Style : INTERIORS : Dramatic Twists

No doubt the silent-screen actress who once owned this house in Hollywood--or the servants of hers who lived here--would have a hard time recognizing it today. Ron Meyers, designer of Atlas Bar & Grill and DC3’s new Club Lux, took the 1920s clapboard house and, over three years, transformed it into a home theatrical enough for a star.

At 650 square feet (150 of which used to be the driveway, now an “outdoor room”), this is a little house that takes big risks. In the bedroom, Meyers covered each pelmet, or decorative valance, with Rowlux, a shimmery plastic developed in the late ‘60s and sometimes used on zany greeting cards. A miniature light and a large tassel complete the novel window treatment and add interest to a room that Meyers used to call “very bland.”

The dining room features other innovative touches: a table painted to resemble marquetry (you have to look closely to see that it’s fake), a green basket-weave pattern painted on the floor and chairs dressed in Stanley DeSantis crowned-lion T-shirts and Karl Mann faux -leopard fabric. A swap-meet bargain at five yards for $15, the same fabric costs considerably more at a showroom.

Meyers, who holds a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Hartford in Connecticut, says his work is about “evoking the emotional quality of a room” and that “color is paramount.” The dining room’s French-blue walls with ochre doors and moldings, painted and glazed, are a case in point. Also dramatic is the “mystery” concoction of pigmented plaster in the living room and bedroom. “The matte-black walls gave me the opportunity to combine intense colors--tomato, turquoise, bright green,” he says.

For Meyers, who is always experimenting, his walls have become his canvas and his house a laboratory for new ideas.