STYLE : FRANKLY SCARLET : Brian Murphy Is Up to His Old Tricks, Putting a New Spin on a Plantation Home in the Palisades
When Michelle and Connolly Oyler first laid eyes on this ersatz Southern mansion in Pacific Palisades, she insisted: “We can’t live in that! It looks like Tara!” But the Oylers were so smitten with the hilltop location and its sweeping views of the Pacific and Temescal Canyon that they abandoned their search for a Spanish hacienda and, rather than change the existing architecture, decided to play up the plantation theme. All they needed, they figured, was a designer with a sense of humor.
Enter Brian Alfred Murphy of BAM Construction, the Santa Monica designer known for his unorthodox style. Over the past three years, Murphy--who once covered an entire house exterior with graffiti--has added Southern comforts with a witty West Coast edge to the Oyler residence. He began by ripping out an ivy hedge, then regrading the property to create a luxurious rolling front lawn. A picket fence came next, followed by a pair of lawn jockeys for what he calls “the formal antebellum entrance.” Murphy then replaced the traditional wood-paneled front door with a Dutch door painted bright red--a tease of what’s to come.
Just inside is an all-out crimson assault: a vestibule in which walls, floor, ceiling and staircase blaze in the same eye-popping shade of “Safety Red.” “I’d been wanting to paint a room all red for 30 years,” says Murphy, recalling that he had to cajole his clients with the reminder that “it’s only paint.” The Oylers admit that they had their doubts--”some of our friends still don’t quite understand,” Michelle says--but now the entry hall is one of the couple’s favorite rooms.
As for the rest of the 15-room house, formerly decorated in wall-to-wall avocado shag carpet and floral drapery, it’s been pared down to white walls and hardwood floors--the better to showcase the Oylers’ far-ranging collections of “high” and “low” art. Picassos and Warhols share space with chandeliers made of gelatin molds and tables fashioned from croquet sets. “We’re both incurable collectors,” Michelle says.
Murphy’s touches fit right in. His idea of track lighting is a Lionel train track suspended from the ceiling; six toy bogies carry lights the length of the living room. He built a barn-door track into the ceiling so that the TV can glide from the family room to the kitchen for easy viewing. And for a new black-and-white linoleum floor in the kitchen and hallway, Murphy inset red paw prints to mark the path the three dogs take in and out of the house.
But the piece de resistance can be found at the back of the house, where Murphy installed seven additional Dutch doors to capture the Pacific breezes as well as the ocean view. When the tops of all the doors are open, they suggest a stable, which, the designer jokes, “every Southern mansion needs.”