A grand entrance: Take 2
Standing in his living-dining room between a late-’60s Lucite bar cart and a Federal period gilt mirror crowned by an American eagle, Scott Mangan describes his design aesthetic. “People tell me I shouldn’t say it, but it’s really Modernism meets Old Lady,” says the decorator, who lives in a 1957 Carl Maston house in Pasadena.
What he could say, but stops short of, is that his style places him unmistakably among a group of young trendsetters who have embraced the highly glamorous, decorator-driven mid-century look known as Hollywood Regency. As far as Mangan is concerned, he’s simply “working in a tradition of beautiful design that you can live with.”
Once derided as an outdated form of country club chic, Hollywood Regency is staging a major comeback, now appearing as the latest trend in home decor. The signs are popping up all over: in shelter magazines, in Versace’s fall 2000 ad campaign, in independent films such as 1998’s “Gods and Monsters” and last year’s “Far From Heaven.” Next year, the German coffee-table book publisher Taschen will publish a tome on Hollywood Regency by former Wallpaper editor Jake Klein.
Some early proponents of the revival were maverick decorator-retailers such as Mangan, owner of Rubbish 20th Century Furnishings in Silver Lake, and Diane Rosenstein, owner of Russell Simpson in West Hollywood. Commercial designers are also at the forefront of the Regency rage. The influence can be felt at retailers large and small, from Barneys New York in Beverly Hills to Trina Turk in Palm Springs. It is the style du jour for boutique hotels, as illustrated by the Viceroy in Santa Monica, Maison 140 in Beverly Hills and the Estrella in Palm Springs -- all glitzily designed by Kelly Wearstler of the design firm KWID.
But this is Hollywood Regency with a twist: a hybrid style that mixes pedigreed furnishings with anonymous vintage and contemporary designs -- most often incorporated into floor plans that have little to do with classic Regency architecture -- giving the style a fresh, invigorated look.
“Pieces of furniture are like guests at a party; they must have personality and create an interesting dialogue,” Mangan says. “A Knoll sofa may seem boxy, but if you flank it with a pair of decorative end tables, the whole room can be made interesting again.”
With an emphasis on decoration and aspirations to grandeur, Hollywood Regency, which began in the 1930s with an elite film colony clientele, was a California purebred -- a form of contemporary design that made knowing references to 19th century English and French design, peppered with touches of neoclassicism. Through exposure in movies and magazines, it reached its pinnacle in the late ‘50s as Los Angelenos built imposing European facades over modest Mediterranean homes.
“There was a desire to incorporate references to a cultivated past,” says John Chase, author of “Exterior Decoration,” the 1982 book that coined the term “Hollywood Regency.” By the time Chase had identified its key elements -- French-inspired mansard roof lines, exaggerated doorways and shuttered windows -- they had already become a cliche of the suburban landscape. Over the last 10 years, however, Hollywood Regency interiors and custom furnishings -- particularly those from the 1930s to 1960s -- have been gaining a passionate following, especially with mid-century furniture collectors on both coasts. Works by designers such as Tommi Parzinger and silent-film star Billy Haines, who became Hollywood’s first celebrity decorator, have rocketed in popularity, in large measure because “they evoke the glamour associated with a period of grand homes and great parties,” says Jason Stein, vice president and specialist of 20th century decorative arts at Christie’s, Los Angeles.
In 1992, David Geffen acquired the Haines-designed Jack Warner estate and put up for auction the entire Haines collection. According to Rosenstein, the appeal of owning pieces with such a provenance from “an era where people lived lives of civilized glamour” proved irresistible to designers and their status-hungry clients in the entertainment industry.
Prices of custom pieces have escalated to an impressive degree. A set of eight dining chairs by Chicago architect Samuel Marx established a benchmark hammer price of $54,000 at Christie’s in 2000. At Modern One in Los Angeles, a pair of T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings mahogany and burled-walnut nightstands from his greatest interior design commission, Casa Encantada in Bel-Air, are tagged at $35,000.
Awareness of certain Hollywood Regency architects, particularly John Woolf, has also been steadily increasing. A Woolf-designed house with the original interiors intact could add a premium of 20% to its market value, says Crosby Doe, a partner in the real estate firm Mossler, Deasy & Doe, specialists in architecturally significant properties.
Part of this dramatically revived interest has to do with the cycle of fashion, but for some devotees, it has never gone out of style. Rosenstein grew up next to a home decorated by Haines on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills. “I remember vividly the neighbors’ dining table, which sat 14, and every chair was done in a different color silk, from lime to tangerine. It blew my mind. He was the total designer.”
Courtney Carol Small, a designer of women’s loungewear, is a third-generation Hollywood resident who lives in an early-’30s duplex once occupied by Tyrone Power. Growing up amid the splendor of Hollywood Regency homes, Small has designer genes. Her apartment, shared with a rescued longhaired tomcat named Oedipus Rex, is a self-decorated shrine to her obsession with button-tufted furniture, gilt bamboo pieces and anything clad in mirror. “I remember seeing a picture of Mae West in her penthouse in the Ravenswood on Rossmore,” Small says with the appropriate air of hauteur, “and thinking, ‘This is how I am going to live.’ ”
It was Joan Crawford, the epitome of the shopgirl-made-good in movies, however, who served as the social architect of Hollywood Regency. “I had always known what I wanted, and that was beauty in every form,” the former laundress from Kansas City, Mo., once remarked. “A beautiful house, beautiful man, a beautiful life and image.” Having married Hollywood blueblood Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Crawford gave her mentor, actor Haines, his first design commission in 1930, decorating the interiors of the newlyweds’ home in Brentwood.
Although the rest of the country was struggling through the Great Depression, the newly minted moguls and movie stars in Los Angeles were amassing great fortunes and building period revival mansions with fashionable architects such as Wallace Neff, Paul Williams and Craig Ellwood. The task of decorating them fell to Haines and his contemporaries. Haines, who abhorred the Art Deco style then in vogue, created residences resplendent with the finest European antiques artfully arranged with all of the theatricality of an MGM soundstage. Five years later, after the studios blacklisted him for refusing to marry and thus conceal his homosexuality, Haines opened a decorating studio on Sunset Boulevard.
Over the course of his career, Haines developed a personal signature -- an unexpected, highly sophisticated mix of updated neoclassical designs and his own contemporary custom creations ranging from low-slung slipper chairs that emphasized women’s legs to exquisitely detailed, ready-for-your-close-up lighting fixtures. He became the most sought-after Hollywood Regency decorator, and he changed the scenery of home decor. Haines, who was known to quote a fee of $1,000 an hour, transformed the art of the interior from a culture run by and for the social register into a much-photographed fantasy. By the end of World War II, Haines’ vision had made the Hollywood Regency lifestyle the gold standard for American homeowners.
On the East Coast, where the look was dubbed Park Avenue Modernism, designer-decorators such as Robsjohn-Gibbings, Parzinger and James Mont added their own interpretation of the style complete with signature materials and silhouettes. A boldly graphic decorative style that reinterpreted classic influences, Hollywood Regency allowed designers to experiment with proportion and scale. A classic example: 10-foot lacquered panel doors with polished brass knobs the size of salad plates conspicuously mounted in the middle. No common cottons would make the cut for upholstery when there was a plethora of silks, sheared velvets and exotic hides to cover every surface imaginable -- from tabletops to windows. Bare walls were intolerable; mirrors, murals or, at the very least, chinoise wallpapers, were de rigueur.
With an educated eye and the right hands, the mix of proportion, pattern and palette could be as intoxicating and invigorating as chilled gin. But as the style trickled down over time, making its way to the suburbs, it could also prove as fussy as a frozen daiquiri. Either way, Hollywood Regency enjoyed a first run longer than most design styles, moving from elitist elan to populist mediocrity.
The look served as a languid, luxurious counterpoint to the stark, futuristic forms of 20th century Modernist movements. While Bauhaus and Streamline designs of the first half of the century emphasized the strictly functional, Hollywood Regency celebrated the purely aesthetic. In the ‘50s, when mass production and marketing made the postwar optimism of Eames, Nelson and Knoll seem democratic, the work of Haines and his contemporaries reveled in class-conscious exclusivity. Modernism imagined a machine-made Tomorrowland; Hollywood Regency promised a handcrafted Gilded Age that would be both of the moment and timeless.
The appeal of Hollywood Regency was so strong that in the late ‘50s, it became a kind of “architectural shorthand for people striving to climb upwards socially by turning an ordinary house into a mansion,” says author Chase. “You get signature elements -- urns, shutters and carved ornaments. The architect John Woolf created an overscaled door -- the door that ate the house -- that was much imitated and fetishized.”
By the end of the ‘60s, imitation had become the severest form of flattery. The genre pioneered by Woolf and Haines had morphed into a bastardized vocabulary of gestures: French mansard roofs on mini-malls, cinderblock apartment buildings with gangly chandeliers in faux foyers, ornamental kitsch marketed as interior decor.
Hollywood Regency had truly left home, becoming a national trend. The decorative flourishes became a semaphore indicating a refined level of taste that could be applied to any number of household products, from the appliances on kitchen counters to the automobiles in one’s garage. The “suicide doors” -- which opened from the center outward -- on the 1961 Lincoln Continental directly referenced the regal entryways of Hollywood Regency homes, while the front grilles of luxury cars emulated the fretwork panels used extensively throughout the period.
While the London-based designer David Hicks used furniture and finishes that paid homage to Hollywood Regency in his exuberant Mod interiors of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the style was clearly in decline. In its stead, a host of decor revivals emerged: Victoriana, Art Nouveau, Deco, even Happy Days ‘50s. By the ‘80s, with the arrival of Minimalism, Matte Black and the Pop-influenced Memphis school, Hollywood Regency was officially old fogy.
The death knell came with the birth of Republican Traditional, a style inaugurated when First Lady Nancy Reagan hired Ted Graber, the inheritor of Haines’ legacy and business, to redecorate the White House.
For Mangan, the Regency revival means reinterpreting the aura of Old Hollywood with a 21st century sensibility -- a return to a livable luxury.
“It’s a way of living that people want these days,” he says. “They’re staying home and entertaining more than traveling, so they want their homes to be comfortable and inviting.” As well as unexpected. In his own home, Mangan painted the cinderblock entryway in high-drama, high-gloss black and used patterned wallpaper and textural fabrics to update a sitting room.
“The Regency style is so adaptable that you can decorate according to your personality. You can be Napoleonic, you can do a room more Asian, or Italian. There are so many beautifully designed objects out there, which is why I prefer using anonymous pieces. There are no rules by which to judge them other than these: Do I love it? And is it worth it?”
His film industry clients -- Harper and Katherine Hug of Palm Springs, who own a post-production studio -- think it is worth it. They jettisoned a significant collection of Modern furniture in favor of Asian-inspired pieces set against a backdrop of white epoxy floors and walls painted in crisp, cool shades of green and blue. “People are a little bored with the all-Modern look,” says Mangan. “It’s become a formula in stores, where it’s all there spelled out for you.”
The result of this Regency Redux collage effect, says Katherine Hug, “is like a warm embrace.”
“It has a softer look than a totally modern interior, which feels more like an art gallery,” she says. “It hits the nostalgia button in your memory, like going into your grandmother’s house.”
Modernism meets Old Lady: Perhaps grandma wasn’t so square after all.
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Where to go
A selection of stores for re-creating the Hollywood Regency look:
Downtown, 719 N. La Cienega Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 652-7461
Dragonette Decorative Arts, 750 N. La Cienega Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 855-9091
Maxfield, 8825 Melrose Ave., L.A., (310) 274-8800
Modern One, 7956 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 651-5082
Paul Marra Design, 721 N. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 659-8190
Pegaso International, 8117 Melrose Ave., L.A., (323) 655-8117
Rubbish 20th Century Furnishings, 1630 Silver Lake Blvd., L.A., (323) 661-5575
Russell Simpson Co., 8121 Melrose Ave., L.A., (323) 651-3992