Okay, she didn’t invent it, and she doesn’t like the word “eclectic.” But after almost 30 years in business, the designer Kelly Wearstler has remained a celebrity in an often faceless field.
If you had suddenly been blindfolded and transported to Dahlia, a cocktail lounge that opened in May at
The high walls are painted dusty rose, and the booth cushions are upholstered in velvety brown, like the desert floor after rain. Artworks in a terra-cotta palette cover the walls, including a bulbous wicker sculpture that looked somewhat suggestive, like one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s abstract flowers.
There was a sweating glass bottle of Mexican mineral water on a table, along with a small plate of lime wedges so fat and juicy that they seemed otherworldly.
Had you been dropped into a boutique hotel bar in San Miguel de Allende? Sedona? Santa Fe?
The answer might not have become any clearer when Kelly Wearstler, the woman who designed the bar and the hotel, walked through the stained-glass doors. She was dressed in oversize denim from head to the pointed toes of her leather Loewe ankle boots. When she spoke, it was with a slight Southern twang.
“Oh, can you still hear the accent?” asked Wearstler, 55, who was born and raised in South Carolina before moving to Massachusetts for college.
Not long after she graduated, she moved to Los Angeles, where she has lived for 30 years. Jobs as a waitress and onetime Playboy model aside, she has spent most of that time designing decadent homes, high-end hotels and idiosyncratic objects to decorate them, such as marble sofas, chunky credenzas and lamps covered in spore-like spheres.
She has become one of the world’s most famous interior designers, with 2.1 million followers on Instagram, where she often shares her work and photos of herself wearing outré clothes. Each post has a magazine-style caption, and some are sponsored.
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Advertise with NZME.She judged a Bravo reality show called Top Design in the mid-2000s. She has a MasterClass. This summer, she appeared on the covers of Harper’s Bazaar Netherlands and Architectural Digest China. Her sixth book, Synchronicity, was published on Tuesday, and it includes glossy photographs of her hotel projects.
Lena Wald, a friend of about 20 years and a jewellery designer in Los Angeles, said that when she was recently in Paris with Wearstler, a group of Korean design students approached her outside the Palais-Royal. They had studied her work in school.
During an interview with Wearstler in August at the Santa Monica Proper hotel, where she also designed the interiors, two people approached within 10 minutes to hand her business cards.
Although Wearstler has been recognised for her decorating style, it can be hard to define. She likes to combine pieces with dissimilar textures, layering them like a design lasagna. When she first rose to prominence in the 2000s, journalists described the look as Hollywood Regency or maximalist. (Her clients then included singer Gwen Stefani and the restaurant at Bergdorf Goodman.) The word “eclectic” is often applied to Wearstler’s work; “that one drives me crazy,” she said.
The Proper hotel in Downtown Los Angeles — a neighbourhood that has struggled as the city’s homelessness crisis has accelerated — is a place to eat Iberian-inspired food on Mexican-made furniture. Work by local contemporary artists is mixed with flea-market finds, and upstairs, in homage to the building’s past life as a YWCA, there is a suite with a private indoor pool stretching beneath a grand ivory ceramic mural. It starts at about US$4800 per night.
In suites like that, about half of the decor is vintage and half is new, a combination that is essential to Wearstler.
“A philosophy of mine is: Old soul, new spirit,” she said. “It’s how I dress. It’s how I design.”
Heart and Soul
Wearstler uses the word “soul” often. On a recent tour of the Downtown Proper hotel, which opened in 2021, she said that some walls were given plaster treatment to “feel more soulful.” A mirror shaped like a mushroom “adds so much heart and soul” to a bathroom, she said.
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Advertise with NZME.Later, as she climbed into her matte Lamborghini SUV and drove to her nearby storage warehouse, she began to describe her sensibility with another word: “love.”
“Literally everything goes back to love,” Wearstler said, walking through tall aisles between shelves stuffed with plastic-wrapped and boxed decor she has been collecting for more than 20 years. Some of it she had commissioned, or produced through her studio in West Hollywood, California. Other pieces were found at antiques malls or bought from galleries around the world.
There was a vintage tapestry from London that she has owned since before her 2002 wedding to Brad Korzen, a founder and CEO of the Kor Group, a real-estate-investment firm, and of Proper Hospitality, which operates the Proper hotels. (Wearstler designed all four.) There was a mirror with a goopy, puffy metallic frame by artist Amelia Briggs.
How does Wearstler choose these pieces? “You just fall in love,” she said. “That’s what design and life is about: Falling in love. That amazing warm feeling that’s in your soul.”
When asked to describe what seemed to be a quintessential Kelly Wearstler piece at her warehouse — a large bronze bowl with nine long cylindrical legs unevenly spaced — she said: “I just love things that have repetition. I like things that have weight and permanence and are sculptural.”
But when it came to defining her style, she resisted labelling it. Instead, she said, “I’m constantly moving forward and pushing myself — I don’t want to repeat myself.”
“As a designer, I’m a free spirit,” she said. “It’s like a moving target.”
Amy Astley, editor of Architectural Digest, said that it was hard to capture Wearstler’s aesthetic in a short pithy phrase. “But I do think she’s a master of jolie-laide,” or finding beauty in the unconventional or strange, she said.
The dominant style in American interiors right now, according to Astley, is “a clean oatmeal look,” which is not quite minimalist but formulaically spare. Living rooms are light and bright with a big statement sofa or coffee table.
Wearstler uses “weighty, hefty, juicy, meaty kinds of shapes — like in her chairs or in her sofas — and there’s a real masculinity to her work,” Astley said. “The colours are the opposite of girlie.”
Lately, Astley said, Wearstler’s most influential interiors have been designed for places like hotels and with a low-slung 1970s vibe. “It’s slouchy, it’s sexy, it’s relaxed, and it’s cool,” she said.
David Alhadeff, founder of the Future Perfect gallery, where Wearstler has acquired contemporary pieces from artists including Eric Roinestad and Chris Wolston, said Wearstler has a confident eye. “She buys something because she’s passionate about it,” he said. “She is emotionally drawn toward the work.”
On ‘Synchronicity’
In recent years, she has taken on a number of unconventional projects, like designing a techno Brutalist-meets-midcentury-modern garage for an electric Hummer ad.
Her more conventional endeavours have included designing a full tabletop collection — her first — in collaboration with Serax, a Belgian decor brand, released in August.
At her studio, where she has about 50 employees, she is working on the conversion of the former Cal Neva Lodge and Casino in Lake Tahoe into the next Proper hotel. Cal Neva was once owned by Frank Sinatra.
“We’re going to make it sexy and cool,” she said of the casino floor, with game tables but no slot machines: “It will be something like you would see in Monaco.”
Last year, she began looking into artificial intelligence after the release of ChatGPT’s public chatbot. So far, it’s a brainstorming tool. In August, Tulika Lokapur, an interior designer at Wearstler’s studio, showed how the technology is being used. Lokapur prompted a chatbot to “imagine a library with blackened steel shelving in Lake Tahoe,” then uploaded two images to guide the AI toward the right style.
Wearstler compared using AI to having a junior designer scour old design books for inspiration.
“You’re still being creative,” said Wearstler, who is aware that there is pushback to using AI in creative fields. “You still have to know design history and style. It’s very important, because how are you prompting if you don’t?”
Lokapur, 33, said, “We’re also very cautious of how we’re using it and the message that we’re sending with it.”
This future feels far from Wearstler’s beginnings, which she described as modest. She went to the Massachusetts College of Art and Design to study graphic design, after developing a passion for collecting old fashion magazines as a teenager. “Myrtle Beach is not a cultural place,” she said of her hometown. “It was my escape.”
At college, she became fascinated while watching a “cute guy” build 3D models in an open studio one day, she said. She began taking architecture classes, and decided to “meet in the middle and do interior design.”
She took a New York apprenticeship with designer Milton Glaser, of “I [Heart] New York” fame, but found herself drawn to Los Angeles, in part for its proximity to the ocean. Her first interior design job came when a friend introduced her to a couple who wanted help with their Venice bungalow. She filled it with vintage furniture she found at the Rose Bowl and other markets.
At the time, she was working as a waitress. Within about three years of decorating that Venice house, she had started an interior-design studio and stopped working in restaurants to run it full time.
Home Life
At the start of her career, work was her priority, over having children. But while engaged to Korzen, she became pregnant with her oldest son, Oliver, now 21. Soon after, they had a second son, Elliott, now 20. Although both pregnancies were difficult, she said, she loved having a family. Years later, she still wanted another baby. “Probably 30 to 40 per cent of our friends had gotten divorced and remarried, and they were having kids,” she said. “Why can’t we do it?”
“I feel, like, 20 years old,” she added.
The couple’s third son, Crosby, was born by surrogate last September. They learned their surrogate’s water had broken while Wearstler was hosting a pool party at their Beverly Hills home, a palatial 1926 estate that she refers to as the Broccoli house. (Its previous occupant was Albert Broccoli, a producer of James Bond films.)
It was about seven weeks before Crosby’s due date. “We freaked out,” Wearstler said. They slipped out of the party and drove to a hospital outside Santa Barbara.
At that point, they had told only a small number of family members and friends about their choice to have Crosby, who was born two weeks later.
“You want to keep it private, and then when the baby comes, you celebrate,” Wearstler said, citing other women in their 50s who have chosen surrogacy, like supermodel Naomi Campbell. “It’s been like a rebirth for our family.”
Although the manicured mansion is the family’s main residence, they occasionally rent it out for brand events. During the Oscars, Versace removed some of Wearstler’s modern furniture to display archival couture gowns.
While the home is opulent, it also feels like a place where people live. And eat: Wearstler, who grazed on a snack platter on a Saturday in August, seemed to have expanded her diet since telling Bon Appétit in a 2013 interview that, with the exception of dinner, she mostly drank juice all day.
That weekend, she and Korzen, 59, swam and hung out at home with their many boys: Oliver and Elliott, both students at the University of Texas at Austin; Crosby, fussy after a nap; and the family’s two rescue dogs, Javier and the distinctive Willie, who, with over 12,000 Instagram followers, has achieved a modicum of fame.
Call it the Kelly Wearstler effect. As her friend Wald put it, “She’s more of a celebrity now — not just a designer.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jessica Testa
Photographs by: Jennelle Fong
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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