A Diva’s Digs
When Caz Love bought a home in Culver City, she dubbed the neighborhood “beigemania.” To escape the suburban blandness, she painted the interior of her 1930s house pink and the exterior a shade of ultramarine that Frida Kahlo used on her Mexico City home. “People have responded positively, but I think they find it quite odd,” says Love, a multimedia artist. The house is both an extension of her artwork and a fitting backdrop for her sometimes diva-like persona.
Love initially was attracted to the property because there was space for an art studio. By raising the roof of the two-car garage and adding skylights and an industrial steel sliding door, she fashioned a modern, light-filled workspace where she creates installations using fabrics, furnishings and sheet music. Here vintage wedding dresses, from her 2003 “Nocturnal Love Songs” installation at Overtones Gallery in Los Angeles, hang from the rafters. Nearby, a collection of 1950s cocktail dresses from a “Sleeping Beauty” project are displayed on utilitarian clothing racks, while antique petticoats hang above an Ikea hospital-style bed.
In the backyard, Love replaced concrete with drought-tolerant California native plants. A path of slate steppingstones leads across a red fescue “lawn” to a meditation circle and an outdoor dining area.
The home’s interior had great bones, but it needed new paint. “When I bought the house I had just started doing 3-D sculptural work with women’s underwear, and everything was pink and feminine. I couldn’t stop with the pink,” Love says.
She painted the entrance hallway magenta, which flows naturally into the saturated fuchsia of the living room. Also heavy on pink accents, the living room includes a shearling sofa, stacks of pillows and a gold coffee table inset with pink leather. A gold-leaf fireplace, gilt-framed paintings of Greek gods and a cowhide rug add more camp.
Love used different shades of pink throughout the house. The intense raspberry walls in the dining room are a striking backdrop for Love’s black-and-white photography collection that includes music icons Chet Baker and Jim Morrison. The room, with its white wainscoting, is otherwise spartan but for a pair of pink, lavender and brown striped benches and an Alvar Aalto table.
The kitchen, which Love calls “mood elevating,” is an unapologetic strawberry ice-cream pink. She has decorated the room with Art Deco pottery and a 1950s corner booth upholstered with sparkly russet vinyl.
In the bathroom, original pink Art Deco tiles pop out against black walls, while a pale green hallway offers contrast. The charcoal-gray guest quarters also serve as a den and dressing room, filled with vintage clothes, shoes and hatboxes. The artist also departs from the color scheme in the master bedroom, which is lavender and sparsely decorated with a high-backed bed, a Philippe Starck Prince Aha stool and a night table with a Lumibear reading lamp.
“I’m a light sleeper, and this is where I dream,” she says. “Of course, I might wake up one morning tired of pink.”
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Resource Guide
Information on artist Caz Love at www.cazlove.com. Sundayland cowhide “Warhola” rug, “Pink Panther” floor lamp and “The Spoiled Table” leather-and-wood coffee table, all at Pieces, Los Angeles, (323) 653-0808; Lana bed with upholstered headboard, at Dialogica, West Hollywood, (310) 888-0008; Philippe Starck Prince Aha stool, at Kartell, Los Angeles, (310) 271-0178.