Recasting the actor’s studio

CENTRAL casting couldn’t have made Stephen Saint-Onge’s latest makeover project any easier. When the interior designer decided to transform a cottage at the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s retirement community in Woodland Hills, among the residents he could have chosen as his costar were Hollywood costumers, cameramen, stage managers and actors, including House Peters Jr., son of a silent-film star and the first Mr. Clean in TV commercials.

The role went, as they say, to a relative unknown.

John Alderson, an 89-year-old from the coal fields of northern England, had played hard guys and heroes in 1950s and ‘60s films with Errol Flynn and John Wayne and served as a technical advisor on all things British to George Cukor during the making of “My Fair Lady.” A robust man with a catalog of Hollywood tales, Alderson represented everything Saint-Onge loved about the golden age of moviemaking.

“He had such a great personality and history,” Saint-Onge recalls. “The space he lived in did not reflect the life he has led. I think he wanted to have a more gracious environment for his friends and his family to visit.”

The actor also possessed another agreeable quality.

“I liked Stephen and trusted him,” Alderson says with a chuckle. “I told him he could do whatever he wanted.”

Not that he would. Saint-Onge, 37, has long had an interest in, and respect for, old Hollywood. Growing up in Vermont, he would sketch floor plans of settings in black-and-white MGM movies. In the mid-’90s he worked in production design on “Jefferson in Paris” and “Surviving Picasso” for British period-film maestros Merchant-Ivory, and more recently he starred as one of the designers on TLC’s “While You Were Out.”

During his run on that show, Saint-Onge was recognized as a designer with an uplifting mantra: “Design has the power to change people’s lives.” Focused on comfort rather than theatrics, he did not come across as a decorating diva who bulldozed people’s feelings along with the buildings.

Though the seven-day makeover at Alderson’s 380-square-foot cottage would involve a crew of a dozen contractors and would be documented on video to aid the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s fundraising, this was not to be a made-for-TV production. A resident for nearly a decade, Alderson had settled into a reassuring routine, and Saint-Onge knew that any enhancements to his unit would have to be made with an eye on function and mobility rather than how it might look on camera.

“In film production, you are designing for fictitious characters and the room doesn’t last,” Saint-Onge says. “When you design for real people you need to create a space that not only works but creates an emotional connection. For John, that meant creating a warm space that reminded him of his native country. The charge that someone gets from feeling that they are home means everything to me. Doing makeovers is even more gratifying because you can speed up the design process and in a short period of time you get instant impact.”

Not without an instant learning curve, however. Saint-Onge had to absorb a great deal about the needs of older residents. “The No. 1 fear is of falling,” he says. “So loose rugs and even old wall-to-wall carpeting that can bunch up, and long drapes that you can trip over, have to go. Furniture needs to be made of softer materials and shapes, yet still be sturdy. And things need to be easy to open, so we switched traditional doorknobs to ones with lever handles.”

But being safety-conscious did not mean dispensing with style.

“An environment geared toward an older person’s needs doesn’t have to be sterile, ugly and uninviting,” Saint-Onge insists. “John still has the freedom to be able to function normally and live independently, so the goal of this project was to show that people like him can live in comfort, but yet have a world around them that is an elegant reflection of who they are.”

The project was blessed with solid bones: Alderson’s 1942 cottage, part of a row of units sharing common walls, had a sleeping and living area with an angled post-and-beam style ceiling and a sliding glass door leading to a small patio.

Saint-Onge brought more of the outdoors into the room with front and rear French doors equipped with interior silhouette shades that can be raised and lowered with a lever. “A big thing for seniors is appropriate lighting,” the designer says. “Natural light and the use of color for seniors is really important because it affects your mood.”

Saint-Onge used Behr’s Desert Camel, a sunny shade of beige, on the walls that complemented new low-sheen dark wood flooring and a suite of substantial brown leather seating and storage chests from Z Gallerie.

“It was a little depressing and somber before,” he says of the room, which was a hodgepodge of furniture. “I wanted to show that in a small space you can do a darker color on the walls and there is still spaciousness but also warmth.”

The designer knocked out a walk-in closet and created a smaller curtained space for clothing on one side and a desk for Alderson’s computer on the other, both illuminated by a Restoration Hardware chandelier.

Hanging swag curtains in front of the bathroom draws attention away from the plain door, Saint-Onge says. It also sets the stage for a Hollywood glam bathroom with a mirror-clad vanity.

On the afternoon that Alderson first saw his redesigned home, he told Saint-Onge, “I have traveled the world and stayed in hotels like the Savoy in London, and I haven’t seen one nicer.”

Saint-Onge flipped the existing furniture arrangement in the living area, hanging a huge flat-screen TV above a console, so that Alderson no longer needed to sit as close to his older, smaller set to watch boxing matches and TCM. Out went what Saint-Onge calls “flowery furniture and a sofa where the springs were kind of gone,” replaced by coordinated pieces including a stack of trunks to hold the colorful sweaters that Alderson is known to wear.

“It was important to give him that space, yet not have it feel vacant,” says Saint-Onge, even if the new, more navigable space forced the designer to eighty-six a second nightstand he had chosen to flank the bed.

“I’m never afraid to change furniture around,” he says. “I always try to see things from a different perspective. If every day when you come home you say, ‘Oh, some day I have to lose that chair,’ just put it in storage, then you can start to rework the room.”

Once everything was in its optimal place, decorative details pulled the room together. “Even though it’s a little tiny space, I wanted to capture that essence of classic masculine Hollywood that doesn’t exist anymore,” Saint-Onge says. He reframed Alderson’s treasured photos of family and friends, such as actresses Madlyn Rhue and Catherine Zeta-Jones, in handsome leather and metal frames, and he scattered Hollywood coffee-table books and vintage-looking clocks “to create a sense of time standing still where John could reflect on his life and career.”

Sitting on a eucalyptus bench designed by Saint-Onge’s TV gardener friend Rebecca Kolls and listening to the gurgle of a newly installed fountain, Alderson is transported back to a simpler time. “This reminds me of Shangri-La in ‘Lost Horizon,’ ” he says, referencing the 1937 Frank Capra film about a Tibetan paradise.

The patio, once dominated by a storage shed, became a blank canvas. Saint-Onge paved it in terra cotta-colored tiles made from recycled automobile tires (ordered from www.rubbersidewalks.com) and filled it with ficus, palms, philodendra, rosemary, ferns and banana plants, creating a tropical version of Castle Eden, the forest outside Alderson’s hometown of Horden where he and his friends would reenact the swashbuckling moves of actors like Douglas Fairbanks.

It was Mrs. Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, who in a small way made all this possible. The Motion Picture & Television Fund began in 1921 as a charity donation box for out-of-work actors on the set of one of Pickford’s films, says Emilie Kennedy, vice president of the Motion Picture & Television Fund Foundation.

“By the 1940s they realized that beyond financial assistance, members of the industry would need medical care and a place to retire,” Kennedy says. In 1940, actor Jean Hersholt donated land to the fund. The property would grow to a rolling campus dotted with Disneyesque bungalow buildings and whimsical animal topiaries. The grounds also house a hospital, the Louis B. Mayer Theater, two dining halls, a chapel from the Reseda ranch of director John Ford and a rose garden dedicated to Roddy McDowall.

“The motto of the fund is, ‘Taking care of our own,’ ” says Kennedy, which explains more recent additions: the Fran and Ray Stark Villa, opened in 2000, an independent and assisted living facility for 90 with an outdoor pavilion named for Jeffrey Katzenberg and a koi pond donated by the late agent Lew Wasserman.

“Most assisted living follows the mold of making it safe and traditional,” says architect Joyce Polhamus of Smithgroup, the San Francisco firm that designed the Stark Villa. “Being commissioned by a creative community, we were able to take a fresh look at design for the aging.” Innovations included “single loaded” hallways, with rooms on one side and full-length windows on the other, allowing natural light in and helping residents orient themselves. High-speed Internet stations and activity rooms keep residents mobile and mentally active.

Programs are a crucial part of the equation, says Seth Ellis, the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s chief operating officer. “We have tai chi, low-impact aerobics, screenings and film discussion programs,” he says. “Helplessness, hopelessness and boredom are what kills old people.”

As one of the few successful industry-supported healthcare and retirement communities in the county, the fund’s Woodland Hills campus has often been studied but never been duplicated, Kennedy says. “You don’t design a building and just put people in it,” she says. “It has to have a life of its own. And you have to anticipate the changes that the next generation will need.”

One thing, however, is constant.

“Everyone who comes here or anyone who goes into a retirement community or assisted-living situation is going to downsize, and that will be difficult for them,” Saint-Onge says. “Even though their life will be free of some obligations -- like cooking and maintaining their property -- leaving the home you know to go somewhere else and establish roots is emotionally challenging.”

After two seasons of the scripted reality and manipulated emotions of decor television, Saint-Onge traded camera time for face time. He developed partnerships with home improvement and equipment manufacturers such as Philips Electronics that donate materials to worthy projects, allowing the designer “to do makeovers for people that deserve them.” He has spent the last two years bouncing between paying clients and pro bono work for Iraq war veterans and 9/11 victims.

Philips, one of the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s sponsors, brought in Saint-Onge to help with Alderson’s cottage. He came to the project on his own time and dime -- forgoing about $9,000 in design fees -- after becoming friendly with his favorite actress, Teresa Wright, who died this spring at 86.

“She was about to go into assisted living,” he recalls. “And I began to be sensitive to how it must feel to be at a certain age and have to make all these decisions about your possessions.”

Visiting the Woodland Hills campus for the first time, he says, was poignant. “Hollywood is detached from the rest of the world and you think these people are living a glamorous life, but they are everyday people -- uncles, aunts, grandparents -- who worked at a job, and now are able to relax and enjoy their retirement.”

Saint-Onge is already talking about redoing a community room on campus in memory of Wright. The Motion Picture & Television Fund considers the designer’s completed cottage, with more than $40,000 in donated materials and labor, a model showcase for fundraising efforts as well as an aesthetic for future renovations on the property.

This pleases the designer.

“When I finish a project, I always ask myself if I could walk away and feel that it is livable,” he says. “I felt like I had done my job and I could move on.”

Before his exit, however, the designer gave Alderson a series of framed watercolors he had done depicting the Scottish seaside. In one, a lone bird flies over the water. In the kind of Hollywood ending no one could resist, Saint-Onge recalls that Alderson looked at the painting and looked back at his life and said, “That’s me.”

David A. Keeps can be reached at david.keeps@latimes.com.

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An eye for details, design

“In retirement homes and assisted living, seniors spend much more time in their environment, so you have to pay attention to the details that satisfy their needs,” says architect Joyce Polhamus, project manager for the Stark Villa at the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s retirement campus in Woodland Hills. Some of her designing recommendations for seniors:

Lighten up: Sunshine makes spaces cheerful. Artificial light needs to be bright but not glaring; try bulbs that simulate daylight.

Color carefully: “As people age, their eyes tend to get yellow and that can make greens and blues indistinguishable,” she says. “Neutral palettes are calming and let the residents’ possessions add color.”

Simplify flooring: Transitions between rooms should be level to accommodate walkers and wheelchairs. Avoid bold patterns on the floor and variations in color and texture between rooms. “If there’s a strong contrast, older people may think they have to step up or down.”

Four legs, round tops: Eliminate furniture with sharp corners and make sure that pieces are sturdy and stable. “Seniors lean on things for support, so pedestal tables might tip over,” Polhamus says. “Furniture in a material or color that contrasts with the floor will be easier to see and grab.”

Not-so-easy chairs: Deep, soft seats are harder to get into and out of. Harder cushions and full arms are necessary, as is an unskirted, open area between the legs of the chair. “People need a place where they can plant their feet underneath them, lean forward and push themselves up and out.”

Emotional connection: Interior designer Stephen Saint-Onge adds one final reminder: Familiarity breeds contentment. “If they were an artist, bring in their work,” he says. “Or if they collect things that they are sentimental about, work those things into the room so they don’t feel completely displaced.”

-- David Keeps