Shabby Chic, all grown up

CAMERON BRUNNER was happy as a clam, ensconced in a Santa Monica condominium done up in Rachel Ashwell’s Shabby Chic furnishings. Then, four Mother’s Days ago, she stumbled upon the 1936 screenwriter’s cottage that, she recalls, “was meant to be my home.”

Two French window walls faced a pool. Triangular skylights brought the outside in. At the center of a sunken lounge stood a live Brazilian black pepper tree, rising from a hole in the floor and through a weather-sealed opening in the roof.

“It was magical,” Brunner says.

Unable to shake the house from her imagination, she called the owner. The property had fallen out of escrow and into Brunner’s lap. Not too shabby.

When it came time to decorate it, her next move was equally simple: not too Shabby Chic.

For the last four years, Brunner has been transforming the house into her highly individualized, thoroughly evolved form of Shabby Chic. Anchored in the coziness of seashell artwork and thrift shop paintings of sailing boats and sea captains, the home is partly defined by pieces from Brunner’s global journeys, putting a decidedly worldly spin on the California casual look that Ashwell made famous.

Since 1989, Shabby Chic -- a freshly laundered take on slipcovered upholstery, whitewashed vintage wood, wicker furniture and country floral prints -- has morphed into an empire for its creator, Ashwell. Mainstreamed with books, a line of household products and a lower-cost collection at Target, Shabby Chic offers an easy yet elegant style, a romantic antidote to the starkness of modern minimalism. Ashwell’s post-feminist frilliness has clicked particularly well in Southern California, home to three of her six retail outlets.

Like many successful and fashionable women of her generation, Brunner began living on her own during the heyday of Shabby Chic and was an early and enthusiastic customer, even appearing in a segment filmed in her condo for Ashwell’s show on the Style network in 2000. Now, Brunner says, although the home she decorated herself still contains some Shabby Chic, “this is a much more personalized interpretation, drenched in color and inspired by my passions and personal history.”

The Santa Monica house reflects her love affair with three things: the ocean, family and faraway lands. Furnished with vintage rattan, cast-plaster figurine lighting, hundreds of marine life specimens and treasures from flea markets from Pasadena to Paris, the space is a fitting domain for Brunner, an advertising sales representative for Conde Nast Traveler magazine.

“Cameron always said, ‘My house is like a living journal,’ ” says Ashwell, who would often speak with Brunner on visits to the Shabby Chic store in Santa Monica. “She designs very soulfully, and her home has a strong point of view, a mixture of the late 1940s and the Ivy at the Shore. She really knows how to create and display vignettes of decorative objects and travel souvenirs. Every single piece feels like it has an interesting history.”

AS the Shabby Chic look proliferates at Anthropologie, PB Teen and other retailers with younger clientele, Brunner’s tweak on the formula proves that it is possible to grow up with the style instead of growing out of it. Though its visual shorthand can appear to be a design cliche, Shabby Chic has proved to be a durable and flexible aesthetic limited only by the imagination of the practitioner.

“I have seen many homes that have evolved away from my expected style, but the fundamentals -- beauty, comfort, function -- are still there,” Ashwell says. “I hope I have empowered people, some of whom are a little fearful, to nurture their own opinions about design.”

Ashwell’s mantra has always been a part of the Brunner design DNA. Born in Pasadena, young Cameron lived in a pink bedroom with a brass bed and wicker furniture, in a home that was walking distance to the Ritz-Carlton, then known as the Huntington Hotel.

“My mother is the Auntie Mame type -- very artistic and lots of personality,” Brunner says. “She bought antiques, French and chinoiserie fabrics, and lots of other collectibles.” Together, mother and daughter have shopped the world -- Madrid; Rome; Positano, Italy; Marrakech, Morocco.

Brunner’s maternal grandparents are equally inspiring characters. Patrick “Dandy” Crowe played pro baseball with the Philadelphia Athletics. His wife, Ruth -- whom a young Cameron called “Ha Ha” because of her laugh -- is a free spirit who came to L.A. in her youth with hopes of becoming a movie star.

“They are warm and generous,” Brunner says. “Those are the feelings that I wanted to convey in my house.”

One of her earliest memories was early mornings at the beach with Dandy. Together they would comb for starfish and sand dollars.

“Cameron grew up with traveling and entertaining and became very sophisticated as a little girl, learning about the finer things in life,” Brunner’s grandfather says. “But she’s always been nuts about seashells, cleaning them up and making things with them.”

That artsy-craftsy impulse came into play almost immediately after Brunner moved into her home. The sleek white interiors she inherited stood in stark contrast to the European country charm of the exterior, with its “My Secret Garden” storybook grounds and gabled Dutch door entry. After gussying up the garden with plants inspired by trips to Capri -- roses, lemons, bougainvillea, geraniums and a giant hybrid “hotbiscus” -- Brunner started to look at paint and fabric swatches.

The walls blossomed, and she had furniture reupholstered and window treatments made by interior designer Lillian Lageyre.

“For me, it all boils down to color, color, color,” Brunner says. “I have to have pink and purple and all the pale shades of the beach, and the blues and greens of the sea.”

She hung seashell-encrusted mirrors on the walls and assembled starfish in a chorus line on the kitchen windowsill. In the downstairs powder room, she had an epiphany: “I envisioned a seashell grotto.”

She came across a magazine photograph of just such a room and tracked down the artist who designed it, Kim Gordon of Mili La Concha in nearby Venice.

“Kim read my taste immediately,” Brunner says.

Gordon covered the powder room vanity in pearly shells and, in a jolt of inspiration, created elaborate sea creature corbels between the walls and ceiling, framing the window above the sink.

Aquatic decorative pieces -- coral, conches, giant clamshells -- are in fashion these days, but Brunner sees the look as timeless. “Seashells are romantic,” she says. “They transport you.”

The two-story, 3,000-square-foot house began as an L-shaped screenwriter’s cottage and had undergone a series of thoughtful additions and upgrades, including dark, polished oak floors throughout most of the house and pedestal sinks from Waterworks in a beautiful blue-tiled master bath.

“I was lucky,” Brunner says. “I did not have to do a lot of structural work. The only thing I had to do in the kitchen was to match the countertops with the same Carrara marble that was already on the island.”

Elsewhere, however, she unleashed her creativity. As an employee of a travel magazine, Brunner looked at every business trip as an opportunity to bring home decorative arts and make each room a destination.

The guest wing, which houses an office, has an East Coast beach house vibe, with fisherman’s netting thrown over a table and a lamp made from a mariner statuette that she found lurking in a corner of a thrift shop. In the dining room, framed Polynesian restaurant menus, Chinese toile print chair covers and silk sari fabric sewn into curtains create an Asian ambience. A hallway with paintings of Morocco and a collection of antique kohl mascara bottles conjures up Marrakech.

In the “tree room,” as she calls it, Brunner added sea glass at the base of the trunk and had an aquarium trimmed in rattan to match a suite of 1950s Hawaiian furniture. Her grandmother, Ha Ha, looks on via a snapshot of her with John Wayne on an Oahu beach -- a photo Brunner enlarged to poster size at a copy shop and placed over a vintage cocktail cart.

It’s no coincidence that the bar is the first thing you see when you walk in the room, Brunner says with a laugh. “It’s a very meditative, relaxing place to have a glass of wine.”

The master bathroom could have been ripped from a brochure of a French mountain spa. To accentuate the soaring A-frame ceiling, she hung a chandelier from her family home in Pasadena and trimmed it with glass fruits that she and her mother found at a flea market in Paris. To compensate for a lack of storage space, she added a 1920s vintage armoire made in Buenos Aires and clad in mirrors, which make the expansive room look even larger.

The bedroom has the air of a Parisian salon. A late 1800s cast iron bed shares the space with a velvet-covered chaise, mirrored night stands, a Chinese Art Deco rug in uncommon shades of purple, and a marble-topped dresser inlaid with mother of pearl -- a piece Brunner purchased at the medina in Marrakech and had shipped back to California.

Despite a late 19th century oil painting of her great grandmother and great aunt as children hanging above the antique wood mantel, the bedroom fireplace looked a little unfinished. Brunner called Gordon, who studded it with scrollwork made of luminescent shells.

WHILE the bedroom project was underway, Gordon often found herself standing with Brunner in front of the fireplace in the formal living room, the two of them wondering what to do about the plain paneled wall surrounding it.

The answer was a love letter to Brunner’s long-standing infatuation with travel. Gordon proposed a series of sailors’ valentines, based on the intricate handmade shell collages made between 1830 and 1880 by women in Barbados for British sailors to bring home to their sweethearts. These works of folk art were designed to hold images of loved ones and often bore sentimental messages.

In his 2002 book, “Sailors’ Valentines,” John Fondas says they have become highly collectible in the last 10 years, often “selling for 10 to 15 times the estimated price at auction.”

Gordon and Brunner pored over Fondas’ book, noting likes and dislikes. Fortunately, Gordon had bought the entire inventory of a seashell supplier and had dozens of specimens to work with, some large and tiger striped, some as tiny as green lentils.

“Once Kim showed me the drawings, there was no turning back,” Brunner says. “There is an absolute design to these pieces that answered all my needs for color, creativity, exoticism, whimsy and the romance of the sea.”

Using only natural shells, family photographs and an enameled anchor bauble, Gordon fashioned eight large panels with beautifully rendered hearts, three-dimensional flowers, a schooner and a mermaid. Smaller trim pieces depict waves and the words “true love.”

Drowned in sentiment? Not Brunner.

“It’s hard to find a client like Cameron, who is willing to take risks, but her artistic eye always prevails,” Gordon says. “Her house is full of examples of taking risks, and her amazing ability to put different cultures side by side -- all woven together by her nautical theme -- helps make the fireplace look as though it has been there since the house’s first summer in the 1930s.”

The hearth now looks like a photo album made of seashells, Brunner says, pointing out family members in black-and-white snapshots cradled by shimmering nautiluses. “It is the story of us. I had one friend cry when she first saw it.”

TEARS notwithstanding, Brunner’s home is a joyous place. On a recent Sunday afternoon, Patsy Cline is singing on the stereo and a cellphone goes off to the ring tone of “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” As Crosby, her 13-year-old cocker spaniel, lounges nearby, Brunner and her beau, George Harros, enjoy a glass of wine.

“My favorite place is right here, sitting at the table and watching the fish tank at the other end of the house,” he says. “I struggle to make things beautiful. Cameron doesn’t. She has a style and a flair you don’t see every day.”

Brunner raves about www.parishotelboutique.com, where she purchased a 1953 teapot and a table with a cast iron mermaid base.

“I couldn’t get my credit card out quick enough,” she says.

It’s the first foray into online collecting for a woman who loves the hands-on shopping experience -- be it scouring for seashells on the beach or haggling in a souk. Brunner still remembers a back-handed compliment proffered by a dealer in Marrakech.

“He called me a Berber. The Berbers are the most toughest, most ruthless negotiators,” she says with a satisfied smile.

In the living room, flames dance across the fireplace logs, and the last rays of sunlight stream through the windows and set the sailors’ valentines aglow. The giant seashell-framed family album is a love note to Brunner’s wanderlust -- and her sense of home. “Think of me,” reads the panel in the upper left-hand corner, continuing in the right corner, “When far away.”

David A. Keeps can be reached at home@latimes.com.

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Tres chic search

Cameron Brunner took Shabby Chic style and morphed it into a mix influenced by sea life and world travels. Among her resources:

Bedding: Anthropologie, www.anthropologie.com; House Boutique in Santa Monica,

(310) 451-2597, www.houseinc.com.

Custom seashell designs: Kim Gordon at Mili La Concha (by appointment) in Venice, (310) 396-3925, www.mililaconcha.com.

Global furnishings, ocean photography: Carlyle Design in Santa Monica,

(310) 395-6667.

Hotel silver, accessories: www.parishotelboutique.com.

Lampshades: Fantasy Lighting in Los Angeles, (323) 933-7244.

Picture frames: Jewel Box Frames in Santa Monica,

(310) 828-6900, www.jewelboxframes.com.

Vintage furniture: Shabby Chic in Santa Monica,

(310) 394-1975, www.shabbychic.com; Pom Pom in Los Angeles,

(323) 851-1342.

-- David A. Keeps