Cape Cod, meet Marrakech

THE 1935 shingled and shuttered Cape Cod house overlooking the ocean from Playa del Rey is a slice of old-fashioned Americana. Ring the doorbell and you almost expect Donna Reed to answer, apple pie in hand.

Instead, Michelle Kelchak ushers you into a worldly living room that would put any chic boutique hotel to shame, then heads for the kitchen to fetch Slovakian pastries or a Moroccan tagine. This is, after all, a showplace for her aesthetic -- a style she calls “international modern.” Using rich wall treatments and lushly textured furnishings, Kelchak has created interiors that recall Parisian salons, Chinese temples and North African medinas.

“My husband and I try to visit two new countries a year,” says Kelchak, 42, who often brings furniture home from her travels. “The things I put in my suitcase and ship home -- my husband sometimes thinks I am nuts.”

Kelchak, a shoe designer whose Michelle K line of casual footwear is manufactured by Skechers, and her husband, aerospace engineer Mark DeRoche, were interviewing architects and planning to build a “Moroccan modern” house when they fell in love with the hillside Cape Cod built by a sea captain. They bought it three years ago from MGM studio actress Rita Forester Mattson, who had lived there for more than 30 years and had decorated the yard with stone lions and birdcages. She also had added columns to the facade and put a weathervane on the roof.

The New England ambience in no way dissuaded Kelchak. Nor did the shag carpeting, faded wallpaper or windows nailed shut. Motivated by romanticism and determined to test their individual sensibilities -- his engineer’s eye for form and function, her fashion designer’s taste for texture and ornamentation -- the couple turned the house inside out.

They burnished the oak floors with a dark stain and outfitted the staircase railings with light-diffusing rice paper sandwiched between plates of glass. They polished vintage doorknobs and installed new casement adjusters from www.rejuvenation.com on the plantation-style tip-out windows.

“I wasn’t at all worried about betraying the architectural integrity of the house,” Kelchak says. “By making all the wood darker and putting in all the old hardware, we gave it more charm than it had when we bought it.”

With those changes complete, she had a blank slate. Rooms could accommodate pieces from foreign lands in a much bolder design scheme, one she describes as “whimsical and elegant at the same time.”

“I am definitely a risk-taker,” she says. “I don’t like conventional things very much.”

Which explains how a chandelier, hung heavy with hundreds of amber and amethyst crystals, switched on the light bulb of inspiration in Kelchak’s head. She had first seen the fixture at a design showroom in Rome called Contemporanea while buying a painting of Aphrodite as a wedding present for her husband four years ago. “I knew that one day when I had a new house, I would come back for it,” she recalls. And she did.

SHAPED like the hull of a boat, the fanciful dining room chandelier not only fit the nautical origins of the house but also helped to determine her color scheme throughout: white, purple and brown, with accents of red.

Kelchak proceeded to shop locally but nonetheless managed to achieve a global effect. In the airy master bedroom, a large pale purple portrait of a sunflower by fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo sits above a dark wood Chinese bench. A large wooden dresser with diamond-patterned metal doors from the Los Angeles store Dialogica adds a shimmer to the mix, as does the silvery Venetian plastered wall behind the bed.

The white leather platform bed from Diva on Beverly Boulevard is as crisply tailored as a Prada skirt, glammed up with a silk and glass embroidered coverlet from an Indian import shop. Red lacquer Chinese drums serve as nightstands. The overall effect is bright and serene.

By contrast, the expansive living room is dark and dramatic, with iridescent embossed velvet panels integrated into the oak walls.

“I knew I wanted to keep the woodwork in order to maintain the original character of the room,” Kelchak says.

The fireplace, however, had “an elaborately carved, cheesy European mantel that was so not me” and had to go, she says. Kelchak went in a Jazz Age direction with a stainless steel surround and a Deco-style limestone Odeon mantel from Chesney’s in New York. For the wall tile around her new hearth, she wanted mother-of-pearl.

“It was going to cost $17,000,” she says with a laugh, “so I asked, ‘What else have you got?’ ”

Eventually a honeycomb checkerboard made from travertine and bronze tiles created an elegant brown and white backdrop for an Erte sculpture and a collection of amethyst glass vessels with delicate hand-painted designs -- some used as candle votives, others flipped over to serve as bud vases.

To keep the space (“my ballroom,” Kelchak calls it) bright, she chose all white furniture. “I don’t have kids or dogs right now,” she says, “and I can live with stains.”

Monochrome was fine, but boring would not do, so Kelchak returned to Contemporanea, which produced a suite of white furniture that is nothing like the ubiquitous California slip-covered sofa and chair. Perched on cast bronze feet, the Italian settees, chaises and club chairs are upholstered in pinwheel-pleated velvet, shaggy faux Mongolian lamb and fish-scale patterned leather.

It’s no surprise where the passion for fabrics comes from.

“There is only so much you can do designing a shoe,” Kelchak says. “To make it unique, you start playing with the materials. Texture and details are the things I look for in the fabrics I choose for my home.”

Light fixtures also define the space: Old-fashioned crystal hurricane lanterns came from the gift shop in the Philippe Starck-designed Paris restaurant Light.

Sconces resembling jewel-encrusted turtle shells inhabit the four corners of the room, and hammered bronze floor lamps wear goat hide shades. A dragon lamp sitting on a Moroccan inlaid table is topped with lingerie-style black lace and crystal.

“It looks like the Mad Hatter’s lampshade,” says Kelchak, who had a collection of vintage hats as a girl and dreamed of going to millinery school.

KELCHAK grew up in a modern ranch home in Munster, Ind. One fateful day she visited “the new girl in school’s grandmother’s house on the rich side of town.”

It was an exotic place of Persian rugs, hand-painted Chinese furniture, Louis chairs and African masks on the walls. “I thought, one day that’s what I’m going to do.”

She went on to major in broadcast production with a minor in art at Arizona State University, eventually landing a job with an L.A. company that edited movie trailers before becoming a stylist for fashion photography.

A chance meeting with an employee at the then-hot sneaker firm L.A. Gear led to an interview. Kelchak submitted drawings of animal print and snakeskin sneakers -- and landed the gig. These days, her signature shoe line sells in department stores nationwide.

“Designing shoes, I am very into texture and mixing materials,” she says. “That’s what I am into in the house. When people walk in, it’s like eye candy: There are so many things to look at, and every piece has a story. For me, decorating a home is about surrounding myself with all of the elements of the countries I love, so that it looks lived-in, not store-bought.”

Kelchak likes to hunt for treasures for her home and garden, but nothing is too serious or precious, says Craig Boelsen, her landscape architect.

“The great surprise of Michelle’s home is that it has this understated, subdued exterior,” he says. “And then when you walk in, you immediately get that the home has taken on her personality.”

Working without an interior designer, Kelchak intuitively understood how to create rooms that have distinctive personalities but still work well together.

The theatrical living room, for instance, leads into a small sitting room with Parisian Deco chairs re-covered in blue eel skin, Syrian mother-of-pearl tables and a carved ottoman from Indian Style in L.A.

The walls and ceiling are covered in embossed leather in a shade similar to the dark woodwork of the living room.

She employed the same trick in the dining room, which is dominated by a custom-built, 10-foot table with a turquoise glass top and Moroccan chairs upholstered in white leather.

She hung a square of the dark embossed leather as artwork on a white wall and painted the facade of a built-in fire niche a deep, earthy shade.

“I wanted it to be dramatic, and there’s so much dark in the living room that I felt it needed to have an element of that in here,” she explains. “This purple-brown color unites the rooms and makes it easier to adjust from walking out of a darker room into a brighter one.”

There is no division between the dining room and kitchen, which has painted Indian doors from Arte de Mexico covering the pantry and a granite-topped island flanked by modernist bar stools inspired by ones she saw in a Laguna Beach restaurant.

“I get inspiration everywhere,” she says.

THE informal layout of the open floor plan suits Kelchak.

“I didn’t feel the need to have a formal dining room because the chandelier and the fire wall creates warmth and intimacy,” she says. “I like it open because when you throw parties, everybody ends up in the kitchen, so even when I’m cooking, I feel part of the party.”

If the rooms in her home are defined by various cultures, so are her menus. “I have three paella pans and six tagines,” she confesses, referring to the traditional Moroccan lidded pots. Dinner parties regularly feature themes such as Christmas fondue or Caribbean barbecue.

“When it’s warm, we like to keep the doors open and live and entertain inside and out,” says her husband, DeRoche.

That meant updating the garden, which was once a “big slab of cement with a fish pond that hadn’t been used in years,” Kelchak says.

She hired Boelsen, whose firm, Pacific Coast Landscape Inc., specializes in wind- and salt-resistant gardens. He planted a stand of the striped cane bamboo ‘Alphonse Karr,’ dwarf New Zealand flax, Texas feather grass and bronze-leafed cordyline that sway in the ocean breeze. Bird of paradise and star jasmine add color and fragrance.

“Michelle plays bocce ball, so she wanted a lawn,” he says. For entertaining, he created a built-in concrete bar and banquette along with a fire pit and seating area set on a grid of concrete pavers and grass. Drip irrigation under the sod keeps the furniture from getting wet.

The result is clean, quiet and modern. “We didn’t want to compete with the spectacular view or overwhelm the house with a themed garden that did not relate,” Boelsen says, adding that he kept the structure minimal and the palette muted because he knew Kelchak would add her personal touch with Moroccan lanterns, Asian ceramic stools and a fountain made from a Turkish olive jar.

It is here, in their own Eastern Eden, that Kelchak and DeRoche often can be found entertaining friends -- or simply enjoying the western sunset.

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

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One Moroccan holdover

When Michelle Kelchak saw the water views from a 1935 Cape Cod house in Playa del Rey, she scuttled her plans to build a modern Moroccan home. Almost. She couldn’t resist trying the style in her master bath. Here’s how she did it.

Color: “I wasn’t that nervous about using red so prominently in a bathroom,” Kelchak says of her unconventional choice. “It’s pretty bold, and if the ceilings weren’t so high and there wasn’t so much light coming in from the windows, it would probably feel cave-ish.” More important, the color works with the beautiful free-standing Moroccan mirror (reflected in another mirror, at left) made from coral and bone.

Tile: The biggest shot of red comes from the Italian glass mosaic tiles on the walls. “We used 1-inch squares in orange, gold and red around the mirrors and light fixtures and 4-inch gold tiles in the tub enclosure,” Kelchak says. “The light that reflects off these tiles gives skin a beautiful glow.” The tiles are from Classic Tile & Mosaic, 3221 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles; (310) 287-0142.

Lights: The fixtures are from Artemide, 9006 Beverly Blvd., West Hollywood; (310) 888-4099.

Sinks, faucets: Fixtures are from Snyder Diamond, 1399 Olympic Blvd., Santa Monica; (310) 450-1000.

Tub: Kelchak and her husband put a Grohe spa bathtub under a Moroccan lantern in the corner of the room. (The edge of the tub is visible on the far right.) “In that position you can soak in the tub,” Kelchak says, “and look out windows to your right and left.” The couple added another window that looks through the top of the staircase and out a window on the landing, which has a view of the water. “We had to give up having a big huge shower, but it’s worth it. When you have the windows open you can really feel the outside.”

-- David A. Keeps