DECORATING : Rose Tarlow Sees Beauty in How Things Were, How They Will Be

Rose Tarlow has become almost a cult figure in the world of interior design. Not for decades has a West Coast designer had such a broad impact on interior decoration.

Long in advance of the ‘90s trend toward simplicity and character, Tarlow moved away from highly polished pieces in favor of well-worn but noble antiques.

She anticipated the current preference for monochromatic, off-white rooms and has helped make overscaled, traditionally inspired wood furniture--which she designs and manufactures--into a national trend.

Entertainment mogul David Geffen entrusted her with the multimillion-dollar redo of the former Jack Warner mansion he bought for $47.5 million in 1990. Barbara Walters lived in a Tarlow-furnished Bel Air house during her marriage to television producer Merv Adelson.

Tarlow insists she is not a decorator, just an acquisitor of beautiful objects who then has to figure out where to put them.

“The rooms that I like the most are the ones in old houses in England and France that have been there for centuries,” Tarlow said. “What makes a house interesting is the way people live in it, how they treat themselves.”

Tarlow was born Rose Khedouri in Shanghai in 1946. Her Sephardic Jewish family, originally from Iraq, had flourished in the Far East since the late 19th Century, part of a wealthy dynasty with diversified business holdings.

Her parents moved into a Fifth Avenue apartment they owned in New York City when Rose was 6 months old. The family also owned a summerhouse in Deal, N.J.

“Even at 6 years old I was very definite about how I wanted my room to be,” she said. “I painted it pink--I don’t know where I got pink--and one year I insisted that we paint all the furniture pink, too. I don’t know why my mother let me do that. It was beautiful old furniture.”

During her first marriage, Tarlow had studied at Parsons and the New York School of Interior Design. In the late 1960s she and a designer friend opened an interior design shop in Englewood, N.J. She moved to Los Angeles in the early ‘70s with her second husband, a California criminal lawyer, from whom she is divorced. With $55,000 in seed money, Tarlow opened an antiques shop on Melrose Place in the Los Angeles interior design district.

When, by the late 1980s, prices for high-quality objects became too steep to be profitable, she began making original designs and top-of-the-line adaptations of antiques. The new furniture became the bulk of her multimillion-dollar-a-year business. Her Lord Byron chaise goes for $6,600, for instance, and her Louis XVI desk for $16,200.

For smaller budgets, she is working on new tableware to be introduced next year--cream china edged with a black wreath. Her flatware will be just that--perfectly horizontal cutlery. The fabrics she designed for Scalamandre, also available in 1995, reflect her distaste for new-looking things--she likes abraded velvets, muted brocades and tea-dipped linens.

Tarlow said she wants to be in business only a few more years.

“I’d like to retire so I can spend more time at home, painting and drawing,” she said. “I want to learn how to blow glass, how to make pottery. It’s not for any goal--it’s because I want to do it for myself.”