The Natural
Interior designer Michael Smith knows a lot of things, and one of those things is that he’s talented. And he doesn’t at all mind telling you.
“I have always had a really good sense of my own destiny. It’s like, everyone is insecure and has ups and downs, and God knows I have all of that, but one thing I never really questioned was my own talent.
“It’s not meant to come across as egotistical,” he says, “but I just know. I always have.”
He’s known it since he was a student at Otis College of Art and Design, or really before that, as a child when he decided to build a Japanese garden in the backyard by flooding it with water until it was a sea of mud.
The result?
“I think my parents were probably unhappy with me.”
That sense of destiny has taken him far. His client roster includes Cindy Crawford, hotel-restaurant mogul Peter Morton, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, actress Michelle Pfeiffer, director James Burrows and a mega-famous producer-director whose name he doesn’t want to mention because privacy is still respected in this blab-happy world.
They come to him for his warm, livable, classically rooted interiors, which Elle Decor editor in chief Marian McEvoy describes as “graceful, colorful, and there is a European something going on, whether it’s English or Portuguese. There’s also a Modernist feeling, which is American and could be Italian and French. He loves color, but he doesn’t hit you over the head with it. He’s not stagey or theatrical.”
Smith does homes all over the world, some of which have been featured in such upscale shelter magazines as House & Garden, Elle Decor and House Beautiful. He designs his own line of reproduction furniture, which retails for $1,100 to $8,000 and is sold through his Santa Monica store Jasper (due to reopen this fall following renovations). A line of Michael Smith for Cowtan & Tout fabrics will debut soon, and he has manufacturers clamoring for more Michael Smith products. His new, spacious Santa Monica studio boasts 17 employees, including eight design assistants.
You’d expect Smith, 34 and single, to be still engaged in the struggle, not at the top of his game in this intensely competitive field. But that’s where he is right now, in the midst of such projects as an apartment in the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan, a Malibu beach house and a 25,000-square-foot house and winery in Santa Ynez.
His baby face and curly dark blond locks belie the drive that makes Michael run. The telephone--car, cell or otherwise--is a constant appendage. A day can take him through several client appointments, an interview, dropping by a site, dozens of phone calls, a workout with his trainer and dinner.
But you won’t hear Smith whining about the pace--he likes it that way.
“I went to Hawaii for this project,” he says, “and you see people jogging on the beach and windsurfing, and that’s their choice. It’s just not what I choose for myself.
“After a day of that, I’d go nuts. It’s hard for me to actually not work. When I do go away, it’s to Barbados or the Caribbean, and for a couple of days I’ll look at real estate. That’s relaxing to me.”
Busy Atmosphere Keeps Him Going
Sitting in his office with three or four design assistants on a recent weekday, he stays focused during a dizzying discussion of furniture, clients, what mirror will work where, which rug will be hand-woven in custom colors, which wood stain has the right hue, which knobs are right for a drawer and the correct shade of off-white for a wall. In between he volleys a few phone calls and every once in a while holds up fabric swatches for approval.
Even his friend and colleague, architect Mark Rios, rarely sees him turn it off.
“We’ll go the beach and veg out,” he says. “But more often we’ll be at dinner and he’s . . . definitely aware of what’s going on. He’s a very intense guy.”
Maybe that’s why his Brentwood hillside home, which he’s lived in for a year and a half (it took six months to renovate), is a cool oasis from this frenetic life. It was featured in Elle Decor last year. A request to see it is met with a huge sigh.
“I’ll show it to you later,” Smith says. “I’m really sick of showing this house.”
From the living room, huge glass windows look out on the canyons and the massive Getty Center, so close you can see the tram crawling up the hill. Terra cotta tiles, whitewashed bricks, robust wood furniture and natural, neutral tones emphasize the sense of calm.
Smith makes a cup of coffee in the kitchen (where cereal is kept in the Viking oven--a throwback to living with dampness at the beach) and sinks into a marshmallowy living room chair, barefoot, wearing faded jeans and a gray cashmere sweater. He recalls that his earliest memories of growing up in Pasadena and Newport Beach have become the underlying aesthetic for his work today.
“I remember that the eucalyptus trees were a huge part of my childhood. It’s a wonderful memory I have, the way it felt to live here and grow up and my perception of what it was to have a good life. Like fresh-squeezed orange juice and white terry cloth robes, because my grandmother every morning would swim laps in her pool. . . . I will always bring a bit of that sort of relaxed quality from my childhood.”
That childhood found him a “really precocious” kid who was into Legos and books and did well in subjects he liked at school, such as history.
His family gave him “a lot of options,” he says. (Smith’s father is in the import-export business, his mother a watercolor artist; they are divorced. Smith has one sister.) “My family was very well-traveled and incredibly supportive of me when I went to school and stuff.”
After studying interior architecture at Otis, he spent a year in London learning architecture history and decorative arts through a program connected with the Victoria & Albert Museum. The experience “changed my whole aesthetic,” he says. “It gave me a whole other perception of color and texture and furniture.”
He did a stint with designer John Saladino in New York, then decided he missed California too much and moved back. He hooked up with a design partner, split, then opened his own business eight years ago.
House and Its Owner Influence the Style
When designer and client click, it’s immediate: “You sort of just get it,” he says. “Sometimes you get it so much that I’ll know exactly how I should do a house by talking to them over the phone on the way over to the meeting.”
What he homes in on is “oftentimes very much about the house, which has its own voice, and then you sort of tailor it to the people who live there. And then sometimes it’s just about the way they are. This sounds kind of hokey, but I call it their ‘style vibe.’ But sometimes people come in and they ask for something and it’s not really what they want.”
That’s when Smith becomes the headstrong diplomat, guiding clients to the design well.
“If you’re hungry,” he explains, “you might crave a McDonald’s cheeseburger. And what you really want is protein. It’s trying to figure out the root of what you want.
“I remember one woman, she was very high-powered and very together and wore really elegant Italian suits, very Armani. But she wanted her house to be very American, like wagon-wheel American.
“We did a little guest house that way, but it wasn’t really her style. So I took the American, and then taking really how she dressed, and got a hybrid that was infinitely stronger, which was kind of a relaxed, monochromatic version of an American house, more sensual and more nuanced than the obvious red, white and blue.”
Still, Smith says he stops short of “imposing my aesthetic on people. I want to show what I think should be done, but I never want it to be like I pushed someone into something. I want it to be something they feel comfortable with.”
‘I Don’t Want Clients to Get Ripped Off’
But sometimes Smith is not that diplomatic, especially when it concerns people such as architects, contractors and landscapers on a project. It’s a trait that has earned him the title enfant terrible, which he readily acknowledges. Even his friends don’t dispute it.
“Michael doesn’t hold back,” Rios says. “If he has something to say to someone, he says it. But I’ve never seen Michael be mean or rude--he’s very direct and clear, and there’s often not a lot of room to argue or maneuver around his words. I think people haven’t been around someone as clear as he is.”
Smith explains it this way: “I don’t want clients to get ripped off. So there may be a lot of situations where, if there’s something I don’t think is right, I would point it out, because I really think that it’s immoral not to be protective of your client.
“I used to be more confrontational about it, but I tend to not do that as much because I think that I used to hurt people’s feelings. But I’d rather do multiple projects for the client than be the most popular person with the tile installer.”
The clients Smith has amassed over the years (most by word of mouth) are often fiercely loyal, some becoming good friends.
Katherine Sanderson considers herself one. The actress-writer and her husband, Chase, a commercial real estate developer, built their Newport Beach home in 1987 and had Smith do the interiors, using family heirloom antiques, slipcovered furniture, warm yellow tones and rich fabrics.
“It’s still beautiful, it’s timeless,” she says. “If I had done it on my own it might have been a little funkier, and he made it more sophisticated, he gave it that edge. Michael helped me go inside myself and find my own style, and we melded it together.”
Having stellar names on his client list certainly doesn’t hurt business; in fact, says Elle Decor’s McEvoy, “if you are a decorator in Los Angeles, you are dealing with people in show business, and of course it’s important.”
Important, yes; but to Smith, it’s not what he wants to flaunt.
“I know that there are people for whom [celebrity names] are their great claim to fame,” he says. “I’ve never used that exclusively to promote something.
“For me it’s about the work. The work has to be really good, and it doesn’t matter if it’s an actor or an orthodontist. I’m sure in the beginning of my career it made it a lot easier because magazines want a hook, but I think it’s really tacky to cash in on that.”
Part of Smith’s allure--and what the rich and famous are often attracted to--is his penchant for custom everything--furnishings, paint colors, fabrics, wallpapers. He is constantly hunting for new resources all over the world.
“If it’s someone like Michelle Pfeiffer,” McEvoy says, “she’s sure she’s not getting a stamped-out look that somebody else is getting. Each one wants to feel they’re expressing themselves through their living environment.”
Offers Smith: “It’s about more options. It’s more crayons in the box. With this apartment I’m working on in New York, the fabrics for the living room are going to be custom woven because I’m looking for a very, very nuanced color, a really rich cream that has a slight bit of gray-green in it.”
Lose those nuances, he says, “and it’s one-dimensional.”
With a client list most designers would kill for, his own product lines and attention from magazine editors, it would seem Smith might lack for new horizons. But he says boredom and complacency aren’t even in the picture.
“I think about how in five years I’ll have finished this body of work, and then I’ll be able to do more stuff. I think of it in terms of where I’ll be aesthetically. A lot of people want to put their name on everything, and the idea more for me is to make beautiful things that people actually like and use, like my fabric and furniture. You can’t put your name on every juicer or slicer. “The biggest fear in life to me is losing what it is that makes me good,” he says. “And by good, I mean what I like about what I do, how what I do makes me feel about myself. I don’t want to lose that.”
Jeannine Stein may be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.