Carleton Varney Refreshes a Neglected Palm Springs Home With Bold Decor

This article originally appeared in the February 2008 issue of Architectural Digest.

The client, a successful and highly regarded doctor, hadn't worked with Carleton Varney in almost 20 years and had barely seen or spoken to him since. So when she called him up one day to see if he might help her figure out what to do with her new house in Palm Springs, she naturally asked him if he remembered her.

He did. And not only that, but he remembered the salient details about her old house back in Cleveland, most significantly its abundance of furnishings and objets—collected from all over the world and proudly displayed—and its vibrant colors. Back then, the client had been no fan of au courant minimalism or muted tones. Over the last two decades nothing had happened to make her change her mind.

She had tried, in earnest and in vain, to find a local designer who understood her. "But everyone had wanted me to get rid of my old furniture and do everything over in beiges and browns," she says. "I thought: No, I don't like this picture. I love my things. And then I thought, Well, I suppose I could call Carleton."

And thus did two kindred spirits reconnect. "She had become accustomed to living with color, and she told me that she couldn't take it out of her life," says Varney, the president of the venerable Dorothy Draper Company and himself a celebrated colorist. "I believe people ought to live with what they love."

The house that Varney visited on his next trip out to California was in sore need of his ministrations. Built in 1973 on an exclusive ridge high atop Palm Springs—the list of neighbors once included Bob Hope, Steve McQueen and William Holden—it offered stunning panoramic views, but its details felt dated, and its layout was awkward. The client had bought it fully furnished with items that ranged from potentially usable to downright homely. Unoccupied for more than a year, it seemed neglected and ghostly, a moribund presence in a city famed for its celebrity-fueled vitality and playful high style.

All it needed, of course, was for Varney to walk through it once and, in his own words, "listen to it. Walls tell me things. Rooms, in a sense, talk to me, whether they're empty or filled, and they always have a story to tell." In this case, the story Varney heard was of Hollywood-style glamour, dormant but revivable. The key to its resurrection would be color, naturally, along with the careful editing of furnishings: some new, some kept from the house's previous owner, and most from the client's already sizable collection.

With his customary fearlessness, Varney went to work. The original entrance hall, unremarkable save for two unusual totem-pole-like columns bearing illuminated pictographic panels, was handed over to decorative painter Ferko Lakatos, whose emerald-green mural depicting a dense thicket of banana leaves alerts the first-time visitor that there will be zero tolerance of beige sensibilities within these walls. (On the topic of beige, Varney doesn't hide his distaste. "I don't like it," he says. Then, on second thought, he grows slightly more charitable: "Well, I don't dislike it when it'ssand.")

客户端想显示她的中国漆cabinet, as well as her collection of glassware and porcelain, in the dining room. Rather than talk her out of it, Varney gave her walls of vermilion and gold that echo the cabinet's panels, and he upholstered the dining chairs in a deep blue fabric that makes the blue pieces on the wall shelves stand out like sapphires amid diamonds. A walk through the butler's pantry, newly formed from an extensive kitchen renovation that annexed an office and a bedroom in its search for more cooking space, leads to the breakfast room, which Varney has imagined as a tented cabana that pays homage to his legendary mentor. (The bold vertical stripes—a Dorothy Draper hallmark—are dead ringers for the blue ones adorning the dust jacket of her classic 1939 book,Decorating Is Fun!)

Elsewhere in the house, Varney's task was to arrange objects that unquestionably belonged somewhere—just not, perhaps, where they stood at the moment. "When I finally moved in, I didn't know how to arrange the furniture," says the client, whose furnishings were delivered before Varney could return to California and help to organize them. "Carleton kept asking me how I liked the house. I'd tell him it was okay, and he'd say, Well, you don't sound very enthusiastic. Wait until I come out there.' So he came out to hang pictures, and he and his associates walked around in absolute silence. Then Carleton just looked at me and said, We have a lot of work to do.' They stayed on for two days, moving things around. They worked magic."

Surely he must have seemed like a magician at times, transforming hopelessly drab spaces into riotously colorful ones, changing the entire feel of a room simply by rearranging the furniture, essentially reading the mind of a client who wasn't entirely sure how to describe what she wanted.

And then there were those amazing feats of memory. At one point early on in the project, Varney was walking through the house, trying to picture how it might all come together. Suddenly he looked at the client and stunned her with his ability to recall tiny details from 20 years ago.

"He said to me: I remember you had a wonderful kimono. Where is it?' I told him it was locked up in storage somewhere. Well, get it out,' he told me." Retrieved from its hiding place, it now hangs—framed, resplendent, like a treasured canvas—in the hallway by the dining room.