Double Vision

She was an American expatriate who had moved to Paris after graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute, a romantic who loved the flourishes of the Neoclassical and Baroque periods. He was French, known for his spare designs for industrial-style furnishings and for an award-winning series of fashion shops around the world. They fell in love. It could have been a design nightmare.

But, though they thought they were pretty well set in their ways, they surprised themselves.

“We met later in life,” says Erica Lennard, a much-published garden and interiors photographer, of her relationship with husband Denis Colomb. “We were both adults, we had very evolved tastes, and we both had created our own environments that expressed our visions.

“I first met Denis in New York, where he had done the French Designers Show House, and I loved what he did there. But when he described his apartment in Paris, I was really worried. I never liked anything modern, and I didn’t understand it. I was thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to go there, and I’m going to hate his apartment, and then I won’t like him anymore.’ But I just fell in love with it. It was very simple and very advanced for the time. Everything was placed very low or very high, but it was so comfortable.”

Colomb’s first visit to Lennard’s Paris apartment was also a trip into a very different world. She had created what he calls an “extreme fantasy of French style” that nevertheless was, he says, similar in flavor to the 19th century antique-filled home of his youth. Unlike his ancestral home, however, “Erica’s home was not at all bourgeois. It was artistic, with gold wallpaper in the kitchen and very feminine. I thought it was charming.”

Nine years later, Lennard, 50, and Colomb, 45, live in a three-level Mediterranean-style 1926 house in Whitley Heights, a neighborhood of grand old residences tucked into the winding streets of the Hollywood Hills. In their time together the two have also shared homes in Paris, New York and Aix-en-Provence, France--the last is where Colomb grew up. And, along the way, they’ve learned how to meld their different styles and still create environments that are distinctive and livable.

Three years ago, they decided to take what they had learned about collaborating on their homes and make a book of it. That was a natural choice for Lennard, whose many books include the photo collections “Classic Gardens” (Lustrum Press, 1982) and “Artists’ Gardens,” (Abrams, 1993), and her collaboration with author Veronique Vienne on the popular “The Art of Doing Nothing” and “The Art of Imperfection” (both published by Clarkson Potter).

Rather than use only their experience to offer advice, they also sought out 15 other duos--all friends from the design worlds of France, New York and L.A. who have also faced the challenge of blending strong visions. The result is “Living Together: How Couples Create Design Harmony at Home,” co-authored with Julie Szabo and due out in October from Stewart, Tabori & Chang.

The book contains stories of each of the couples along with many tips on how to find common ground. On the final page, “ten steps to harmonious living” lists principles clearly in evidence in the authors’ own home. Truisms of marriage are applied here, such as “mutual respect is essential,” or “divide up responsibilities to achieve your goals.” But as designers, perhaps the most important lesson in evidence is: “Remember your tastes will change and evolve along with your relationship.”

At the heart of Lennard’s and Colomb’s collective design philosophy is a taste for comfort and an eye for the unusual. They call their L.A. home, which they are renting and have lived in for just over a year, a work in progress. “Don’t expect a harmonious living arrangement to materialize overnight,” they write in their book, and, indeed, they are working on the house room by room and did not feel compelled, for example, to paint the whole home at once or even finish all the floors. Instead, they give themselves time to focus on individual rooms.

The couple love to entertain, so they tackled the house’s most public spaces first. The lower floor, with a grand salon and foyer, is the closest area to being finished. It’s mostly Spanish in feel, largely because of two staircases with black wrought-iron banisters that lead to delicate balconies. Tall arched windows keep the rooms well-lighted by day.

The living room and the foyer are generous in scale and can easily accommodate the couple’s tendency to mix and match furnishings in unlikely ways. Lennard and Colomb travel frequently, for work and pleasure, and they have a particular interest in the Far East. As a result, their home incorporates a variety of international flourishes. In the living room, a set of wooden dining chairs inlaid with bone were brought over from a trip to Rajasthan, India, evidence of Lennard’s eye for the exotic.

Ornate jewel and metalwork chests imported from Thailand flank a doorway in the foyer. Mixed in are designs from Colomb’s home collection, which includes sofas, tables, rugs and tiles. A simple Colomb day bed greets the visitor at the front entrance, and his playful new line of wool rugs woven with geometric patterns are scattered throughout. Erica’s presence is also all over the walls, which are covered by her black and white photographs of landscapes, as well as art by some of their friends.

“If you expect to be mixing a lot of colorful objects, especially ones with radically different provenances, choose a unifying neutral scheme for the walls,” the book tells us, and indeed, the first order of business here was to paint the living room’s high-ceilinged walls cream-colored (they were salmon before) and to darken the wooden floors. If not much of the decor resembles their descriptions of their earlier Paris apartments, it is because both believe that when you move into a new home, you have to accommodate the needs of the new space, even as you bring to it your own personal effects. Objects that may have worked in the last place can be placed in storage or given away, replaced by new things that fit better.

“You design for the space,” Colomb says in a visit to their home. “Each place has a story. For me, the best thing would be if, when you leave a house, you could leave everything in it. Except for the things you are attached to--art, books, music.”

“You want them to have another life,” Lennard says. “I gave things from my Paris apartment to a friend who’d bought a house in Provence and needed furniture. It looks fantastic there, and I can go and visit it.”

Finding a house they both love is always key, and indeed this one, which belongs to friends who decided to move to Malibu, had been a favorite haunt for Lennard and Colomb long before it became available. Since their work is itinerant and their home base is governed only by the availability of e-mail and overnight delivery, their move to Los Angeles was a spontaneous response to the opportunity to rent the home. As artists, the move has paid off for them. “We have been inspired by this house,” Colomb says. In the past year, his designs for furniture and rugs have changed as well, becoming more colorful and textured.

They have kept a few modern pieces, added some new finds from their travels to China and India, and picked up a lot more objects in Los Angeles. In a small inset fireplace in a large outdoor terrace on the home’s second level, Colomb has set up a display of colorful decorative tiles of his designs and those of three partners. Four garden chairs picked up for $5 at a junk shop in Silver Lake are a prized possession. “We used to bring things from other countries more, but in Los Angeles, that wasn’t necessary. You can find everything here,” Lennard says. “That could be a book in itself,” says Colomb.

Included among the lushly illustrated selections of “Living Together”--all the photographs are by Lennard--are the Los Angeles homes of photographer and author Tim Street-Porter and interior designer Annie Kelly, restaurateur Michele Lamy and fashion designer Rick Owens, and landscape designer Julie Milligan and her partner, real-estate developer Jackie Yellin.

The book describes the design compromises the couples have found for their living spaces. “If one of you is bold about color and pattern but the other is not, don’t take risks on things like tile and flooring that are difficult to replace,” the authors write. And if you hire professionals to help, listen to their advice.

Every home illustrated here is distinctive. Perhaps the most unusual is that of Lamy and Owens; he uses displays of his dress designs as decorative elements in their converted storefront household. They also eschew anything resembling a kitchen, preferring instead to eat out at Lamy’s Les Deux Cafes across the street.

Two artists, April Gornik and Eric Fischl, built a haven in the Hamptons that combines Mediterranean, Japanese and Arts and Crafts influences and includes two separate but adjoined studio spaces. Their furnishings are old and new, including a silk-clad Indian daybed, a French 1940s chair and mahogany cabinets built by Fischl’s former assistant. “Building a house is ... an externalized, concretized version of what you interior dynamic is,” Fischl says in the book. “It’s two people trying to possess something equally, and it’s something every couple should experience.”

“Recognizing a partner’s quirks and accepting them with a smile can make home life interesting and fun,” Lennard and Colomb write in one of the book’s “harmonious how-to’s.”

In the end, says Lennard, it’s all about love for each other, finding ways to share the experience of making a home--and making it fun. For Lennard and Colomb, shopping together is enjoyable, in part because they share the same self-assured instinctive approach. “Five minutes,” says Colomb, snapping his fingers and shaking his head for emphasis. “We go into a shop, and we know if we want something in five minutes. It’s very fast.”

Lennard nods in agreement. The trick is to always carry a floor plan and a measuring tape, just in case, Colomb says. And though they say they agree on most purchases, both know that there will be occasions when one person will have to compromise .

“I tend to defer to Denis, because I trust him,” Lennard says.

“Erica has opened my eyes to color and to textiles,” adds Colomb. “She woke me up.”