Visiting Mr. Belvedere : Interiors: Designer John Benecke put plenty of surprises into the Belvedere mansion in Tustin Hills. Now, it has a personality as individual as a fingerprint.

At Belvedere mansion in Tustin Hills, things are not always as they appear.

A refrigerator is disguised by a trompe l’oeil painting to look like an old-fashioned pantry. A mirror in the bathroom conceals a shower, another hides a television set. Even a dish towel hanging over a kitchen cupboard turns out to be nothing more than a painted illusion.

Visitors will find plenty to trick and tease the eye at a home and garden tour of Belvedere sponsored by the Decorative Arts Study Center in San Juan Capistrano from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Oct. 26.

The 6,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style villa and grounds are a combination fun house, museum, nature walk and petting zoo. The house has, since it was built in 1926, undergone a drastic renovation under its current owner, developer and property manager Richard Silver.

“What the house didn’t have was elegance. It looked tired,” says Santa Ana interior designer John Benecke. “We gutted the house, but we did keep the old flair.”

In decorating Belvedere, Benecke has put the everything-must-coordinate look to shame. He travels around the world looking for eclectic furnishings and art. When he sees a unique piece he thinks will fit a client’s home, he buys it and lugs it home.

“That makes it personal,” he says. “I don’t like everything to match.”

Thus Belvedere is a house with a personality as individual as a fingerprint. It is filled with surprises.

In the kitchen, trompe l’oeil paintings on the cupboard doors and refrigerator give the illusion of an open pantry with colorful vegetables stored behind chicken wire.

In the master bedroom, a pair of socks and underwear hang from a clothesline strung across the posts of a wrought-iron Renaissance-style bed; a closer inspection reveals the “garments” are carved of pine.

Like a magician, Benecke often works with mirrors to fool the eye.

He covers one long wall of the guest bath entirely with mirror, which appears to double the room’s size and reflects the geometric pattern in the Portuguese tile. One mirrored panel opens to reveal a shower, and another hides a toilet.

Benecke also uses mirrors to solve what he calls “every designer’s nightmare”: how to hide the television. Open the side mirror in the master bath, and out slides a small television to watch while brushing one’s teeth.

European art works and collectibles worthy of a museum can be found throughout the home. A massive early 19th-Century mirror in a carved gold gilt frame dominates a wall in the entry. In the center of the entry, encircled by a winding staircase, stands a 19th-Century French bronze statue that almost ended up in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Along one hallway hangs a painting of a man with a handkerchief believed by the museum to be the work of Edouard Manet.

Lest one take the profusion of fine art too seriously, Benecke has added comical life-size foam sculptures of a butler to inhabit the library and a maid upstairs who wields a duster.

“I’ve shopped everywhere, from Laguna Beach to Cairo,” he says. On a recent trip to Africa, he brought back two chairs from Nairobi carved in the form of a giraffe and a cheetah that will go in the guest house.

“You really have to let your imagination go. You can’t be afraid to mix things.”

Belvedere offers many examples of the importance of texture to design. The pale green walls of the guest bath, for instance, have fine ridges formed by combing through a thin layer of plaster. The roughness of the walls complements the room’s smooth Brazilian blue granite countertop and mirrored surfaces.

Often Benecke makes do with the materials at hand in innovative ways.

A concrete driveway that once ran up to the home’s front steps has been removed. Benecke had the old concrete broken into pieces and stained a sandy color. They now look like flat sandstone--another trompe l’oeil. He set the stones in clover to make a far more attractive walking path leading from the drive to the house.

When it came time to transform the billiard room into a wine cellar, Benecke removed the gold and green shag carpet and old floor tile and decided he liked the nubby texture of the concrete floor underneath. He used a sponge to dabble multicolored paint over the floor, then added Oriental rugs.

For a warm, earthy effect, he pulled off the wallpaper and had painters copy a section where the wall was mildewed, leaving the glue on for added texture.

Inside the wine cellar, friends can sit round a glass table and sample the stock. The wine bottles are kept in bins of rough-hewn cedar built into the wall. When the cellar was finished, Benecke sprayed the cedar with cheap wine to give it a rich, musty aroma.

“The contractor thought I was crazy,” he says.

Benecke doesn’t try to make a house conform to preconceived notions of design. Rather, he draws inspiration from the surroundings.

For instance, peacocks roam the property and sometimes find their way inside the home to peer at themselves in one of the bathroom mirrors. Benecke thought it fitting to put a vase full of their feathers in a powder room.

“Normally, I would hate that,” he says. Yet the feathers fit the room’s exotic porcelain sink hand-painted with an Oriental motif, the red wallpaper and the amusing monkey pictures and figurines.

“I do what the house dictates. If it was a contemporary house, I wouldn’t do what I’ve done here,” he says. “I walk into a house, and it doesn’t all come to me at once--it comes over time.”

Often he sees a great furnishing and decides “that would be perfect for those people in Rancho Santa Fe.”

“I love to shock clients. If they say blue, I’ll show them green. If I give them exactly what they want, what do they need me for?”

Belvedere provides a good example of architect, landscaper and interior designer working together.

Benecke and architect Walter Wilkman renovated the entire upstairs, converting two children’s bedrooms into a large master bedroom and bath with a huge walk-in closet. They took out two small linen closets that occupied the upstairs landing and made them into lighted display niches for showing off two impressive artworks--a 1st-Century Roman eagle and an artist’s rendition of a statue of liberty carved in wood and rejected by the French government in favor of the now-famous version in New York.

Benecke also added bay windows downstairs by the kitchen and the dining room that drew more light into the home, and had an octagon-shaped window cut above the dual sinks in the master bath.

“People said, ‘Oh you’ll ruin the house by adding those windows,’ ” Benecke says. Instead, the windows keep the home from looking dreary, and they blend so seamlessly with the architecture that it’s hard to tell the original from the new.

The library was added to the front of the home. Benecke went to the lumberyard to pick out a high grade of pine with small knots to use for paneling the interior walls and ceiling.

From the library and at various vantage points all around the house, one can view the lawn below--a great swatch of grass in front with a trellis of cut logs on one side bordered with lush vegetation.

This is not a neat, manicured yard. It has the feel of a nature walk with its blend of wisteria, roses, Mexican sage and other plants.

“It’s an English garden feel with a lot of California native plants,” Benecke says.

In the far corner is a small petting zoo with two llamas named Mozart and Charlie, two pygmy goats, geese and chickens.

Reservations for the home tour are required. They may be made by calling the center at (714) 496-2132. Maps and tickets will be mailed when the reservation is made.

Tickets are $35 per person, $50 including lunch; proceeds support the center, a nonprofit organization.

In conjunction with the home tour, the Decorative Arts Study Center will have a designers’ symposium called “Do You Want to Build or Remodel?” that will help those inspired by Belvedere to renovate their own homes.

The panel of designers includes Mario Buatta of New York, whose clients include Barbara Walters and Billy Joel; Nancy Goslee Power, former editor of House Beautiful; John Saladino of New York, creator of an award-winning furniture line, and Hutton Wilkinson, a Los Angeles interior decorator.

They will appear together for the symposium from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 25, at the Design Center South, 23811 Aliso Creek Road, Laguna Niguel. Cost is $150 for the symposium, lunch and afternoon tea, or $25 to attend only the tea. Reservations may be made by calling the center.