Inside Looking Out : No Longer an Expression of Public Protest, Murals Move Off the Freeway and Into the Home

It’s a simple yet strangely moving mural of clouds, framing a skylight and visible from the guest room.

“Our guests say they have fantasy dreams when they stay here,” screenwriter Carol Doumani says, describing effects of the Terry Schoonhaven mural and other art in the Venice home she shares with her husband, Roy. “Murals don’t just belong in public places. It’s quite wonderful to live with them. This one doesn’t shout out at you: ‘I’m important. Look at me.’ It’s just a nice, little surprise you get if you happen to look that way.”

Popular in hippie-style interiors of the 1960s, and later the star attractions on office buildings and freeways, murals are increasingly being viewed in private places. But this time out, they’re rarely the cartoonish wall paintings of drug-inspired flower children.

Today’s residential murals are often created by noted public mural artists such as Schoonhaven or Kent Twitchell, who recently completed a two-story-high portrait of artist Don Bachardy on the backside of the home of art collectors Peter and Eileen Norton in Santa Monica.

Business Never Been Better

Other artists say they find themselves with more and more requests to create huge wall paintings in private homes. And paint-to-order muralists who don’t consider themselves fine artists--but charge as much as $8,000 for an average mural--claim that business has never been better. Even some set designers, such as Los Angeles’ Bob Zentis, have been sought out to produce murals in homes.

Consider, for instance, Zentis’ richly detailed outer space scene that 35-year-old Mathew Tombers falls to sleep with at night.

“It’s a floor-to-ceiling mural with a foreign moon that looms like it’s rising over an alien landscape. It’s painted and lit in such a way that it literally glows at night when I turn the lights on. In a darkened room it looks like a space port has opened,” says Tombers, the western regional sales director for A & E Cable Network. “Sometimes, as I lay my head back against the pillows, I can see the mural as I’m falling asleep and my thoughts just free-flow.

“It really takes me out of myself and causes me to reflect. It awakens my sense of wonder, and sometimes makes me feel like I’m a little kid again. . . . When I have out-of-town guests, I often lend them my bedroom. My sister-in-law couldn’t stop laughing. My brother tells all his friends about it. A couple of people asked me to turn out the black light because it kept them awake. People who’ve heard about this are asking for tours of the house.”

What’s behind such flights of fancy? Why are murals suddenly spreading from freeways and neighborhood revitalization projects to kitchens and dining rooms and bathrooms and dens?

“Murals are a way of being in your environment and transcending it at the same time,” suggests Don Lagerberg, a Cal State Fullerton professor of art who taught mural painting to many of the muralists working today.

Thus, it’s increasingly common to find trompe l’oeil nature themes (sunsets, forests and gardens) painted on the walls of city-bound homes. Says Ann Warnick, describing the mural of a sunset created by artist Miriam Slater for her Beverly Hills den: “It has a feeling of the outdoors. It brings peace and serenity. You get the feeling almost that you’re not in your own den, that you’re in the setting that the mural is in.”

Henry Andreae, a retired commander in Britain’s Royal Navy who lives in Santa Barbara, has a similar experience with the dining room mural painted for him by Robert Walker, a Santa Monica-based muralist well-known in the interior design community.

“The mural brought the outside to the inside. It’s a scene of Santa Barbara with reflections of the Far East. All the guests gyrate to it,” says Andreae, now a venture capitalist. “The weird thing is that if you were to turn off all the lights in the room, the mural seems to be lit by moonlight.”

Echoes of the ‘60s

Some observers suspect the recent interest in residential murals is simply part of the aging hippie syndrome. “I think there are a lot of leftover hippies. We dress better and look better now,” says interior designer Jarrett Hedborg, 38, who has hired artists to do murals and decorative painting for such clients as Bette Midler and Jack Nicholson.

“Basically, what you’ve got now are a lot of leftover hippies with money. These people have a love of real creativity and humor. . . . My philosophy is that somewhere in the room, it’s got to have a giggle and if it doesn’t, you’re a very sad person. It doesn’t have to be an out-and-out knee slapper, but we need whimsy in our lives.”

Sherman Oaks-based Hedborg also finds that murals can offer their owners the illusion of permanence.

“All the people I work for lead extremely public lives and want to have quiet private lives. They really are not looking to impress anyone. Murals give a feeling of home, not June and Ward Cleaver, but almost a 19th-Century feeling of home. People who want murals in their homes are trying to create permanence,” he says.

‘Anti-Dynasty Look’

Bette Midler, for example, wanted her home to look as if she and her husband had lived there for 20 years, Hedborg recalls. “She wanted to tell (her daughter) Sophie that grandma and grandpa had lived there before that. It’s a very anti-’Dynasty’ school of design, very anti-glitz.”

For Midler’s home, Hedborg commissioned artist Nancy A. Kintisch to paint soft-hued garden flowers on a bedroom fireplace and trompe l’oeil scenes (resembling other places in the house) on panels in a door. Kintisch’s work has an intentionally aged look about it, as if it were done a couple of generations ago.

“It doesn’t look like it’s freshly done and it doesn’t look as if it’s falling off either,” Kintisch explains. “I try to do something that looks as if, when the house was built, somebody was in there, sort of a mad artist.

”. . . It’s nice to have the evidence of human hands and love around you. It’s different than getting wallpaper, because that’s so evidently a product of the Machine Age. Having someone come in and actually pour their heart into your home, the results are a lot friendlier.”

Source of Revival

They may also add to the value of the home, points out Dawn Heinsbergen of the A. T. Heinsbergen Co., a Los Angeles interior design firm known for mural work for the last 70 years. Heinsbergen believes the current revival of residential murals stems from financial conditions in the early ‘80s.

“In 1980-81, the interest rates went soaring. . . . Out of that came words we hadn’t heard much before: restoration and rehabilitation. All of a sudden, what became very popular was the saving of our older buildings,” she says. “What is a trend commercially often becomes a trend residentially. We’ve found people are taking a greater look at older homes as a way to go, restoring them--and that often involves some sort of decorative paintings. It was somewhat camp in the ‘60s to do murals in homes, but what’s transpiring today is beautiful artwork.”

Architectural Digest editor Paige Rense also credits economic considerations for the growing revival in murals. “It’s certainly in reaction to $17-million paintings,” Rense says. “We may soon see murals everywhere.”

Response to the Boring

Robert Hutchinson, a San Francisco-based interior designer whose work has been featured in Architectural Digest, suspects the trend is partially a response to boring architecture. Thus, he sometimes collaborates with plasterers, painters, stone masons and carpenters in creating sculptural murals on walls.

“We’re starving for some kind of relief. We’re tired of buying postage-stamp paintings and putting them on the walls,” he says. “People are looking for real architecture, not just flat walls. That’s why they’re buying murals. They add painted architecture to the given architecture.”

British author Caroline Cass, whose “Modern Murals, Grand Illusions in Interior Decoration” was published earlier this year by the Whitney Library of Design, similarly credits the “remarkable comeback” of murals to “a palpable reaction against the sterile walls and bare spaces of postwar architecture.

“The urge to make our houses and buildings more attractive, a nostalgia for the past, the challenge of working on a huge scale and the large amount of money offered to the best muralists, especially in America, have all contributed to the mural’s current popularity,” she writes.

Peace of Mind

What this boils down to for most people who commission residential murals is that elusive quality of peace of mind, muralist Walker says.

“Murals enhance your day-to-day living,” agrees his colleague, Douglas Riseborough, who has been painting murals for most of his 65 years, favoring Renaissance styles. In his Venice home, for instance, Riseborough wanted a pleasant reminder of Venice beach as he remembered it in the 1950s. So from memory, he painted a huge beach scene on the wall of his living room, employing a style reminiscent of Botticelli’s “Venus.” “It’s wonderful to see people every day (in the mural) living joyfully and sensitively,” he says.

Computer software entrepreneur Peter Norton has similar experiences with the Twitchell mural of Don Bachardy--who is one of his neighbors--on the back of his home.

“This turned out much more successfully than I imagined. There’s a side effect I didn’t expect with this,” Norton says.

“The mural is over two stories high, and if you look out some of the upstairs bedroom windows you see a giant version of Don’s face. It’s not as if it’s peering into the window, but as if there’s something really interesting out there. It’s as though, out of the corner of your eye, you were seeing something magical, like there was an angel passing by.”