Creating New Design Flavors : Architecture: By combining a variety of styles, designer Larry Totah has created his own unique statement.
In designer Larry Totah’s living room, the fireplace is flanked by a pair of red and orange “Humpty Dumpty” easy chairs that resemble sci-fi versions of Adirondack garden furniture. A copper coffee table on curly iron legs is guarded by padded crimson sofas, whose shapes mimic the mouth of the “M.A.S.H.” character “Hot Lips” Houlihan.
To set off these odd curves and colors, the floors of Totah’s Hancock Park Craftsman home are plain waxed oak. Walls are finished in a somber gray. The total effect is both outlandish and cozy.
His talent for creating such idiosyncratic yet comforting interior scenarios has established Totah as a designer of international reputation. In the last five years, however, Totah, 34, has spread his wings to design everything from boutiques and restaurants to furniture and flatware.
Totah’s unique style is best seen in the design that made his name in Los Angeles: the 1986 Maxfield fashion store on Melrose Avenue, one block west of the Pacific Design Center.
Maxfield’s exterior is a raw concrete cube with a single showcase window on the street. The main door, guarded by a phalanx of monolithic figures resembling Easter Island gods, is hidden at the back. The interior’s cracked cement floor and bare gray surfaces set off the opulence of the expensive luxuries on display, creating an ambience of “neo-primitive” hedonism.
“You only have to be around Larry for a few minutes to realize how clever and sensitive he is,” said Maxfield owner Tommy Perse. “He intuits what you’re after even if you’re not quite sure yourself, and filters it through his special sensibility. The result is so subtle it looks simple, but who else could bring off his unique dialogue between the rough and the sleek, the raw and the cooked?”
Totah describes his style as “the use of inelegant materials for elegant uses.” Working from sources that include Arts and Crafts, Streamline Moderne, Art Deco and 1950s Functional, combined with echoes of ancient Greece and Persia, he dreams up a kind of California Cuisine that fuses sweetness and roughness, sophistication and naivete.
“It’s like mixing pineapples and potatoes to make new flavors,” Totah explained. “Any adventurous Angeleno chef knows that such unlikely combinations sharpen the palate.”
Totah said his furniture leads familiar forms down unfamiliar paths. His “Aphrodite” line of curly iron chairs and tables gets its name from Totah’s memory of the luxuriant tresses on a statue of the goddess of love. Some of his wooden chairs, inspired by the Arts and Crafts perfection of Gustav Stickley, take on added menace with twisted shapes, such as gracefully poised praying mantises ready to embrace you.
Totah’s chairs, tables and sofas, sold through his Cozmopole store on Larchmont Boulevard, are popular with a hip, young clientele that includes such movie industry lights as “Rain Man” director Barry Levinson. Prices run from $400 for a leather-seated iron Spirole dining chair to $4,800 for a “Hot Lips” sofa and love seat ensemble.
Totah favors vividly colored, comfortable open-necked shirts and baggy pants supported by suspenders. Reared in Texas, he followed an undergraduate degree from the University of Houston with a spell at the avant-garde Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC) in Santa Monica when he arrived in Los Angeles in 1977.
“SCI-ARC’s abstract approach to design bored me,” Totah said. “I preferred the hands-on education of serving an apprenticeship with woodworkers and upholsterers. This experience gave me a respect for craftsmanship and an understanding of how furniture is actually put together. Both these things have allowed me to experiment and create new forms in a loving and expert way.”
On Melrose Avenue, two blocks west of La Brea, is the people clothes boutique, one of Totah’s latest creations. Totah dubs the people design “Japanese Neo-Gypsy.”
The former studio of photographer Max Yavno, people has a hacienda-like frontage of white stuccoed archways with a red Mexican tile floor. A thick wooden door leads into a stark, high-ceilinged interior featuring counters constructed of old timber salvaged from a wrecking yard. A stairway with a wrought-iron railing leads to a balcony where designer shoes are displayed. A typically baroque Totah touch is seen in the panels of red and blue glass set high up, casting colored reflections on the creamy walls.
“Architecture sells designer clothes,” said people proprietor Neal Gaydos. Gaydos, who intends to show art as well as fashion in his store--”a mix of paintings and pants”--discovered Totah’s work at Maxfield. “Larry and I latched onto one another instantly,” he said. “He is a highly gifted . . . guy.”
Kenji Seki, who commissioned Totah to design his new Noa Noa restaurant in Beverly Hills in a lush Polynesian Revival manner inspired by 1950s L.A. coffee shops, praises the designer’s sophistication. “Larry realized that the Southern Californian style of sunshine and surfing, of pastels and pastiche was passe,” Seki said. “He saw that we needed designs that, while being clearly Angeleno, were less obvious in manner, more complex in aspiration.”
To retain an intimate connection with every aspect of his professional practice, Totah has deliberately cut back his operation. A few years ago, around the time he opened Cozmopole, Totah had a large staff and worked seven days a week. Now he works out of his Larchmont Boulevard studio with a small staff of three--a draftsman, a secretary and one assistant.
“I’ve always had a lot of work, but I don’t like to be too busy,” Totah said. “It can dilute the quality. I need to spend a lot of time getting to know my clients or dreaming up new furniture. Since my whole aim is to make people happy, I have to have a rapport with my patrons that’s genuine, not forced or phony.”
“Larry can be damn stubborn if he feels you’re compromising his idea,” Maxfield’s Perse said. “We had a lot of arguments during the design, (which came) close to actual fist fights. But overall I have to say he’s a pleasure to work with and a terrific talent who’s only just hitting his stride in a rhythm that’s wholly his own.”
