DO-IT-YOURSELF DIVA

By David A. Keeps

Jan. 26, 2006 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

FOR Cristi Conaway, necessity is the mother of reinvention. As a self-described “Dallas girl with big hair who dressed like Madonna,” she overhauled her style to become a model in Japan. As an actress, she used downtime on film sets to knit the sweaters she couldn’t find in stores -- colorful, sexy cashmere creations marketed under her name in more than 500 boutiques. Late last year, frustrated by the shortcomings of Internet gift stores, Conaway and her husband launched their own online luxury emporium for housewarming and baby shower presents.

In the midst of these entrepreneurial ventures, Conaway took on her most challenging transformation to date: turning a Santa Monica house that she calls “Orange County Mediterranean” into a hip young family home in the still red-hot Hollywood Regency style. Lacquered, Lucite and mirrored furniture mix with European antiques and Asian accents in swank, colorful rooms, often with exaggerated patterns. Designers such as Jonathan Adler and Kelly Wearstler have amplified strong graphic elements of the style, giving Hollywood Regency a pop profile in Southern California stores, restaurants and hotels.

Wearstler’s design for the trendy Santa Monica hotel Viceroy was particularly influential for Conaway, who met her husband, commercial real estate developer Mark Murphy, at a party there. Inspired by Wearstler’s “sense of scale and way with color, her ability to create jewel box moments in rooms,” as well as by Slim Aarons’ glamorous midcentury photography of Hollywood royalty at home, Conaway fearlessly faced a daunting design task.

“Hollywood Regency is a demanding style,” says Scott Mangan of Rubbish Interiors, one of the first vintage dealers in Los Angeles to revive the post-World War II mix of ornate antiques and custom furniture that define the look. But in the last few years, he adds, “people have become more educated about the genre. There are books out on the legendary designers of the period like Billy Haines and Frances Elkins who created rooms that have stood the test of time.”

The success of Adler and Wearstler has brought a flood of upscale Hollywood Regency furniture, fabrics and accessories to the market, and some signature pieces such as fretwork chairs and upholstered headboards are trickling into the catalogs of West Elm, Ballard Designs and others. The revival scratches an itch for luxury, Mangan says.

“The old days of throwing a bunch of Eames chairs and Nelson bubble lamps into white rooms are pretty much over. People who are interested in design now want architectural detailing, fine carved furniture and high-end upholstery,” Mangan says. The challenge, he adds, is making this theatrical look more livable for a home.

“With Hollywood Regency you can use so many distinctive materials -- wallpaper, patterned fabrics, mirrors, Lucite, marble, leather, brass -- and you can choose from many historical periods, which makes it that much harder to pull it all together,” Mangan says.

From the start, Conaway was working at a disadvantage. She and Murphy, who run the website www.suedebox.com, had not yet moved into the house when they began renovating the interiors, painting and ordering furniture last summer. She also was trying to complete the project in less than six months, in time to host a friend’s engagement party.

“Luckily, for better or worse I am incredibly decisive to the point of craziness,” she says.

The novice decorator had tough decisions to make. Built in 2001 by Los Angeles architect William Hefner, her new 4,200-square-foot house had the bones of an A-list ingenue, but the previous owners had dressed it as a dowdy dowager. Conaway decided her makeover would be “California casual with a touch of Palm Beach, because that’s where my husband comes from.”

Like many new Mediterranean homes, Conaway’s house was neither pure Spanish nor Italian. Rooms had good height and dramatic windows but were decorated with floral flourishes and poetry quotations painted on the walls. She reduced the interior to a blank canvas by painting the exposed wood beams and trim white and staining 5-inch-wide oak plank floors a dark espresso color.

“The walls came first,” Conaway says. “As soon as I picked colors for some of the rooms, the selections of rugs and fabrics became much easier.”

One guest room is painted in Benjamin Moore’s deep Polo Blue, which sets the stage for silver lamps, a white desk and a headboard covered in a tapestry print by the British textile designer Lulu DK. The sea-glass green nursery for daughter Colette, 1, is dominated by a floral rug in a rainbow of pastels that reflect on a mirrored dresser. Hand-printed rose wallpaper covers one wall.

“Wallpaper is a key ingredient of the Hollywood Regency look,” says Conaway, who kept a notebook of swatches, paint chips and inspirational images for each room. Wallpaper is a great way to fill a room, she says, especially if you don’t have a lot of artwork.

“Normally, I’m a brown and beige girl,” Conaway says, pouring afternoon refreshments at a white lacquer and mirrored bar that she designed and had built by carpenter Bob Eisman. The area is splashed with icy blue and lemon meringue on the glass tiled counter, and an accent wall is covered in large-scale palm frond paper. Three flowery iron pendant lamps -- purchased as “$100 worth of rusted balls” and then painted and rewired -- illuminate the scene.

Formerly a little-used dining banquette in the couple’s great room, the bar is one of Conaway’s own jewel box moments -- a room that blends materials, shapes and lively color with imagination and wit.

From the rotunda ceiling on the second-floor landing, Conaway hung a Verner Panton chandelier made of dangling capiz shells as an airy counterpoint to the wrought iron banister and rails.

The formal sunken living room below offers similar juxtapositions of periods and forms, an integral part of the Hollywood Regency template. A tufted suede Chesterfield sofa, Conaway’s must-have purchase for the room, sits under a 1960s metal arc lamp, and vintage chairs upholstered in bold brown prints and canary yellow silk surround a shell-topped table on a white cowhide rug.

The dining room is swathed in silvery textured wallpaper, creating a cocoon. Smitten with an Oscar de la Renta-designed red Asian buffet trimmed in brass, she designed the room around the piece, which she saw on Century Furniture’s website. “My philosophy is that you should spend the money on the things you love and cut corners to balance your budget,” she says.

For the dining room, she bought a split bamboo Parsons table from Decadence in Los Angeles and red Chinese Chippendale chairs from Williams-Sonoma Home reupholstered in a bold black-and-white print -- proving that it is possible to evoke the past without having to invest in costly antiques. That mix of old and new is exemplified in an eye-catching light fixture by the Dutch design firm Moooi, which covered a traditional crystal chandelier with a translucent silver Mylar drum shade that gives the room the feeling of an avant-garde French salon.

The couple anchored the patio with a custom-built, free-standing fireplace. They also cleaned up the exterior, covering wooden details that Conaway found “too Swiss Miss” with a coat of white paint “to make it disappear as much as possible” and removing extraneous Spanish-style iron railings. Classical iron lanterns in the shape of a pineapple, the Hawaiian symbol for welcome, came from Kemble Interiors, where Murphy’s sister works as a designer. The pineapples became a light motif on the exterior surfaces of the house.

“I knew I wanted to do something to beach it up, something starfishy or seahorsey,” says Conaway. “Then I saw the pineapple and got hooked. At night, the light goes through the holes of the fixture and puts the most beautiful pattern on the walls.”

At the recommendation of friends who are designers, Conaway had chairs and tables made at the custom furniture workshop Residence. She scoured local 20th century design stores such as Chapman Radcliffe, Tim Clarke and Woodson & Rummerfield’s House of Design, and she also found traditional pieces with a modern edge from Oly in Berkeley.

Though she had “around a six-figure budget” and, because of her businesses, she had access to the trade-only Pacific Design Center, Conaway did use more common resources, and some of her favorite pieces are from less expensive manufacturers.

“I love that the two T chairs in our office only cost $179 at West Elm in Santa Monica,” she says.

Conaway also did a lot of thrift shopping on Dixie Highway in Palm Beach, Fla., “which has great vintage furniture,” and found many unique items at the Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena. Many of these pieces were worn, rusted lighting fixtures and mirrors that Conaway could see revitalized.

“Powder coating became a new term in my vocabulary,” says her husband, referring to the industrial painting process in which powdered colors are baked onto sandblasted metal objects.

Conaway also taught him that tiny details can make a large impact. She became a regular at West Coast Trimming, where she found ribbons and edging materials to liven up lampshades and window treatments.

“I had a hard time with the kitchen cabinets until I went to Koontz Hardware and found separate knobs and back plates that I put together to make it look cute and fancy,” she says.

At one point even Conaway became aware that any more reinvention might be too much of a good thing.

“I think there are mistakes, but I would never admit that, when other people just don’t see them,” she says with a laugh. “I have learned to live with them because I want to stay married.” She is particularly hard on hardware. Take the Tuscan handles on all the doors in the house. She says: “Please. I wanted to take them all off and at least have them nickel plated.”

“That,” says Murphy, “is where I had to put my foot down.”

David A. Keeps can be reached at [email protected].

Mastering the look

Cristi Conaway put together a Hollywood Regency home without a decorator. Among the resources she used:

Furniture

Residence: Custom chairs, tables and upholstered pieces. (323) 731-9991

Campbell Glass: Mirrors and mirrored bed frame. (323) 735-0021

Oly: Sophie chairs in master bedroom and capiz shell table. www.olystudio.com

Bob Eisman: Custom carpentry on bar. (818) 887-9872

Vintage furniture

Chapman Radcliffe: (310) 659-8062

Tim Clarke: (310) 452-8374