Kelly Wearstler: How to make any home feel ‘A-list’
She’s done up homes for Elton John, Gwen Stefani and Cher and regularly scours antique stores with Cameron Diaz. Designer to the stars Kelly Wearstler reveals how to add a Hollywood touch to any home.
You have to be a really good listener,” says Kelly Wearstler when asked the secret to an interior design career that has spanned 27 years. Wearstler, 56, is something of a legend in the design world thanks to projects with some of the world’s most happening hotels, including the Avalon Hotel, Beverly Hills, and the Four Seasons Resort, Anguilla. Her private client list reads like the Hollywood Walk of Fame and includes Cameron Diaz, Ben Stiller, Cher, Elton John, Christina Aguilera and Gwen Stefani. Add in six books, a MasterClass series, 2.1 million Instagram followers and her own furniture line, including the famous $US4900 stone Butt Stool, and it’s easy to see why Wearstler’s distinctively maximalist, larger-than-life style is a hit.
“You have to think, ‘What do they want? What’s in their mind’s eye?’” she says. “Not all clients are great at articulating that, so you have to prompt them with the right questions and know how to extract information.”
Wearstler wasn’t always surrounded by the glitz and glamour of a famous clientele and big-budget hotels. She has called Los Angeles home for the past 28 years, but she grew up in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. When she was a child, her mother, an antiques dealer with a love of fashion, would take her to flea markets, auctions and vintage boutiques. “At that age I was educating my eye and became really curious,” Wearstler says. “That’s where my creative spirit came from.”
She studied photography in Boston after falling in love with fashion magazines, but soon decided that interior design was where she “really wanted to be”. She started by designing her own apartment and some rooms at the home of a friend of a friend in Venice, Los Angeles, which led to another job, and before she knew it Hollywood was calling.
It started with actor Stiller’s home in New York, then came Stefani’s pad in Beverly Hills and eventually Diaz, for whom she has designed two properties – one in LA and another in New York.
Has working with celebrities ever been intimidating? “I was nervous at first,” Wearstler says. “I didn’t grow up in LA so I wasn’t used to celebrities – people who grow up there see famous people all the time, even at the supermarket.” The nerves didn’t last long – “probably about a week” – before she found her groove.
She is particularly fond of her projects with Diaz. “She loved shopping with me because she wanted to make sure that everything felt good to her,” Wearstler says. “She wanted everything to be really comfortable, so she had to touch and feel every fabric.”
Wearstler’s own home, where she lives with her husband, a hotel developer, and three sons, is as fabulous as you’d expect. She purchased the Beverly Hills mansion from the Broccoli family (the producers behind the James Bond film franchise) in 2005 and describes its style as “free spirit, because I’m constantly evolving and changing it”. The decor is a mix of old and new, which “creates tension and makes it more interesting”.
Does her family get a say? “My family is like my client, so I always involve them in the decision-making. But at the end of the day, if I feel strongly about something, they’ll listen.”
Wearstler is big on family. She wakes early, at 5.30 every morning, so that she can work out – a mix of heavy weightlifting, cardio and Pilates – and spends time with her kids before heading to the design studio. She often takes her family on work trips, the longest of which was to Paris for five weeks in the spring during one of her sourcing trips.
One of the properties that features in her new book, Synchronicity, a late-1940s house in Malibu named Surf Shack, holds a lot of sentimental value. “As a family, we love to surf and that house is in front of an amazing wave,” she says. “We walked past it on a visit to a friend – it was up for sale, so we asked if we could rent it for the summer. It was a really special time because there was no TV, so we just had friends over, hung out and cooked.”
Ever the designer, Wearstler painted the walls, put in a new seagrass carpet, and added new furniture and some art during their stay. The house had been on the market for a long time – once Wearstler was done with it, the owner took some photos and it sold immediately. “Staging is powerful,” she says with a shrug.
With wealthy clients come high demands and a certain level of particularity. During one five-year project involving an LA home owned by a client who worked in the finance industry, Wearstler was asked to design a bath. The client was so specific about the level of comfort he wanted that she created a life-sized foam model for him to sit in. “They were very particular about comfort and the bath wasn’t quite where it needed to be, so we had to shave it down,” she says. “Once we got it right the model was shipped to Italy, where the stone was cast to its exact silhouette.”
Does she like it when a client is so involved? “I love it!” she says. “A client has to be actively making decisions or it slows the project down. You have to be involved in the process and be decisive.”
If a bespoke bath was no problem for Wearstler, is anything ever too demanding? “No. Nothing’s ever too big a problem – I love a challenge,” she says.
Synchronicity by Kelly Wearstler (Rizzoli) is out now.
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