Twenty years ago, when Los Angeles developer Brad Korzen asked up-and-coming designer Kelly Wearstler to decorate a model room for the Avalon in Beverly Hills, she was brand new to the hospitality scene. “I’d never done a hotel before,” recalls the AD100 talent. “I was completely freaked out.” But the nuanced interiors that she had in mind, schemes outfitted with midcentury-mod furnishings that played off the 1948 building’s boomerang shape, got her the job—and then some.
Today, Wearstler has completed more than 10 hotel projects with Korzen, whom she married along the way. (They now have two teenage boys and split their time between Beverly Hills and Malibu.) One of the couple’s latest collaborations, the Proper Downtown L.A., is scheduled to open this year inside a 1926 Renaissance Revival building, a onetime YWCA. The basketball court and swimming pool have been transformed into supersize suites, decked out in warm colors and graphic, Mexican-inspired tiles and textiles. In true Wearstler fashion, there is pattern-clashing galore.
The lobby of the Santa Monica Proper features collectible design pieces (properhotel.com).
Photo by The Ingalls.
“It’s a well-oiled machine,” Wearstler reports of Proper, Korzen’s newest hotel group, cofounded with Brian De Lowe and Alex Samek. In the past two years they’ve also opened outposts in San Francisco and Santa Monica, with others in the works. “Still, the projects feel unique.” Maintaining that balance is crucial to Wearstler’s design empire. The secret weapon? Wearstler herself, whose super supply of personal style she endlessly recalibrates for clients.
After arriving in L.A. by way of Boston and New York, where she studied graphic design and architecture, Wearstler (who grew up in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina) planned to get a job working for an interior designer. But when a friend of a friend needed a few rooms in a Venice house decorated, she took on the gig. “Before I knew it, I had started my own practice,” she recalls. Soon after launching her firm, in 1995, she met Korzen, who brought her on to tackle his hotel projects, as well as his Hollywood Hills house. First came the Avalon. But it was the Viceroy Santa Monica, completed in 2002, that earned Wearstler her stripes. Inspired by the decorative pastiche of L.A. bungalows, she put her own twist on Hollywood Regency, lining walls with mirrors, installing slick checkerboard floors, and deploying stark-white wingback chairs poolside. Wearstler recalls her team’s apprehension: “They were like, Whoa, we’ve never seen anything like this. But it turned out to be iconic.” That same “Just trust me” approach extended to her residential projects. (She’s completed some 25 private homes.) Clients across the country come to her for something unconventional, and she delivers, often injecting the decors with splatter-painted walls, sheets of polished agate applied floor to ceiling, and bespoke furniture and fabrics. The goal is to reflect the personalities of the residents through her own lens, such as conjuring up a one-of-a-kind fabric to upholster a sofa or creating rugs inspired by a homeowner’s abstract paintings.
Not surprisingly, manufacturers began approaching Wearstler for product collaborations. In the fall of 2008 she unveiled decorative objects at Bergdorf Goodman, an inaugural fabric line with Lee Jofa, and a collection of floor coverings with The Rug Company. The last included the veined Tracery carpet that Wearstler has in her own bedroom. She’s still developing collections with both brands, in addition to tiles with Ann Sacks, vessels with Georg Jensen, lighting with Visual Comfort, and her own furniture and accessories.