Starck on Stark

PHILIPPE STARCK, the prolific French designer, is holding forth over a brunch of Champagne, brioche and English sausage on the deck of a house he designed in Mar Vista. “I never do residential because I believe everybody must create his own home,” he declares. “If you hire a designer, you will get a showroom and you will die. Or worse, you will live in his brain.”

The owners of the house, Camilla and Benjamin Trigano, exchange a smile. Starck is a close friend, and the couple have enjoyed vacationing in the place he built for himself on the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux. So they asked him to design their refuge on another coast. “All we wanted,” Camilla says, “was what Philippe retreats to: a surf shack with a twist.”

That’s what they got. From the tree-lined street, the simple shapes, pitched roof, black clapboards and white trim have the childlike innocence of a dollhouse-albeit one belonging to a sophisticated little girl with a preference for black T-shirts.

For 30 years, Starck has been the agent provacateur of design, delighting people with the unexpected and playful. He transformed the drab Mondrian Hotel on the Sunset Strip by adding giant flowerpots in the garden and Godzilla-size doors at the entry. The Royalton, Paramount and Hudson are the edgiest hotels in New York, known for their quirky decor. He’s created whimsical chairs (one of his favorites is the Louis Ghost, a transparent acrylic version of a Louis XVI armchair), lamps, toilet fittings, kitchen utensils (his lemon squeezer looks like a praying mantis) and just about anything else you can think of, all while maintaining that they’re strictly functional tools meant to enhance everyday life.

The Trigano house is no exception. The interior vibrates with light and color. In the entry and kitchen, there are walls of lime green and orange. And the living room has lemon-yellow walls that set off the pitched ceiling and gleaming white floorboards. Three steps lead up to this eclectically furnished space, a melange of Starck-designed pieces and Paris flea-market finds much like the designer loves to use in order to annoy purists. there’s a rosy glow of pink on the staircase leading to the master suite. Behind the bed, a closet serves as a room divider, with the master bathroom beyond. Expansive French doors open to a desk, where the owners can gaze at the sky and treetops while soaking unseen in the tub.

Benjamin, a French native who recently opened the MB photo gallery in West Hollywood, supervised the construction to ensure that Starck’s simple forms were meticulously executed.

For Camilla, who is British but grew up in France, it’s the colors-the combination of shiny white and intense pastels-that give every room a lift when she comes home from work as manager of the Starck-designed Taschen bookstore in Beverly Hills. “When I open the door and see the splash of green, it’s like a twinkling star,” she says, “and waking up in the pink-walled bedroom, I feel I’m floating.”

“The only ambition of this house is to express the happiness of the people who live in it,” Starck says. in that, he’s succeeded for the Triganos and their two children.