Hollywood glam, his way
WHEN Darryl Wilson says he knows “what makes a house work,” he isn’t just talking about floor plans and furniture placement. For years the 49-year-old designer has defrayed the cost of renovating his residences by getting them paying gigs as locations for magazine fashion spreads and print ads.
“The houses that work are the ones with tons of glass and natural light, a simple white box with midcentury furniture,” he says. “Photographers and their clients also love the sexy backdrop of a city view.”
Three years ago, Wilson found a Beverly Hills makeover project that was all that -- with a fish-shaped swimming pool and a side of Hollywood history. The 6,000-square-foot ranch home was built in 1958 by Eddie and Toni Mannix, a powerful MGM vice president and his wife, the adulterous duo portrayed by Bob Hoskins and Diane Lane in the current release “Hollywoodland.” The property included an Asian-style cabana inspired by the film “The Teahouse of the August Moon.”
Any vestiges of a movie colony mansion, however, had been “bastardized” with bad 1970s fixtures, ceramic tile floors, wood ceilings and rock fireplaces, Wilson says. After renting the house once -- to a photographer for FHM men’s magazine, which shot actress Teri Hatcher straddling Wilson’s washing machine -- Wilson reimagined it as “the type of house stars would’ve lived in during the glamorous and groovy era when the Polo Lounge and Perino’s were swinging.”
Deco-inspired doors with $500 Lucite knobs, triple-bevel-edged marble countertops and other custom elements add up to Wilson’s design vision: Rat Pack modern with a Parisian accent. It is, he says, a home that reflects the elegance of European hotels and the ease of Southern California living, an amalgamation of everything he has loved in old movies and his extensive travels.
“Darryl has taken one of the predominant decorating trends of the moment, Hollywood glamour, and given it his own flair for luxury,” says Stefan Lawrence, owner of the L.A. gallery Twentieth, where Wilson frequently shops. “What makes him distinctive as a designer is his ability to recognize the potential of the architecture as it exists and then execute perfectly correct interiors from start to finish.”
Wilson’s instincts, much to his surprise, led him to a design scheme that was more about what a house could do for him than what he could do for a house. This time, the makeover was personal.
YOU might say that Wilson was to the manner born. His father, Marvin, was a real estate developer who built high-end tract homes in the San Fernando Valley and Pacific Palisades, and his uncle, Ron Wilson, was an interior designer with clients including Johnny Carson and Kenny Rogers. Wilson’s next-door neighbors in Encino were the Jackson Five. His baby-sitter? Cher.
As a teenager, Wilson opened Living Interiors, a group of plant shops housed in the lobbies of office towers built by his father. “I would put plants in offices and do landscaping, and people said I had an eye for it,” he says.
The plant business was prosperous enough. At 19, Wilson bought his first house for $47,600 in probate. The $294 monthly mortgage payment was about the same as the rent he was paying.
After his undergraduate years at USC, Wilson went to law school, figuring he would become an entertainment attorney. He worked for record labels in London and managed L.A.-based musicians, restoring houses for himself and his clients on the side. In 1991, he gave up the dream of a career in the entertainment world.
“You can’t hide what’s inside of you,” Wilson says. “I realized just how much I loved design. I was trying to manage artists when I wanted to be one myself.”
He found his medium in real estate. He had an ability to look through sloppy remodeling and outdated decor and see the bones of a house. He knew what to keep, what to replace and where to find the vintage modern furnishings that have since become bestselling reissues at Modernica and Design Within Reach.
He designed Kelsey Grammer’s Malibu compound and the New York offices of Interscope Records. His last house in the Hollywood Hills earned a minimum of $2,000 a day as a photo location.
“It was ideal for anyone who wanted to tap into that retro, pop-hipster look,” says Toni Maier, president of On Location, one of the companies that has represented Wilson’s homes.
“Everyone from Pierce Brosnan to DMX shot there,” Wilson says. “Carmen Electra laid on my sofa naked with feathers glued to her. It was the sexiest house people had seen in years.”
Wilson loved waking up in the morning to find equipment trucks and caterers arriving. “My master bedroom hanging off a hill 1,000 feet above the Sunset Strip was like being in a jet flying over the city,” he says. “It was exhilarating, but it was never peaceful, even when there wasn’t another soul sharing the space with me.”
The Beverly Hills house, he says, is the opposite.
“I feel grounded, not floating in space somewhere,” Wilson says. “I like the sense of connectedness I get from being in a one-story ranch house where my dogs can be on the outside of the house and literally follow me from room to room by watching me through the windows.”
Set on a promontory with views of downtown L.A., Century City and a stand of Canary pines, the property had an instant effect on Wilson. “The house was almost secondary to these 200-foot trees,” he says, “which looked like something you’d find in Lake Tahoe.”
Having spent much of his career as a designer living in low-slung, flat-topped midcentury homes, Wilson struggled with the prominently pitched roof and considered tearing down the house. He found a solution in shingled slate, a look that recalled French chateaux and postwar Hollywood mansions.
“I knew what I had was a traditional house, and I’d always thought that traditional was boring,” Wilson says, “but I was also burned out on doing post-and-beam Modern.”
The new slate roof complemented the few original details that made the ranch house look more stately than suburban. Wilson kept the existing copper oven hood in the kitchen, which he transformed into a clean white space with stainless steel appliances that sport copper-trimmed handles.
Wilson furnished his pool deck with licorice-colored, all-weather wicker chairs and metal chaises from Crate and Barrel, topped with skirted black- and white-striped custom cushions. He brought the same palette indoors with a terrazzo floor in the entry and dining room that is white, trimmed with a Chanel-esque 6 1/2 -inch-wide black border.
“I liked the graphic, tuxedo-ish nature of it,” says Wilson, who repeated the effect with black baseboards and moldings on walls and ceilings. “It hides a lot of sins where the moldings join.”
In the living room, he tamed a wild Western rock fireplace with a wide, ebonized mahogany mantel and gray marble hearth, crowned by eight black-and-white photos by the Hungarian modernist Gyorgy Kepes. On the nearly black herringbone parquet floor, Wilson placed a black-and-white custom rug that he had made through Designer Floor Coverings in West Hollywood.
The rug’s elaborate swirls, which look like pumped-up iron scrollwork or tribal tattoos, find a counterpart in Wilson’s curvaceous design for a blue velvet couch. It’s flanked by silk lanterns on carved wooden stands that he purchased in Hong Kong.
“The house had enough right angles,” Wilson says. “What it needed was softening curves, silhouettes that are as beautiful as the form of a woman in a flowing gown and the shape of an old Ferrari.”
Unable to find the right guest seating to complete the living room, Wilson had his upholstery shop construct two oversize chairs based on the sofa.
“The lines of these pieces are incredibly elegant and hearken back to the great French designers of the 1930s, and that rug is insane,” says Lawrence, who has offered to show them at Twentieth, citing the “attention to proportion, detail and superb craftsmanship.”
Wilson had his carpenter set up on site to cut the custom trim pieces and build cabinetry, including kitchen cupboards with silver-plated knobs that “look like cufflinks.” In the two cavernous bathrooms of the Mannixes’ his-and-hers master suites, he resurfaced everything in three types of marble.
“I’d pack up water and lunch and drive to North Hollywood and go marble yarding,” says Wilson, who personally selected every slab.
Not everything was custom or astronomically costly. Wilson found vintage dressers by decorator Dorothy Draper and lamps by Pierre Cardin at auctions and the spring Modernism show in Santa Monica. He purchased samples of new designs, including an ornate white-lacquered, button-tufted leather bergere chair at furniture exhibitions.
For the guest powder room, he bought Bridgeport sconces from Williams-Sonoma Home for $195 and used the company’s block crystal lamps in a basement billiards and media room, which has a projection-TV screen economically framed in black velvet ribbon.
“I’m not this purist about periods or prices,” Wilson says. “To me, a 1930s-style sofa and a ‘70s Lucite-and-chrome coffee table look completely contemporary together.”
He also freely mixes abstract art, 20th century portrait photography, geological specimens, glow-in-the-dark acrylic sculptures and native artifacts. In the breakfast room, one battleship gray wall is hung with a new rug made from black rubber loops, and the opposite wall sports feathered headdresses from Cameroon. On a nearby fireplace ledge, a gilded and mirrored fan from Thailand sits on a museum mount.
“I hate the word eclectic,” Wilson says. “It strikes me as a term for lazy design or for homeowners who read too many magazines and can’t decide what they want.”
WILSON proves that even the most ornate furniture can be integrated into a minimalist interior. In one of the beige carpeted bedrooms, he created a camelback headboard upholstered in cut velvet that matches the Italian Baroque curves of two nightstands given to him by his parents.
“As I’ve gotten older,” he says, “I found that living in a semitraditional home, which is reminiscent of where I was raised but furnished to my taste, is this great mixture of where I came from and where I am going, a collection of memories from the past and dreams of the future.”
Since Wilson finished work on the house, only two photo shoots have taken place there. “It’s not necessarily the type of design that people in Middle America are going to be able to relate to,” he says, acknowledging that it might get less work as a photo location.
“It’s a more mature, subdued, Frank Sinatra kind of place,” says On Location’s Maier. “I could see it being very attractive for sophisticated fashion shoots and luxury brands.”
As much as he has transformed it, the house has changed Wilson even more. It has become home. And even if he never rents it out again, it’s working for him.
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Must-haves for a location shoot
Thousands of L.A. residents register their properties with agencies that negotiate usage fees for film, television and still photography. Film and TV shoots are time- and labor-intensive and involve lots of equipment, but the fees are high. Fashion shoots for print media require smaller crews and shorter hours but a much more polished look. “Everyone who rents a house likes to be able to walk right in and start shooting,” says Toni Maier, president of On Location, which represents 3,500 properties in the region. “In some ways still photography is the hardest nut to crack, because clients are looking for a certain sense of style.” Her checklist of what makes a house a great location:
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Space: Parking needs to be adequate. The house needs at least one room for wardrobe, sufficient restroom space for hairdressers and makeup artists, as well as changing areas for models. When it comes to rooms to shoot in, larger and taller are better.
Light: “Clients love natural light, so skylights and floor-to-ceiling windows are a big plus,” Maier says. “Preferably ones that have a city view, where you can also shoot at night.”
Water: A swimming pool is a huge draw, says Maier, especially if you can walk around it. “Infinity pools are cool, but you can only shoot them from one direction.”
Finishes: Think clean and simple, Maier says. “Shiny wood floors are always in style.” Busy paint jobs and wallpaper may be too distracting. Avoid clutter.
Furnishings: “The whole midcentury look -- Eames chairs and Mies van der Rohe chaises -- is still very hot,” Maier says. “Tastefully outlandish interiors appeal to the cutting-edge fashion photographers. They may pick a house because it has a couple of pieces of good furniture and not care about anything else.”
-- David A. Keeps