Is this paint job a joke? More like revenge

It happened so suddenly. One day, Dave Vendig and Marca Whitten’s 1940 Silver Lake home was a bluish gray. A day or so later, the Moderne facade was ... not.

The first story was peach, the upper a particularly vivid pink. Window and door frames were painted red, yellow and a deep blue. There was some purple in there too. Blue bubbles gently accented the whole. It looked like the setting for a Dr. Seuss story.

Instantly, the house was the talk of the neighborhood. Only the front was painted. Was it done for a commercial? A movie? Could it really have been a deliberate aesthetic choice?

The answer is deeper, lying at the heart of a relationship, produced by that particular stress that emerges during any sort of remodeling and redecorating. It’s located somewhere near the fact that when two become one, their approaches to decor don’t, necessarily. And that when decisions are made -- sometimes, and occasionally often -- someone feels shafted.

The Vendig-Whitten house is one man’s attempt to fight back.

Vendig, 42, and Whitten, 36, had lived in their Silver Lake home since 1997, but had done little to it apart from a kitchen remodel when they first bought the house. They didn’t intend to redecorate. The original plan was to work with a designer to reorganize the closets. But it “kinda snowballed from there,” says Whitten, a Los Angeles-area teacher.

Under the designer’s guidance, plain white walls became dramatic and intense. The pale blue of the master bedroom turned to a combination of burnt orange and green. The living room took on what Whitten calls an “Asian meditation vibe.” Their “first grown-up furniture” was purchased.

The results were pleasing. Whitten says the house showed a cohesion it didn’t have before and is “way nicer” as a result. So, a redecorating success story, right? Not exactly. Notice who is missing from this narrative.

“There was always this idea that I was part of the process,” says Vendig, who owns a packaging company and does business management for photographers. “They would turn to me and say ‘What do you think?’, feigning I was part of the process. It was placating me. They weren’t deliberately trying to do it; they just vetoed everything I said.”

Did Whitten consult her husband?

“Hmm,” she says. “Not that much.”

She knows Vendig thinks she abdicated too much power to their designer. Still, she had no idea just how strongly he felt about it.

In August, as the redecorating wound down, Whitten and the couple’s children, Sam, Isaac and Molly, were on a short trip. Vendig joined them, as planned, halfway through.

He told his wife he was experiencing strange dreams, about colors “bursting out of me. I said I didn’t know where it came from, it was just calling me to express myself. I don’t know what it means, but I may have this artistic sense inside me.”

Whitten ignored it. “Dave says a lot of things.” Then they returned home.

The kids screamed when they saw their house. Whitten went into shock.

“I literally could not wrap my mind around it,” she recalls. “I could not take it in completely.” Whitten was so confused, she called her husband’s best friend to ask him if he understood what was going on. Her parents and some neighbors came over to videotape her reaction. Throughout, Vendig played it straight. He was so casual and serious, Whitten says, her confusion turned to concern. Was he having a breakdown? Hours later, he admitted the truth.

It was a joke, of course. With his wife out of town, Vendig could “make decisions without having to clear it.” So he got their painter a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, told him to match it, and then fanned out a color wheel “to find colors that were completely diametrically opposed to any rational choice. I made sure they had good shock value, which was the whole point.” Then he joined his family, and waited.

And no, once she heard the story, Whitten was not mad, or even all that surprised.

“Dave is a really outrageous person, and has more energy than anyone I’ve known,” she says in a voice somewhere between admiration and resignation, explaining that her husband flew to Japan recently because he wanted to climb Mt. Fuji alone.

“I’ve lived through this. This is the man I married. And I married him for a reason. This [prank] is a little expensive, but.... “

“Good for him!” exclaims Michael Payne, a principal in Michael Payne Designs and host of HGTV’s “Designing for the Sexes,” where he often sees communication and gender decor clashes.

“I love this,” Payne said. “Men are deprived of a voice. The men get steamrolled. I make sure men do express their feelings. ‘What do you think about this pillow with all the fringy trim around it? What do you really think about tassels hanging off everything?’ The fact that [Vendig] has to live there and look at it, it’s as though he has no right to say anything. My hat’s off to him! This amuses me no end.”

It also amuses the neighborhood, which has been almost entirely supportive. It probably helps that the neighborhood is Silver Lake.

“Historically, Silver Lake has always been open to new ideas,” says neighbor Todd Wexman, who admits that while he wasn’t so sure about the paint job at first, it grew on him. “That’s why all these Neutras and Schindlers are here -- because [residents] have been open to experimentation.”

Wexman also has a theory, shared by Payne, that Vendig secretly likes the house exactly as it is, and the prank was really “a ruse, to get it the way he wanted.”

Whitten reports that people stop her every day to praise the house, but one friend overheard two women discussing the paint job in a less than complimentary way. “T-A-C-K-Y,” one said to the other. The friend hastened to reassure them it wasn’t an aesthetic decision, then told them the story behind it. Whereupon the woman turned again to her friend. “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”

Not to worry, says Carol S. Potter, a marriage and family therapist based in Larchmont and Culver City. “This is a woman who knows her husband and truly accepts her husband for who he is, not trying to make him into someone else. I think it says a lot for their marriage.”

Potter and Payne agree that remodeling and redecorating can be enormously stressful on a relationship, and urge all parties to discuss matters often, to ensure no one feels ignored or left out.

Though the couple’s children love it, and many in the neighborhood, like Wexman, hope that the house will stay varicolored, the paint job is finite. Whitten says she’s grown tired of it, especially since the recent rains have made it appear even brighter.

Vendig is fine with that. He’s happy about what he did -- “You only have one house to ruin!” -- and resigned to the inevitable.

“I will probably hand the color fan over to my wife, pretend I have some say and go back to my own little world.” Whitten doesn’t disagree.

“Will I consult with him more? Well, no,” she says, firmly. “This shows me I can never consult with him. He should never be consulted.”

The house will be painted a shade of coffee.