The Sultan of Swatches

Looking like an escapee from a fractured Margaret Mitchell masterpiece, the bearded, bonneted belle has planted himself in front of a Confederate flag. He is draped in red velvet (a brass curtain rod protrudes a few feet from each shoulder), unmistakably lampooning Scarlett O’Hara’s contribution to wartime couture. “We ah talking window treatments today,” drawls Christopher Lowell. “And frankly, my dear, ah do give a damn.”

So begins another episode of Discovery Channel’s highest-rated daytime show, “Interior Motives,” offering simple and inexpensive advice on home design to just about anyone with a staple gun, duct tape and a seething resentment toward other, tonier how-to gurus who succeed only in making us confront our pathetic inability to distinguish an authentic Federal gilded girandole convex mirror from a wall tile. Lowell is so nonthreatening, so sincerely interested in boosting self-esteem, that 800,000 viewers nationwide tune in to the hourlong show each weekday, at noon or 3 p.m. They never know what to expect.

On another day, Lowell opens the show dressed as a spear of asparagus, exhorting a rowdy crowd of extras dressed as vegetables: “I have a dream that one day we will grace the dinner table not as side dishes but as great centerpieces. Fruits, romaine, summer squash, lend me your ears . . . of corn.” He’s played a tuxedo-wearing, paint-gun-wielding James Bond with a “license to paint.” He’s reprised Grasshopper from “Kung Fu”; a bearded guru sitting cross-legged on a mountaintop; Indiana Jones escaping an oncoming . . . beach ball.

All this creativity just for a 30-second introduction? “Hey, if they’re not laughing, they’re not learning,” Lowell says.

“Interior Motives,” in only its second season, has roared past Discovery’s other how-to programs and made 43-year-old Christopher Lowell the cable network’s No. 1 personality. This success has made it difficult for the effervescent designer to travel anywhere these days without being recognized. “Every steward and stewardess in America watches Christopher Lowell,” he says, “and they tip off the rest of the plane. It’s ridiculous. I have to travel first-class. Otherwise I’d be conducting six-hour seminars on every flight.”

Lowell is currently taping his third season of the show--63 hours--which will start to air in September. With the end of his four-year contract looming next year, his attorney, Daniel J. Levin, reports that he is already negotiating with Discovery to renew. Although no one will disclose Lowell’s salary, or the production costs of the show, Levin says Discovery executives want to build their daytime franchise around Lowell, giving him the kind of leverage that could take the sting out of remaining a star in the cable firmament.

The show’s success ought to make it possible for Lowell to transcend the moderate rewards of cable stardom and insinuate himself into the lives of millions more American women, who will surely purchase his yet-to-be published books on decorating (he is about to sign with star-caliber editor Judith Regan), his yet-to-be launched line of paints, his yet-to-be-marketed linens, his paintings, his sculptures, his novel, his musical. For all that, comparisons with the reigning doyenne of gracious living are inevitable.

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Martha Stewart doesn’t live here,” say two identical ceramic tiles, hung discreetly together on a wall in Lowell’s home office. He stays in the trilevel house, perched in the hills off Laurel Canyon, while he tapes the series and lives the rest of the year in a home near Rancho La Costa. The Laurel Canyon place has been decorated in a style Lowell describes as “a dramatic Manhattan apartment with a heavy influence of Balinese.” No, Martha doesn’t live here, and, in fact, she probably wouldn’t be caught dead here, since what Lowell dedicates himself to--his claim to fame, actually--is helping women overcome the paralysis that someone like Stewart, with her perfectionism, historical accuracy and excruciating attention to detail, can inspire. Yet she hovers over Lowell’s life, her name invoked in conversations with both admiration and distaste. The very busy Stewart did not respond to a request for comment.

“Everything Martha does is absolutely beautiful, picture perfect; it is a dream,” Lowell says. “And we watch those dreams; we wish we could emulate them. I would say 90% of the people who watch Martha and watch me cannot even afford her materials. Our projects have to be done with a modicum of money, in a weekend. We show you how to disguise what’s not working in your home.” So while Martha is showing her viewers how to gild duck eggs with real gold leaf for that extra-special Easter basket, Christopher might bring a pair of middle-aged newlyweds out of the audience and, using their own photographs, help them avoid having to dump beloved furniture simply by showing them how to rearrange it.

“Interior Motives” began as a half-hour show but was expanded to capitalize on its popularity after its first season. Each program is devoted to a single theme and can include demonstrations with experts, room or home redecorations in the field by Lowell or other designers, a segment during which Lowell uses a special TV screen to draw on top of photos brought by audience members to help them reconceptualize their decor, and a Q&A; with adoring fans. Discovery executives say Lowell delivers to them the “all-important women, 25-54” demographic. And his studio audience, perhaps two dozen viewers, reflects that, although it is not unusual for a handful of men to attend.

“The women who watch our show are very well turned out, and many of them had professional lives prior to nesting,” says Lowell, pausing one day for a chat in his dressing room at the Chatsworth studios where the show is taped. “They’ve been traveling on these fabulous travel and entertainment budgets, they’ve been to wonderful hotels, the best restaurants, so when they come home to their nice houses with no furniture, they’re embarrassed to have people over.”

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On the day of my visit, he’s taping an hour on Scandinavian design and turns an inexpensive wood armoire into a faux Swedish oven with fake tile contact paper, a fake tarnished metal oven door and a fake ornamental top. “You wouldn’t really have something like that in your home?” I ask him. “Oh, yes, I would,” he replies indignantly, “although I’d probably use real tiles and not the contact paper.” Lowell says he loves about half of what gets on the air, and the remainder he describes as “make-do because we can’t afford better.” And anyway, “chances are that people at home watching are gonna have to make do, too.”

The show’s rule of thumb on cost: room redos for less than $1,000; project demos (like the “Swedish oven”) for under $100. Unlike Martha Stewart’s quasi-judgmental tag line, “It’s a good thing,” Lowell’s is a cheerfully upbeat “You can do it.”

Mario Buatta, the Old Guard New York designer whose clients have included Barbara Walters, Billy Joel and the late Malcolm Forbes, was a guest on Lowell’s show and loved it. “He’s great for all those women who are afraid to do anything, afraid to make a move. He makes it easy for you.”

“The likes of me can watch this program and not be turned off,” says Suzanne Beshoff, a harried 37-year-old Tustin hairdresser and mother of two, who emigrated from working class Liverpool years ago and appreciates Lowell’s practicality.

Lowell brags that he can exhibit “good taste” with a budget of $1.98. And yes, he has actually redecorated a house trailer for the series. “I’d be lost without my staple gun,” he says. As I watch him create a box-pleated fabric backdrop for a bed, I wonder how on earth you’d get it down for cleaning. I guess you’d just rip it down in six months and make a new one.

As he attaches a piece of fabric to the foam cushion of a window seat with duct tape, I imagine the horror I’d feel if a guest ever noticed. “The fact of the matter is,” Lowell says, “if your guests are gonna walk in your house and lift up your cushion and look underneath, they shouldn’t be in the house in the first place cuz they ain’t there to see you. When you can afford it, you can have it professionally slipcovered.” Touche.

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Watching Lowell, with his close-cropped beard and theatrical gestures, is like watching a hyper-creative set designer who has wandered off the proscenium and into your living room by accident. As it turns out, that is not far from the truth. Lowell spent many years in the theater, acting and in technical roles; both kinds of training serve him well now.

His childhood was a peripatetic one, with a restless father who frequently changed careers and locales, bringing his wife and three children with him. Lowell, born Richard Lowell Madden in Anchorage, Alaska, says he attended more than a few elementary schools, never bonding with other children. “I was a quiet kid and very shy,” he says, “a total ‘Shine,’ if you know what I mean.”

But for as long as he can remember, he could paint, sculpt, draw and play the piano. Perhaps the artistic temperament was inherited: Lowell says his Sicilian American mother, Josephine Cavaleri Madden, who died eight years ago, was a Miss Bell Telephone and sang as part of a sister act with Tommy Dorsey. His father, Henry Madden, was a “real frontiersman,” who worked as a master carpenter, restoring old homes, and as a photographer, cinematographer and videographer. He lives in Maine and owns his own video production house.

When Lowell was a child, his father preached in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, and was a charismatic speaker who “understood the word of God” and exuded “just an extraordinary amount of love and energy.” Lowell says he fully expected to be a preacher one day, too. It is this quality, this man-with-a-mission air, that captured the attention of the TV executives who created the craze for Lowell.

“He is extremely motivational, and that’s what viewers and fans get from him,” says Rita Kofalt, Discovery’s executive producer, daytime programming. After viewing a tape of Lowell, Discovery commissioned a Sherman Oaks company, Weller/Grossman Productions, to make the series.

“We saw a tape of him and said, ‘Hey, he’s got great energy,’ ” says the show’s co-executive producer, Robb Weller (of “Entertainment Tonight” and “The Home Show” fame). “In 45 days on the air, he was beating Martha Stewart on Lifetime.” (Stewart’s now-syndicated show, “Martha Stewart Living,” airs locally on KCBS.) Adds Weller’s business partner, Gary Grossman: “I’m waiting for ‘Saturday Night Live’ to do a spoof.”

In some ways, Lowell is already a fictional character, invented by Madden to do his inspirational bidding. “Christopher is a pumped-up and energized version of Madden,” Lowell says. “Richard is about three notches down and very intense. I [as Richard] am much more philosophical. Christopher is all the fun aspects of myself.”

He is also someone who seems to fulfill every expectation we have of a gay interior designer. But Lowell rejects that, describing himself as “androgynous.” “What I hope I stand for is a very nonthreatening sexual presence,” he says.

Discovery executives say they were aware that Lowell might turn off some viewers, but they liked him too much to be deterred. When the network tested the show in Tampa and San Francisco in 1996, viewer response was positive. Says Chuck Gingold, Discovery’s senior vice president and general manager, daytime programming: “In Tampa, they referred to him as ‘happy and bubbly,’ and you couldn’t get them to say anything close to ‘androgynous,’ let alone ‘gay.’ They loved him.”

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There are exactly seven steps to home design heaven in the gospel according to St. Christopher, and they must be followed in this order: (1) paint and architecture, (2) installed flooring, (3) high-ticket upholstery items, (4) accent fabrics, (5) all non-upholstered furniture, (6) accessories and (7) plants and uplights. “The whole idea,” he says, “is to keep you out of overwhelm.”

Lowell conceived his layered approach to interior design in the early 1990s. He had parlayed his stage experience and sense of drama into a career as a creative director, developing marketing campaigns first for a line of L.A.-based table linens, Table Manners, that ended up in the Reagan White House, and then for a variety of beauty companies that sold products to hair salons. The work often included directing photo shoots, creating commercials and making videos for use as merchandising tools. For a Pittsburgh-based line called Framesi, he created a memorable and award-winning campaign. “I Only Dream in Color” featured black-and-white photos of women with only their gorgeous tresses reproduced in sumptuous color.

In 1990, he was hired by Matrix Essentials, an Ohio-based salon supplier, to help “re-image” some of its products and launch a new line. It was then that Lowell decided to open the business that would lead to his current incarnation. Outside of Cleveland, in a little town called Chagrin Falls, he opened a retail interior-design store. He called it the Christopher Lowell Project and, over the course of the next few years, taught home design to thousands.

There he developed his seven-step philosophy, which will become the basis for his first book. It’s a blueprint for beginners, a way of dividing up the task of making four walls livable. You say you don’t know from uplights? “A room should have as much light coming from the floor as from the ceiling,” Lowell explains. “Think of your favorite restaurant, the kind with lighting that makes you want to linger forever. All-overhead lights creates a cafeteria look--get your peas, get your steak and get out. If you don’t want your room to look like it’s missing a sneeze guard, get uplights.”

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With all the ancillary possibilities--the books, the products, the sponsorships--coming at him, Lowell knows he is on the verge of something that could be huge, and he grapples with what it all means, how it could change his life or, maybe, how he could change yours.

On a rainy Saturday in April, he makes an appearance at the grand opening of a Westwood blinds store. It is a small turnout--50 people who braved the downpour, sitting through his seven layers of design. He shows them a video of a room that he’s transformed from a cold, austere space into a warm, inviting family room. But first he shows them a compilation of the funny opening segments of his program. He grins, as do they, watching himself as a cigar-chomping Baby Huey in bonnet and diapers, for an episode called “Building Blocks for a New Room.”

“Now I ask you,” he says, “would Martha Stewart do that for you?”