When ‘ours’ becomes ‘his’ and ‘hers’

AFTER more than two decades of marriage, Jon Lind and his wife had not just one home to split up upon their divorce, but two. She happily took the house in New England. He gladly took the three-bedroom Hancock Park ranch on the double lot. That was the easy decision.

What wasn’t so easy for Lind was the decision to sell the house and move on, or to stay put in a place loaded with furnishings that his ex-wife selected, kitchen tiles that she hand-painted and memories lingering in every other room. In the end, the songwriter and A&R; executive decided to move on by not moving, a riddle solved with the assistance of an interior designer who is creating an environment that’s “more about the future than the past,” Lind says.

It’s a conclusion other divorced couples are reaching as well: that the benefits of new paint and furniture, of reconsidered color schemes and curtains, can be as effective as a new home in fashioning a fresh start. Redecorating, experts say, can be better than moving.

Familiar belongings keep you connected to the past and provide comfort as you make room for the new things, including hope, says Noel O’Malley, a Los Angeles psychotherapist. “Furniture, remodeling, asserting your will upon the things around you is central to healing,” he says. “Redecorating can be the psyche’s way of rehearsing for emotional change.”

For Southern Californians, however, staying in the same house is as much a financial decision as a sentimental one. That new coat of Dunn-Edwards can buy not only a second beginning but also an escape route from the current realities of real estate.

“This kind of market makes it harder to keep the house and buy a spouse out because the market is so crazy in L.A. and prices are so high,” says divorce attorney Annie Wishingrad. “But that same crazy housing market also makes some people do whatever they can to buy the spouse out and stay with what they know. I’m seeing people who give up retirement and other assets to stay in the same house. It’s an emotional decision.”

It’s a market no less daunting for renters. For Heather King, keeping her one-bedroom, rent-stabilized apartment in Koreatown after her divorce in 2001 meant that she could avoid paying double the amount elsewhere. So the essayist and NPR commentator stayed in the 1930s courtyard complex where she had lived with her husband for 10 years.

“This is a very comfortable apartment complex where everyone knows each other,” says King, whose space includes the home office where she wrote her 2005 memoir, “Parched.” She decided to redecorate gradually. “I wasn’t in a rush to change things.”

Eventually she did break from many of the design decisions that she and her ex-husband made together -- or, as King calls them, design non-decisions. Navajo white walls were upgraded with a couple of coats of taupe in the living room, apple green in the kitchen and deep chestnut in the bedroom. She replaced white sheers with bamboo shades and, eventually, reupholstered the furniture.

But for King, what stayed was just as important as what changed. She kept the pine dining table and bookshelves built by her ex-husband, along with the piano, stereo and sofa. The divorce was generally amicable, King says, so she didn’t feel the urge to exorcise her ex from the apartment.

After Lind divorced, he lived in the house that, aside from four pieces of midcentury Swedish furniture he bought for the TV room, was virtually intact from his marriage. The pine table, the William Morris print sofa and the children’s room decor -- all picked by his wife -- were like sets in which a post-divorce Lind played the bachelor, eating his meals in front of the big screen TV and only occasionally visiting the pool-house studio where he cowrote such hits as Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland” and Madonna’s “Crazy for You.”

“It took two years after I got divorced before I decided to redo the feel of life in this house,” Lind says. After considering a move to Santa Monica, Brentwood or various canyons, Lind stayed in the comfort of his home and Larchmont Village, ready to transform the old into the new.

Enter the decorator. Lind contracted Gary Gibson, who says a basic “paint and fluff and fold” job evolved into a top-to-bottom redo that, after more than a year of planning, purchasing and intense consulting with Lind, is nearing completion. In the last six months, while Lind has lived in the Palazzo at Park La Brea apartments, the all-white walls of his house have been painted dramatic grays, blues and mochas. The light oak floors have been stained tobacco, and the ceiling has been studded with drop lights throughout. Soon truckloads of mostly contemporary furniture will arrive.

Meanwhile, the man who rarely made decor decisions has morphed into a bona fide design junkie. Lind now subscribes to Elle Decor, refers to drapes as “window treatments” and navigates his way through the Pacific Design Center without consulting the information booth.

“Before, the house was basically my wife’s eye. Now I’ve discovered my own eye,” says Lind, who refers to himself as a “recovering narcissist” and likens the process of redecorating a house to reassessing one’s life. “I’ve realized that with the house, the past doesn’t need to be erased. The house needs to be loved again.”

Lind kept his ex-wife’s hand-painted kitchen tiles, as well as most of his art, books and objects. “This isn’t about eradicating the past,” he says. “It used to be our home; now it needs to be my home.”

Crossing the line from “ours” to “mine” is a familiar process for Sasha Emerson. After divorcing her first husband in the early ‘90s, she stayed in their Echo Park home for five years. “I redid the furniture, built out a rumpus room, put in a pool and landscaped,” says Emerson, then a studio executive, now an interior decorator.

“When staying in the same house after divorce, it’s both symbolically and emotionally important to change things. If it’s a shrine to your old way of life, it will be nothing but old memories.” She tells clients that small gestures such as buying new towels or getting rid of an old recliner chair can help the transformation -- of a life as well as a home.

O’Malley, however, sees just as much value in keeping some of those icons of the past. “Reactive redecorating isn’t a surrogate for developing a new and grounded identity,” says the psychotherapist, who cites an Eames chair when talking about his own experience with decor and divorce. “It was given to my family by Ray and Charles when my sister was born. My parents divorced when I was just starting my post-college life, and I snuck back into their house and literally stole the chair. It’s become a reference point, a kind of doorway into memories of family nights together in the living room. I knew I’d never sit in a room with my mother and father together again, but I could at least live with a chair that was embedded with those experiences.”

For others, divorce calls for nothing short of a complete purging of the past. Designer Nathan Turner worked with one recent divorced client who kept the family home but changed wall colors, furniture and seemingly every detail, down to those all-important framed photos. “You can really alter the energy and feel of a home through decoration,” Turner says. “You don’t have to move.”

Lind also knows that fresh paint and new sofas can only take someone so far. “This house has weaknesses, and they’re the same ones since the day I got here. The kitchen is still too small, and I’ll never have that kitchen island or the great room I always fantasized about, but part of this process has been letting go of a lot of trappings,” he says. “It’s about being comfortable in my own skin.”

Alexandria Abramian-Mott can be reached at home@latimes.com.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

New beginnings

Redecorating as therapy? Whether driven by a tight real estate market or a simple desire to live in a longtime home, some people find that redecorating an old home is easier than moving into a new one. Experts’ tips for a fresh start:

To preserve the past:

Refresh the old: Put your treasured objects in a new context, designer Gary Gibson says. Hang art on a different wall, move souvenirs to a new spot and reorganize books or put them in a new shelving unit.

Keep photos: Don’t throw them away, even if you think you never want to see them again. Keep them in a box. Every six months, swap out the photos in your frames. Your feelings toward images may change over time.

Focus on details: Keep the architectural bones of the house and change paint, furniture and fabrics. The original structure provides a connection to the past, while new decor looks to the future.

To start completely fresh:

Estate sales: Giving your belongings to charity or selling some at a garage sale are two options, but if you want to liquidate everything, estate sale companies will do all the work for you in exchange for a percentage of sales.

Wertz Brothers: This store, with locations in West Los Angeles and Santa Monica, buys used furniture in great condition. Expect to get 20% to 30% of the original price, designer Sasha Emerson says. The trade-off for a lower payoff is convenience: The store picks up at your home. www.wertzbrothers.com.

Craigslist: Great for getting top dollar for furniture. Downsides: You’ll have to photograph pieces to maximize sales and schedule meetings with buyers. losangeles.craigslist.org.

Flea markets: Vendor spot start at about $50 to $100 a day at the monthly Rose Bowl Flea Market, the weekly Melrose Trading Post at Fairfax High School and the twice-monthly Santa Monica Outdoor Antique & Collectible Market at the Santa Monica Airport. You have to haul stuff there and back, but the markets are among the most lucrative and fastest ways to sell belongings.

-- Alexandria Abramian-Mott