 Peter Dunham June 2009 Interview by Coleen Rider and Holli Thomas Photographs by Coleen Rider
We recently sat down with Peter Dunham to chat at his design studio and here is what transpired. CR: Can you tell us about your first memory of wanting to be a designer? PD: My first job when I was 15 years old was working for a designer. My best friend at boarding school's mother got him and me a job for this glitzy designer on Sloane Street in London. My best friend happened to be David Hick's son, so already I was suddenly like, "Oh, this is a profession?" I already loved houses so I was really into it.
In college I had an internship with David Hicks. CR: When you were 15 and had the summer job with this decorator what did you learn there? PD: We would clean the storeroom, go out on installations, and do some measuring. I really should have started the design gig earlier because I was very frustrated creatively without even realizing it. I guess I was always positioned to be doing what I am now. It just took a lot of preparation. CR: When you were growing up in France, did you have a vision of Los Angeles or ever dream that you would end up here? PD: I came here once when I was 15 years old with my father. We went to New York, Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco. He had business here so I tagged along. I took to New York like a fish to water. I felt like this is where I belong, this is where I'll end up. I didn't really connect to L.A. It's not an easy place to come to for four days and connect to. I didn't even come back until 20 years later. I don't know if I had stayed in New York, if I would have given up my schtick in real estate and said, "O.K., now I'm going to hang my shingle as a designer." It's easy to come to L.A. and reinvent yourself.  I'm very lucky you know, to be doing what I love, because this is my second career. I started as a designer when I moved to L.A. 11 years ago. I moved here because I fell In love and was going back and forth for a year. I was in real estate in New York and had just finished fixing up this house in the village. I sold the house to Rupert Murdoch's son. They were the first to see it and the wife walked in and said, "Finally a Village house with all the original detail." I mean, when I bought it, it looked like the set from the film Seven. It was like a crack house. Basically, for a year I scoured salvage yards and dumpsters, which are amazing sources in New York. Wonderful old wash basins that came from the Plaza Hotel, all the fireplaces were vintage, old doors, a fabulous old copper bath tub, all the subway tile came from houses in Harlem that were being torn down. It was a belabored effort, like everything with me. So with the cash from that, I thought well, this will finance my move. I thought I was going to do the same thing in L.A, except every florist, actor, agent, decorator, contractor was doing the same thing, so good luck. I did one house here which I really liked and it got published in L.A. Magazine as a before and after piece. Then people got the gist that I was doing this and they started saying, "Oh, would you help my friend, she just bought a house, she's kind of decorator shy', blah blah blah." Then Marion Mac Avoy, who had just gone to House Beautiful, said, "I'm going to do a show house and I really want you to do a room." 
I said, "Marion, I haven't got any money, what are you talking about?" She said, "YES, YES, YES, you're going to do it and you'll be fine!" This was about eight years ago. I didn't even have an assistant. She asked what room wanted. So I did the kitchen, and I'm sandwiched between Suzanne Rheinstein, Barbara Barry, and Waldo Fernandez, and that too got the phone ringing. Right after I did the first show house, I got my first real client, Jennifer Garner. A 3000 square foot house with a decent budget. In one room I wanted to copy this toile which I had found in London to do kind of a girly boudoir for her. So I had the fabric made. CR: Is that what made you think of starting your own fabric line? PD: Well, we did another House Beautiful show house in Bel Air and had custom fabric made in India which arrived a week before the show house, smelling like gasoline. I almost had a heart attack. Then, after that everyone wanted to know about the fabric, "Who, who, who?" CR: How do you feel about Los Angeles? PD: There are things I really love, and things I miss about New York. The things I love are, there is this kind of layered look, all the different styles of architecture, nooks and crannies, the mysterious corners, the vegetation is sumptuous, so there is kind of like an old Hollywood glamour still that I sniff out and love about it. The things I don't like, is that it is incredibly damaged. It's been wrecked physically. A lot of it has been ripped down, but it is an incredibly creative community here. The main business here is really an artistic business. There's definitely that creative bohemian community here which I find is really appealing and stimulating. People here are very inventive. I love the weather. When you come from Paris, where I grew up, or New York, its really a challenge to find the city here. It's a new form of an environment. It's not really a city, and it's not really a suburb. It's kind of the city of the future. You have to make an effort to meet people and go where they are. I hike, I go to the farmers market, the flea market, I'm always looking to do things where you can run into people. That's what I miss, the running into people. CR: Do you think Los Angeles is a hot spot for design right now? PD: I think it's totally a hot spot. People look to California for new ideas. Lots of new ideas erupt here. The concept of the family room, the media room, they come from L.A. living. Magazines come all the time. They want to see what we're doing.
It pushes you to do things here. People come here with an openness. So we have all different types of architecture. You have to come up with furniture that fits in all these different houses. I think in people's minds in L.A. particularly, there is a sort of glamour to it because of the movie business, the music business. CR: A relaxed glamour, don't you think? PD: Yes. There is a relaxed glamour, a sexiness. CR: When thinking about your work, how would you describe it? PD: David Keeps of the L.A. Times called it Merchant Ivory Moderne. That kind of summed it up. I like things to look real. That's where the layering comes in for me. I like things to feel and look real so when you walk into a house I don't want you to get it all in one look. I want different punctuation. I want it to kind of peel off a little bit. That's why I like to break a room off into areas. I like a little mystery to be created. If you have an old Spanish house it's very easy to do that, but a "Mc Mansion" is much harder. We have tools of the trade and we need to slap pattern on the wall and mix high and low to achieve this lived-in-ness and charm. Part of it goes back to the vintage thing. People will come to me and say, "We're not really into curtains," and then I know the minute you put a curtain up in their house they want them everywhere. I mean, these are the tools. If you start taking away my tools, the freedom to use pattern, to use color, to use vintage, to use curtains, then you know what? You better go somewhere else. CR: Do you find yourself inspired by a certain piece, as a starting point? PD: Oh yes, definitely. If I can start from there, it's a joy. You grasp onto what you can. It's harder to pull something out of thin air. I've done whole rooms off of the color of someone's eyes. You can always start with the carpet. It's the hardest thing to back track to and make work. David Hicks taught me that. He said, "Dear boy, you must always start with the carpet," and he was right. You can also start with the view you're looking at. CR: Is there anything that you say to yourself, "I will never use...... PD: Every time I've said that, I found out later there was a way to do it in a cool way. In my 20's, I started meeting people like Andy Warhol and Fred Hughes who used to come to Paris, and they had very eccentric taste, but they had a taste for things that were really cool and used in a really cool way. You might say "I cannot stand Victorian," and then someone will come up with a collection of Victorian furniture and use it in a really cool way. I find there is a role for everything. It's easier for me to stay open to everything than the reverse. Every rule is meant to be broken in some form or another. You make a statement by breaking rules.
CR: It seems in your work that even though the rooms are cohesive, there is always that one element or piece that you think, wow, that's an odd choice that not everyone would use. That's the element that stands out. Is that a conscious thing with you, like you are throwing it off? PD: I don't know how much of my design is that conscious. There are practical things you have to do, furniture layout, etc. and then quite a lot of it comes from serendipity, the unconscious. I do knock it off a bit because I want that sort of quirkiness. I want there to be the feeling that there's something there maybe because you bought it and you loved it. I don't like decorating perfection. I think there is no such thing. Perfection to me looks like a showroom, and I don't want that. I want there to be a feeling of accumulation. I like things that are off scale; very big scale for example, like big lamps or a very big piece of art. CR: Your work never looks trendy. Would you say that you do not pay attention to trends? PD: I do look at trends because with a fabric line you have to. I might take something out of it different than someone else. I don't like trendy decorating. I just think it has to last a long time. Choose a decorator of your choice that is very trendy, look at the house five years later, and it's very dated. I prefer the timeless. CR: So tell us the story behind deciding to open your showroom "Hollywood at Home". PD: Things in my career as a designer have sort of followed along in quick succession. We were originally going to take one of these spaces, not both. Then I thought, "I can't really risk having like a nail parlor move in next door!" Then I thought, "Well things may go well so we might as well take the whole space or we'll end up regretting it." That's when I came up with idea of calling my friends who needed a home. We ended up doing a lot of things that we never expected. The furniture that I had been making for years for clients, such as the "How to Marry a Millionaire Chair," I had probably used in six projects. I said, "Why don't we put a chair or two basically for decor for the fabrics?" We never really expected to make as much money from the furniture as the fabrics! I was never into the idea of making furniture that was easy to copy. I wanted to make things that are a bit more complicated, cane, rush, and wood framed pieces. I thought, "What's the point of making something that's already available?" Like the Syrie Maugham chair I bought in London and copied. CR: It's hard to find that perfect pair of vintage wood framed chairs that are comfortable, I think this chair is an excellent alternative. PD: And you need wood framed chairs. Yes, it's very deep pitched, really comfortable, great for big rooms. CR: A husband can be happy with that chair. PD: Well, I'm sure you go through this all the time, what I do with fabrics is the same as decorating. You've got to seduce the women to take you home, then you have to get past the husband! It's more challenging. On the whole he wants to say no. They just want something to get into to watch the Lakers.
In a weird way it's more challenging to get past the husband. Unless it's leather in black or brown. The wife says, "Honey, what do you think?" and the husband says "Eeeh!" (sort of unimpressed). CR: Don't you think that women want their husbands to love it? No woman wants to hear "eeeh" when they're asking, "Do you love it?" PD: The women are much more aware of more stylish things, more options. She will have shopped more, she will have read more. When you're trying to be a bit more edgy, the women will go for it. Paisley, tribal things, are more bisexual. Paisleys are just about the limit for a man to go for. They can deal with rhythm, stripes, etc. Men also love brown leather. CR: How are your clients with vintage items? PD: Usually people come to me for the sort of layered look. Even in a modern, mid-century house, there has to be a bit of layering. It's just in my DNA. I get bored visually without it. I kind of educate them on that. You have to find an angle. I think people really understand that vintage has value. To get something cool that's new is often really expensive. People really get into it. If people are buying my package, then it comes with a vintage quotient. I don't know how to decorate a house without it. To me, I can't do a house and not have certain pieces that you can't find anywhere else. Lamps, carpets, Calder tapestries, pillows, something that doesn't look like it all came out of a showroom. CR: You seem to have a couple of signature styles, one being the very modern, spare, open with white walls, the other the layered, English. Do you think people come to you more for the modern or the traditional? PD: I think by now, people probably come more for the layered English look with an ethnicy vibe. That's what they most associate me with. One thing that's great about working in L.A. is, there are all different types of architecture. I've always loved the mid-century style and also the sort of Merchant Ivory look, Room with a View, World of Interiors look, and then the country house look. It's a little bit of what's reflected here in the store. Why would I have a pair of mirrored obelisks with a rusty old plane, because they both appeal to me for different reasons. CR: Right here is a good example for telling people to buy what they love. You are putting together pieces that you love and it's working. It's passionate and the elements are coming together wonderfully. CR: Which fabric is your top seller? PD: Samarkand. It came from a friend of mine's old hippy bedcover. He had bought it in Tangiers. I had always loved it, and when I knew how to do it, I said, "I'm going to take that and copy it." I cleaned it up a little bit. Fig leaf is also a big seller. We have a new paisley that's doing really well. CR: Is there anything you can share with us about David Hicks? PD: I had a total crush on him as a school child, I mean he was like the James Bond of decorating! He was incredibly sharp and debonaire, and he kind of captured both worlds. He was living in this very rich aristocratic world by marriage, and he was also very practical and commercial at the same time. He was incredibly talented and his eye was dead-on. Like almost no one I've ever known.
His eye was constantly working. Kind of like Yves St. Laurent in fashion. He was dead on in taking other influences, like the Russian style or Chinese style, and morphing it into something for today. That's what David Hicks was doing. Taking the Indian influence and the English country house style and sort of turning it on its head in a classic way. He didn't work in a trendy way at all . David's look is trendy today because of the way people have sort of re-interpreted it, but it was actually incredibly classical. He was achieving both modern and classical at the same time. He knew who Jean Michel Frank was before anyone. He was an artist, he went to art school, he drew and painted beautifully in the same style as he decorated. Very controlled, graphically beautiful, and sharp with clean colors and very edited. The mixture between modern and antique. He was really one of the first people to get it. He was not a nostalgic type decorator at all. He had an amazing sense of history, all of which was built in and came out in his work. He was the real thing, and he didn't take it lightly. He would not pass an important house in the country side on a drive. Whether it was L.A., France, or Miami, if there were two houses to go and see, he would be there taking notes on little pads and drawing. He had an intense drive for it. He was a remarkable person and I immediately thought, "Oh, this is it," when I first saw the books. They had the most beautiful house, this beautiful classical Georgian house that's in his book. I remember when I first went there. Here I was this spotty fifteen-year-old, and I don't think David had ever spoken to a friend of Ashley's before. He stuck his cigarette in his cigarette holder, and he showed me the entire house. I said, "Show me everything," because I had seen it in the book. So he showed me, and Ashley could not believe it. He showed me every single bit and what was achieved and why. Like the punctuation of an object to make this boring corridor into something interesting. I was very privileged just in those several times that I went. Particularly at that time I thought, "Wow, this is who I want to be." Part of what put me off on being a designer at the time was I thought, "I'm never going to be a character like that." But would Mark Jacobs have ever become a designer if he had befriended Madamoiselle Chanel and said, "Well, I'm never going to become her?" Well, guess what? He never is going to become her! But maybe that doesn't really matter. That's the reality that took me twenty years to figure out. He definitely influenced my work in pattern and color, my interest in rhythm. It's something in our eye or in our brain that we respond to. He liked mixing rhythm and pattern, playing with shiny and matte, and new and old. He liked experimenting with the mix. If you look, his interiors are all varied. They're very unlike anyone else's. His viewpoint was very strong, and he had a very strong personality. Impossibly strong for some people to live with. CR: I really think of confidence when I think of him. He seemed to know exactly who he was and what he was doing. He was very confident and also, he was a true artist and was probably quite challenging for clients to deal with. The people who worked well with him probably said, "O.K., what's the scheme?". He would get it immediately, and it would last. In the books, some of the most modern interiors that he did still exist today. Clean, well maintained, and high quality work. Very simple and not trendy, although I'm sure it was revolutionary at the time, but not trendy. He had a great sense of humor. Very naughty and biting, and very mercurial. Sometimes he was impossible. Sometimes egotistical, but always fabulous. You were either a huge fan or you could just leave because it wasn't going to work. I remember one of the last times I saw him, when he came to New York. He always used to take me to Le Cirque. He loved it. He said, "Peter, you didn't ask me if I went to the Chelsea Garden show this year." So I said, "No, David, I didn't." He said, "Why don't you ask me who I went with?" I said, "Who did you go to the Chelsea Garden show with?" He said, "The Queen." So then I said, "Well then, describe the whole thing." He would go into intricate detail that only he or I would appreciate like, what color were the electrical outlet cover plates, what were the paintings in the room, were they wearing white gloves or not, who was sitting next to who. He would, of course, remember every detail and I would have done the same thing. I was listening avidly. How many people were there, how were you transported from the dinner to the show and also the reverse. You're all ushered in and she goes with eight people. He said you're standing in front of the elevator and everyone is watching the elevator needle go around and then she appears, and everyone's eyes as they watch her, just every last detail! The observant nature of it, the enthusiasm, the curiosity. He was a total genius and a terrible businessman. He went through a series of bankruptcies and partners. The work is littered with disastrous professional relationships. He was very extravagant. But he's like YSL, there is no one else who can synthesize all of these different influences and make it relevant for today. For today! I mean this was thirty years ago, and it is very sharp and for today. He was absolutely magical. I would like to tell you one thing to finish. I think you can only really do this job if you passionately live, breathe, sleep, and eat it. I feel very, very fortunate that I love what I do. To contact Peter Dunham Design: 323.848.9900 This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. 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Comments (1)
jbwebb
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... What a fabulous picture!!!! And those dogs - too cute. I loved this interview - esp. what he said about David Hicks - I didn't know they were so close. Fascinating. I love Peter's work. The site is wonderful. Congrats!!!!!! |
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