STAYING IN CHARACTER
“If you listen to a place, it will tell you what to do with it,” says interior decorator Tom Beeton, whose simple Hollywood Hills house spoke volumes when he bought it two years ago. Despite the shag rugs and muddy paint left from a long-ago redo, the 1936 house had potential. Three of its rooms opened onto a courtyard, a lavish garden and a city view. In its step-down living room, floor-to-ceiling doors wheeled aside to let the green world in. “Empty, this was a magic space,” Beeton says. “My approach was to edit further and add a few things in keeping with its spare, luxurious comforts.”
Beeton began with basics, ripping out rugs to discover original riff-cut oak floors. He replaced metal sliding doors with single-pane French doors, inviting in a view of the garden, and he painted the walls a muted off-white. “The object,” he says, “was to make the house disappear while at the same time giving it the quality of a place where life is lived--not a set.”
For Beeton, a former antiques dealer, the choice of furnishings was critical. He built his rooms around a mix of classic pieces and what he calls “costume furniture”--good reproductions and flea-market finds dressed up in quality fabrics. “It’s like going to Chanel for one great jacket,” he explains, “and putting it together with some pants from the Gap.”
In his living room, the central period piece, a 1940s cork-top cocktail table by architect-designer Paul Frankl, is tucked between a 1920s loveseat draped in cowskin and a chaise-for-two that Beeton had made for its romantic implications. (“Every room should have at least one spot to be seduced in.”) In the dining room, another Frankl table shares space with a set of 1950s Heywood-Wakefield chairs Beeton bought for next to nothing and re-covered, a 1950s lamp inspired by Mondrian and a 19th century Chinese altar table.
Beeton credits growing up in a creative family in Virginia with fostering his spontaneous style. And San Juan Capistrano antiquarian Gep Durenberger, with whom he worked during the early 1980s, taught him more about “undecorating: creating rooms that look as if they’ve always been there, and treating precious things casually and everyday things as precious.”
Of course, in any one house, the decorating process eventually comes to an end. While Beeton continues to look for the right Oriental rug for his living room and prepares to sandblast the ceiling beams, he is saving new ideas for his next house. “You have to know when to stop,” he says. “If you go too far in ‘doing’ a house, you destroy the character you fell in love with.”