STYLE: INTERIORS : THE INNER SANCTUM : At Home in a World of One’s Own
Painted scarlet, paprika and pimento, the living room inspires passion. For restful dreams, the bedroom comes in three shades of blue. With a paintbrush and furniture of his own creation, Juan Fernandez, a native of New York’s Spanish Harlem, has turned his Silver Lake house into “a place that is totally safe--my own world.”
“If it’s depressing outside, the house’s colors lift me up,” says the 38-year-old actor, a former model and protege of Salvador Dali. Like the surrealist master, Fernandez has adorned his home with curious objets --an outdoor cupid fountain holds a Mexican sombrero, electrified glass grapes glow amid a nest of pine cones and metal roses snipped from candelabra grow on the dining room walls.
Fernandez designed his own wrought-iron furniture and decorated circus-tent fabric with mirrors and crystals from old chandeliers for draperies. “Dali taught me self-expression,” Fernandez says. “Most people are afraid to reveal themselves. Houses should reflect who you are.”
No Gray Areas
Practically every inch of this former Hollywood printing factory swirls with a black-and-white motif--the harlequin-tiled floor, the geometric-patterned dhurrie carpets, the calfskin-clad furniture. Even the piece de resistance, a three-panel screen that separates two living rooms, is painted with exotic salt-and-pepper flamingos.
“After working with colors all the time, black-and-white is very soothing to me,” says Tony Moses, a 45-year-old interior designer whose clients have included Grace Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Lionel Hampton and Charles Dutton. Moses framed a gallery of black-and-white family portraits and hung them against a startling lilac background, one of the home-studio’s few accent colors. He continued the two-tone theme in the kitchen, where shelving holds neat stacks of black-and-white baked-enamel pots and pans, cups and saucers, trays and plates.
Originally trained as a cabinetmaker, Moses earned a bachelor’s degree in interior design at the Maryland Institute College of Art and opened his own firm in Baltimore. Later, he worked as home design editor for Essence before trading New York (“Living there became such a hassle.”) for Los Angeles five years ago. The move, Moses says, has meant a lifestyle change with pros and cons: “Life has become so violent; mistaken identities can make you dead. Here, I can tuck myself away and escape from reality.”
A Pet Project
Fantastic forms sprout from the walls of this sixth-floor studio apartment north of MacArthur Park. What are they? “That’s open for interpretation,” says their creator, Steven Corvelo. An elementary school teacher turned artist, he describes his home as a “living fantasy.” Huge worm-like shapes snake from the ceiling and through doorways, a giant octopus-like form hovers above the kitchen table and a pair of ostrich-like creatures with toy Ford Mustangs for beaks--Corvelo calls these “LAnimals”--emerge over the kitchen counters.
“It was my first apartment by myself, so I could do anything I wanted,” says the 32-year-old UCLA fine arts graduate. A fascination with Southern California’s palm trees and cars helped Corvelo shape his private menagerie, which took three years to paint and sculpt from papier-mache and plaster. Currently, he’s weaving his LAnimals and red angels into a children’s story that he hopes will someday become a movie. “I made virtually everything here,” Corvelo says, pointing to the sculptures, tables, lamps and other revamped items purchased from used-furniture stores, yard sales and flea markets. “I wanted it to be like nothing else.”