Egos, Waldo Fernandez, ‘Designer to the Stars,’ Almost Always Gets His Way

Two days before the unveiling of the Beverly Hilton ballroom he refurbished, interior designer Waldo Fernandez learned that a fire had caused $1 million in damages to the Moroccan-style La Quinta ranch he designed for Merv Griffin.

With dozens of celebrities and camera crews about to sweep through the peach-and-beige Hilton ballroom, and with a mansion still in embers, Fernandez was placid.

“I’m doing OK,” he said, measuring his words. “When I got the call from the contractor, I was shocked. How could it happen? But at least nobody got hurt, that’s the most important thing. Nobody was in the house.”

Reputation for Tolerance

That Fernandez remained unruffled is typical of his personal style, if not his designs. It’s no wonder the 41-year-old designer has a reputation for getting along ridiculously well with his star clients, some of whom have questionable taste and egos as overstuffed as the Waldo cushions they sit upon.

Of course, they pay him to work his magic on their homes, but not to design cookie-cutter abodes. “He did my house according to my taste and life style, while some decorators put their mark on everything. . . ,” says client Alana Stewart. “I told him that I wanted a canopy bed with kind of gauzy fabric over it--it’s something I’ve always loved. He came up with exactly the kind of the thing I’d envisioned.”

The Waldo style is contemporary California casual: oversize sofas with enormous cushions; rattan; concrete slab tables; pale, monochromatic hues, and lots of windows and mirrors. He designed Trump’s restaurant eight years ago (and is part owner) and on a recent visit for lunch there decided he wouldn’t change a thing today, except maybe the flowers.

Celebrities Like the Look

It’s a look the rich and famous have come to adore. And if you must ask how much he charges for a job, well . . . figure that an antique reproduction side table in his showroom came with a price tag of $10,000.

Who lives in Waldo-designed homes? Goldie Hawn, Carole Bayer Sager and Burt Bacharach, Michael and Pat York and City Council candidate Lisa Specht and her public relations executive husband, Ron Rogers.

Among his 18 current projects are several grand-scale jobs: Griffin’s 60,000-square-foot Beverly Hills hilltop home (“actually,” he says dryly, “it’s 59,000 square feet, but we say 60,000 because at that point, 1,000 square feet doesn’t make any difference”); remodeling Griffin’s Beverly Hilton; real estate developer Dar Mahboubi’s imposing mansion, and the redesign of Griffin’s most recent acquisition, the Resorts International Hotel in Atlantic City.

Fernandez didn’t become interior-designer-to-the-stars by being a pushover. With a style as polished as chintz, he eventually gets his way.

If he has any habits that might be perceived as egocentric, it is that he likes clients to visit him instead of his making house calls. “I found that a lot of people who call and ask you to go to a job site, they’re not as interested as when they come to you,” he explains.

At a recent meeting with a couple who are building a new home, the middle-aged blond wife who was carrying blueprints in a Louis Vuitton tote bag, tells Fernandez how she wants the front door to look.

“You know the front door at Bulgari in New York?” she asks. “I don’t know why, I just love that door. Could we do something like that, in the open basket weave design?”

Fernandez, without a twitch, nods and quietly steers her back to a discussion of doorknobs. “We’ll talk about that later,” he says.

There is method in his smoothness. “You have to have a strength to make them feel good, but in the end try to get your way,” he later explains in Spanish-accented English. His personal style is as subdued and classy as his furnishings: He sports an Oxford shirt, striped tie, gray herringbone pants that match the gray industrial carpeting in his showroom. A fat Mont Blanc pen rests in his pocket; his hair and neatly trimmed mustache show traces of gray.

“You’re working with people’s emotions and taste,” he continues, “so you have to watch out that you don’t hurt their feelings. If my clients come up with an idea, I say, ‘Fine, let’s think about it.’ And in the process of doing a job, I kind of--little by little--make them feel that maybe I am right. I say, ‘Let’s wait two weeks or a month,’ and then I say the same thing I said before. If I believe in something that much, then I’m not going to budge.”

There are never arguments, he insists. “And I have some crazy clients.”

They “are very undecided. They’re just that way by nature--they’re that way with a pair of shoes. It drives me crazy because it takes too much time. It just drains you. I have two clients like that, and they are wonderful people. People in my office say, ‘Why don’t you say goodby to them? You don’t need that.’ But I figure that I put up with a lot of little things. They’re not mean people, they just have these awful insecurities.”

‘Loves a Challenge’

“I know he loves a challenge,” says friend and client Ryan Collier, vice president of the Trope Co., a Beverly Hills real estate firm. “The more a client can’t make up his mind, in kicks that challenge for him to strive to bring his design and the client together.”

When Collier has gone with Fernandez on buying trips, he notes that, “If something isn’t in perfect condition or if he doesn’t think it will please the client or represent his good taste, he wouldn’t even consider it.”

Fernandez is a self-proclaimed perfectionist. Spending 15 minutes discussing the merits of shower heads is his idea of a good time.

“A year and a half after he did my house he still walks over and fluffs the pillows on the sofa,” Stewart says.

Fernandez believes such quirks make him a “nightmare” to work for, though he laughs when he says this. Fifteen-hour work days (with an hour break for a workout with his personal trainer) make him a challenge to keep up with.

“Am I a workaholic?” he asks. “I don’t know what that means. I like working like this.

“I think I’m difficult,” he adds. “I like things a certain way. . . . At the end of the day, I want to know what has been done, and if it hasn’t been done I want to know why.”

Credits His Mother

His need for organization is innate; his love of design he credits to his mother. “She didn’t work at it,” he says, recalling the chintz-and ruffles Cuban home she decorated, “but she had an eye for that.”

His father was a mechanical engineer who owned a shipyard. Fernandez left home at age 15 to avoid a five-year mandatory stint in the military (his parents and a younger brother were stalled for eight years by red tape, he says).

He lived briefly with relatives in Miami and New York, then headed west on a Greyhound bus for Los Angeles. “I decided maybe that’s the place to go,” he says casually, as if deciding on chocolate instead of vanilla.

While he worked at “little jobs” while attending L.A. City College and UCLA, his mind was on design. His big break came when he was hired by Walter Scott to work in the set design department at 20th Century Fox on such films as “Dr. Doolittle” and “Hello, Dolly!”

He learned a theatrical style from Scott, but tired of studio politics and went off on his own. Of course, having entertainment contacts didn’t hurt--his first jobs were studio offices, then homes of studio execs.

He learned early that first impressions of clients don’t count. “When a new client would walk into my office, I used to look at what they wore,” he recalls. “But I learned that that’s not right. Because years ago I used to wear Levi’s and T-shirts and tennis shoes, and that’s all. And I would walk into Tiffany and they look at you, and I have as much money as somebody else with a suit on. So especially in L.A., you never know. The sloppiest people could walk into your shop, and they’re worth millions.”

Fernandez is the first to say that his style is borrowed from those who came before him--primarily the late designer Michael Taylor, known for pioneering the “California look” in interiors.

Fond of Airy Look

“He knew scale,” he says. “I think I took a little bit from that and a little bit from something else--nothing new, I don’t think. Everything has been done. It’s how to do it and get it done better or change it. I’ve always liked that airy look, even when I’ve done chintz and flowers. I like cleanness, I like simple things.”

His company has expanded to include home accessories sold at department stores nationwide. It also has an architectural division. Fernandez calls himself a “frustrated architect” and lacks formal training but has been designing houses for years.

Architecture has given him a new respect for buildings: “I think the spaces are more important than the pieces of furniture. I think if you do good spaces, then everything else makes it look great. . . .”

When asked if a celebrity clientele helped build his business, it’s a moot point for Fernandez: “When I went to do my first job, it was for a director. So I always had that clientele.”

His clients often become friends--multimillionaire Griffin, for example. The former talk show host says Fernandez is “the perfect choice” to redo the Resorts hotel, though a glitzy casino is the antithesis of Fernandez’s understated style.

“It’s a different kind of theatrical designing--it’s fantasy land,” Griffin says from his Resorts suite. “People come here and don’t expect it to look like anything in their home town.”

But he says of Fernandez: “I love his ability to improvise. Most people say, ‘How can you allow him to change his mind? It’s too costly.’ But he doesn’t change his mind in the original concept of the room; he starts improvising little touches that really finishes the room off, so it isn’t a locked-in pre-production.”

Fernandez has thought about how he sees the Atlantic City hotel: “I’m going to do some crystals, like stalactites, in fiberglass, and gold-plate the inside and put lights in them. So when you walk down into the room, it’s like you’re in a cave.”

He smiles broadly at the thought. “You could do crazy things because you’re not going to live in it.”

This from a man who lives in a 1,200-square-foot house, which might fit into some of his clients’ bathrooms. He has put in an offer to buy a 105-acre Malibu ranch that includes a Frank Lloyd Wright house untouched in 22 years. The ranch’s main house was never built but Fernandez says there are blueprints.

Plenty of Work

With the rest of the Hilton and the Resorts hotel to finish and several residences to work on, it’s unlikely he will have much free time on his hands anytime soon.

After all, Fernandez has new generations of nouveaux riches to educate.

“I think the level of taste is improving, especially in the last four or five years,” he says. “We’ve grown a lot. We seem to get more theater, museums, people seem to be getting more into culture, and I think that there are more Europeans moving here and bringing that culture to the L.A. area. . . . There is hope for anybody who wants to learn and wants to have beautiful things around them.

“I tell my clients, instead of buying 10 ugly pieces, buy three good pieces. Money-wise it’s better, and the beauty and the quality is there. You keep clients happy, and then they keep you busy.”