Cozying Up to the Stars

At only 224 years old, the United States often feels somewhat deficient, tradition-wise. So when a self-confident Brit landed in Hollywood, complete with a crisp accent, a sure sense of how a proper home should look and a sense of humor to boot, she had a good shot at collecting acolytes.

Interior designer Kathryn Ireland’s clients include Fran Drescher, Steve Martin, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, Lorne Michaels and Robert Zemeckis. Along with a roster of socialites and moguls, they’ve hired the 39-year old, Santa Monica-based mother of three to decorate their Park Avenue apartments and their Long Island beach houses, their Pacific Palisades mansions and their Montecito retreats.

The look she gives them is homey, comfortable, family and dog-friendly, with large doses of color and a lack of orthodoxy. Though her style might seem familiar, January House & Garden magazine included her among a list of “Ten to Watch in 2001,” a group of architects and designers they predict will influence the style of the 21st century. Her success working among people who could afford any feathers for their nests proves that while the shelter magazines regularly tout new trends like mid-century modern or Shaker minimalism, the appeal of traditional English style endures.

Ireland is one of those polymorphously creative and fearless individuals who just gets on with it, whatever “it” may be. When she first came to Los Angeles 14 years ago, after working as an actress, designing a line of women’s clothes and running her own public relations company in her native London, she helped her new husband, director Gary Weis, who made short comic films for “Saturday Night Live” and rock videos.

She never dreamed of hiring anyone to help decorate the succession of houses she and Weis rented as their family expanded. (Their sons are now 7, 9 and 11.) “When I grew up in England,” she says, “no one had decorators. Anyone who did was thought of as terribly nouveau riche. Here, we’d only rent a house for a year or so, so I got very good at doing them up quickly.” In 1990, she converted Weis’ editing studio on Santa Monica’s Main Street into a store. Ireland-Pays, named after the designer and her then-partner, actress Amanda Pays, was stocked with pillows, lampshades and other accessories that Ireland acquired on trips to London. Meg Ryan, Candice Bergen, Annette Bening and Maria Shriver were customers.

“From the shop, I started getting a few small jobs,” Ireland says. “One of them was Victoria Tennant and Steve Martin, who were married then. I made all the curtains for their apartment in New York. Then when they divorced, Steve came to dinner, and he looked around and said, ‘I’d just love to live in a house like this. I want something cozy.’ ”

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The house that charmed Martin is a Spanish hacienda built in the ‘20s on one of Santa Monica’s tree-lined streets, north of Montana Avenue. The decor is Ireland eclectic--an old wooden coffee table from Bali, a squooshy sofa with colorful pillows scattered on it, an 18th century Italian chest that was a gift from Ireland’s mother, and a wall covered with a baker’s dozen portraits of Jesuit priests found in an antique shop.

“I live with a rather casual look,” she says. “It isn’t very mannered. With my boys and the dogs, it can’t be. I grew up around nice things. It was important to my mother that we go to the best schools, so the friends I made lived in wonderful homes in England and Europe that I was exposed to. It does educate the eye, even if you don’t know you’re taking it all in.” Ireland’s father was a stockbroker, and the family had homes in London and on the Scottish shore. “Now, I know what’s right when I see it. If I was a butcher, you’d say I know how to cut meat. Sometimes I’ll walk into a room another decorator has done, and I’ll see right away that the proportions of the sofa are wrong. Some people just don’t get it.”

Fran Drescher used the same phrase in trying to explain what she enjoyed about working with Ireland on her Malibu house. “I rarely can work with other decorators because they either impose themselves on you, or they just don’t get it,” she says. “When Kathryn’s finished your house, it doesn’t look decorated, it just looks beautiful. What she creates has the relaxed feeling we appreciate in California, but she has a wonderful eye for an elegant look that isn’t pretentious.”

Evidence of Ireland’s unerring eye is that clients hire her to do a house, then engage her again. She’s done three homes for Martin, two for Schlossberg, Zemeckis’ home and office. “I’ve actually worked with a lot of single men, which is fabulous,” she says, “because there’s no one else giving an opinion. I don’t think my look is really feminine, anyway. And doing stuff for Steve Martin is wonderful, because he has such good taste. He let me buy beautiful antiques.”

Ireland’s currently juggling six or seven jobs, in different stages of completion. There’s Oceana Hotel Santa Barbara, a 125-room Spanish-style inn overlooking the water that must be finished by June, an estate in Brentwood Park, which she’s just assembling presentation boards for, a beach house in Amagansett, Long Island, which will be transformed as soon as the truck bearing furniture, pillows and curtains that just left Santa Monica reaches its destination.

The hotel rooms will all be done in fabrics Ireland designed--nostalgic florals, ticking stripes and paisleys printed on voile or a cotton and hemp blend. She developed the fabric collection three years ago, then moved her retail operation from Main Street to a larger store on Montana Avenue. That shop closed recently when Ireland lost her lease. She was not sorry to lose it, she says, because “dealing with the fabric manufacturing, my design clients and my kids was too much.” Her fabrics are sold at Hollyhock in West Hollywood and carried by trade showrooms in L.A., San Francisco, New York, Chicago and London.

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“Now that I’m doing the fabric line, I sell to other decorators and see what they’re doing,” she says. She’s horrified when too much allegiance is paid to a single period or style. “There’s this whole ‘40s revival going on, and there is some great stuff from that era,” Ireland says. “But I think you can very nicely marry lots of different styles and make a home eclectic. I love a great piece of Stickley furniture. But if you do a whole house in one look, it turns into a showroom.”

Her other pet peeves are rooms that look too “done” and inferior workmanship. The latter shows up in details such as curtains that aren’t interlined or stenciling that isn’t first class. She sees the former in the pages of Architectural Digest. “I mean, what is that magazine about, really? It’s just that a lot of money’s been spent on every room. They’ve got no soul to them,” she says.

Ireland suggests that if people don’t have a lot of money to spend, they should just get a few things but choose the best they can afford. “Go for quality,” she advises. And some wonderful effects can be achieved with inexpensive fabric. She’s made curtains for her home in muslin, a basic material that approximates the look of linen or fine cotton.

When Ireland takes on a client, she charges a monthly retainer, with a three-month minimum. A whole house will typically take eight months to a year to finish. She prides herself on staying within budget, except when a client demands that things in progress be changed. “Timewise, I’m always spot-on,” she says.

In Ireland’s world, anyone doing a six-bedroom house should expect to spend $500,000 to $1 million, not including her fee. Of course, that figure goes up if buying artworks is included.

She attributes much of her success to her ability to handle people. “I think I get on with my clients, and we have a good time. I’d heard that Caroline Kennedy had never done her houses because she couldn’t get along with any decorator. Well, some of that might have just been that some people walk in and they go, ‘Eeww. That’s awful.’ And they’re rude about your stuff. And they don’t get that you have children and dogs. I think it’s very arrogant for a decorator to have a huge ego.”

Twelve years ago, Ireland bought an old farmhouse in the village of Monclar de Quercy in southwest France that she’s redone, very simply, using her fabrics. She escapes there with her family every summer, and for vacations in winter as well. It is her haven and her hedge against difficult clients.

“The truth is, if I didn’t have my office to run here, I could move to my house in France and live off the land,” she says. “My kids could go to the village school, which they’ve done, and it would be a lovely life. So I only want to do this if it’s fun.”