Kelly Wearstler
Kelly Wearstler is an American designer. She founded her own design firm Kelly Wearstler Interior Design in the mid-1990s, serving mainly the hotel industry, and now designs across high-end residential, commercial, retail and hospitality spaces. Her designs for the Viceroy hotel chain in the early 2000s have been noted for their influence on the design industry. She has designed properties for clients such as Gwen Stefani, Cameron Diaz and Stacey Snider, and served as a judge on all episodes of Bravo's Top Design reality contest in 2007 and 2008.
Wearstler has released five books. Her first, Modern Glamour: The Art of Unexpected Style, was named a best seller by the Los Angeles Times in 2006. Other publications include Domicilium Decoratus and her most recent, Evocative Style in 2019. Her eponymous luxury lifestyle brand incorporates her own designs as well as pieces she finds at auction houses, and she sells her own furniture, lighting, home accessories, and objets d'art collections. Wearstler is the design partner for the Proper Hotel Group.
Wearstler is the first interior designer to be part of the MasterClass Series and the first outside designer to partner with Farrow & Ball.
She has won numerous awards including AD 100 Hall of Fame, Time Magazine the Design 100, Elle Decor A-List Designers and Vogue Best Dressed.
Early life and education
Kelly Wearstler was born in 1967 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and raised in Myrtle Beach. Her father was an engineer and her mother an antique dealer. Her mother's interest in design had a major influence on Wearstler from a young age. She would come home from school to find rooms often painted new colors. When they were young, Wearstler and her older sister would accompany their mother to thrift shops, auctions, and flea markets, which helped develop Wearstler's early interest in fashion and design. She started collecting vintage clothing at age 15 and later attended the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, where she took architecture classes, and obtained her bachelor's degree in interior and graphic design. While paying her way through college by waitressing, she held internships at the design firms Cambridge Seven Associates in Boston and Milton Glaser in New York.Wearstler moved to Los Angeles in her mid-twenties, hoping to work in the film industry as a set decorator. In 1992 she was a production assistant on HouseSitter, and the following year she served as an uncredited assistant art director on So I Married an Axe Murderer. After working small roles on several sets she decided not to pursue a film career, though the experience did lead to an interior design commission from a film producer. Working in the porn industry acting in adult films, she later stated she used the money earned as porn actress to start off her design business later on. While working as a hostess at a Beverly Hills restaurant in 1994, she was scouted by a Playboy photographer and was featured as September Playmate of the Month under the name Kelly Gallagher. She used the money from the photoshoot to pay off student loans and help start her interior design business.
Design career
Early projects and hotel design (1990s–2000s)
In 1995 Wearstler opened Kelly Wearstler Interior Design, her own design firm. The following year she was introduced to her future husband real estate developer Brad Korzen, who hired her to design his house in the Hollywood Hills and several residential properties owned by Korzen's company Kor Realty Group. The first of the residences was the Avalon hotel in Beverly Hills, which re-opened in 1999 with a style described in the press as "a playful take on mid-century modernism." With apartments filled with pieces from modernist artists such as Arne Jacobsen, Eero Saarinen and George Nelson, The New York Times would write a decade later that "her playful, elegantly over-the-top designs for the Avalon Beverly Hills changed the look of boutique hotels around the world." In 2000, she designed the small Maison 140 hotel in Beverly Hills.Her work on the Avalon and the Maison 140 led to a commission designing Viceroy Hotels and Resorts, a new chain of boutique hotels, which she gave an "almost theatrical" Hollywood aesthetic. The Viceroy in Palm Springs became "her most accomplished work" in 2001, and the design of the Viceroy that opened a year later in Santa Monica also earning praise in the press. By that time she was also working on the Viceroy Miami, and other notable designs include Viceroy Anguilla on the island of Anguilla and The Tides Hotel South Beach in Miami. Elle Decor would later write that "her luxury hotel interiors" featured "elegant bergère chairs, unexpected lacquer finishes and old-style stately wallpapers." As of 2002 she had also completed design projects for clients such as Mercury Records, Ben Stiller, and Jeanne Tripplehorn. In 2006 Wearstler designed the restaurant and lounge, BG Restaurant, at the Bergdorf Goodman Building in Manhattan.
First books and ''Top Design'' (2004–2008)
Wearstler published her first book of design in March 2004. Titled Modern Glamour: The Art of Unexpected Style, it was co-written with Jane Bogart and released through Regan Books. Publishers Weekly wrote that the book's "large, full-bleed color photographs do justice to the variety of creations." HarperCollins published Wearstler's Domicilium Decoratus in 2006, a style book featuring photographs of her Beverly Hills mansion and herself dressed in evening gowns. David Colman of the New York Times described it as "a kind of lavish brochure for Ms. Wearstler’s vision, which involves a decadent Hollywood riposte to Martha Stewart’s stolidly tasteful East Coast domesticity."With filming starting in 2006, she served as one of three primary judges on Top Design, a reality show contest that premiered on Bravo in January 2007. Wearstler appeared in all twenty episodes before the show's end in 2008, and attracted a fair degree of attention in the press with the outfits she wore while judging. The New Yorker wrote in 2009 that "most people, say they watched just for Wearstler’s getups," with The New York Times writing that "Wearstler’s fondness for pastiche in fashion garnered a lot of attention... but those hats aren’t calculated." The latter article quoted Wearstler stating that "sometimes I might look a little crazy, but sometimes beautiful things happen. I don’t take it too seriously.’’ In 2007, she was named to Vogue’s Top Ten Best Dressed list, and also that year TIME named her to its Style & Design 100 list of international creative professionals.
Retail stores and home and fashion lines (2008–2012)
In July 2007 Wearstler opened her first brick and mortar retail space in the form of a boutique in Bergdorf Goodman's home-furnishings department, and the following year her office was based in West Hollywood on La Cienega Boulevard. Also in 2008 she introduced a line of decorative home goods for Bergdorf Goodman, which was sold out of her own retail shop in the store. In late 2008 she started working on a line of jewelry, scarves, bags, and belts, with plans to expand into women's apparel at a later time. By 2009 she had designed the top suite of the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel and a home for Stacey Snider of DreamWorks, and was in the process of decorating a large contemporary house for Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale. She released her book Hue in early 2010, which features photography in chapters organized by color. Wrote the Los Angeles Times about the book, "Hollywood glamour, neoclassical ornamentation, pattern and texture prove to be Wearstler signatures, but color, she writes, 'is everything.'" In 2011 she was named to Architectural Digest's AD100 list, which is also dubbed the Top 100 Architecture & Interior Design list. The French version of the publication would also name her to its World's Top Interior Designers list.By early 2011 KWID had designed rugs for the Rug Company and fine china for Pickard China, and KWID would also for a time continue designing a line of wall treatments for F. Schumacher & Co. and exclusive bed sheets for Sferra. Wearstler announced her own eponymously named fashion line, Kelly Wearstler, in spring 2011. Her first fashion collection was four years in the making, incorporating patterns and design aesthetics seen within Wearstler's interior design work. Booth Moore of the Los Angeles Times said the collection had the "appearance of being handmade or one-of-a-kind, even if not." The Wall Street Journal called her ready-to-wear clothing and jewelry "reflections of her modern, but also classic and opulent, aesthetic," while magazine W described that season's fashion collection as "a bold mix-and-match collection of hand-painted blouses, cropped jackets, full-legged pants, and pouf skirts," as well as "stone-laden metal clutches and sculptural jewels" for accessorizing.
As of July 2011 her home furnishing, clothing and accessories continued to be sold at Bergdorf Goodman, as well as through Neiman Marcus, Holt Renfrew, Net-a-Porter, and her website. Her new fashion collection debuted at those same stores in August 2011, and was shortly afterwards sold through a new flagship boutique she opened on Melrose Avenue on September 1, 2011. David A. Keeps of the Los Angeles Times dubbed the store "a sleek atelier where Art Deco meets 1970s Minimalism and the 1980s Italian style known as Memphis." Her winter 2011 fashion line was sold exclusively by Bergdorf Goodman, and featured ready-to-wear, clutches and jewelry. This debut season was described as having a"feminine sensibility" by Nicole Phelps of Style.com, with Phelps describing Wearstler's spring 2012 line as featuring clashing patterns and a mod-glam look. As of late 2012, Wearstler's home furnishing continued to be available in the Kelly Wearstler Boutique at Bergdorf Goodman.