‘I haven’t ever met a colour I don’t like,’ says Johnson Hartig, reflecting on the giddily hued interiors he has put together in his new house in Los Angeles’s Windsor Square neighbourhood. The fashion designer made it all happen last year in the first four months of lockdown. ‘I really do work fast.’ Fast, but with a sure eye, shaped by a clear vision of what he sought to achieve. ‘I wanted this house to feel incredibly comforting, more grown-up than my previous house (WoI April 2015) – more grandmotherly, more “country life”.’ Cheerfully, Johnson – founder and creative director of the fashion line Libertine – describes the finished rooms, overflowing with old-fashioned chintzes, painted furniture, 18th-century portraits and decorative ceramics, as ‘like Sister Parish on acid’.
Elements recalling the mid-century US decorator abound, such as the collection of baskets Johnson has amassed over 25 years, now hanging from the kitchen’s painted-plank ceiling. There are botanical prints, including the numerous leafy images he photocopied and taped to white Ikea kitchen cupboards to tone down their shiny whiteness; lampshades jolly with découpage roses (images Johnson snipped from Jackson & Perkins catalogues as a reminder of his childhood).
At intervals, there are whiffs of England and France – a lacquered chest of drawers, an 18th-century giltwood fauteuil covered in an ikat of Johnson’s own design; blue-and-white transfer-printed meat platters and white Staffordshire dogs ranged against the dining room’s yellow walls; scenic wallpaper covering the walls and ceiling in his own bedroom.
Many of the pieces are new to Johnson, the harvest of an auction-buying frenzy that gripped him during his first months in the house or commissioned especially for these spaces as the interiors rapidly took shape. He cites as his favourite piece a red lacquer chest of drawers painted last year by Chris Evans. Among its gilded ‘chinoiserie’ elements are images of Johnson gardening and two of his dogs crossing a bridge. Now in the dining room, it stands below a collection of ship dioramas assembled over three decades.
A friend commented that the finished rooms transport visitors by turns to Provence, the English countryside and Marrakesh. There’s the green-and-white drawing room and the yellow dining room that flank the entrance hall, the green-painted library and the dreamy blue breakfast ‘grotto’, lined with one of the wallpapers Johnson designed for Schumacher. ‘My favourite places are the most exotic,’ says he. ‘So why not live somewhere that reminds you of them on a daily basis?’ Nuggets of exoticism stud these vigorous interiors: earthy ceramics from the borders of Afghanistan, a clutch of Indian portraits, Moroccan lanterns, green-and-white tiles used in all four bathrooms, zingy suzanis and, on Johnson’s metal four-poster bed, a velvet cover bought in Paris. Evans painted the drawing-room walls with a panorama of sumptuous vegetation, glimpsed through a criss-cross pattern resembling glazing bars. His inspiration was the 15th-century Casa degli Atellani in Milan, its botanical frescoes done in the 1940s by the architect Piero Portaluppi.
Johnson undertook a degree of the decoration himself. He sponge-painted the ceiling in the breakfast area as well as the green-and-brown skirting and risers of the staircase (inspired by pottery pieces in his collection). After discovering ceramics by Picasso on a visit to Barcelona, he set about making his own versions, creating plates and platters from painted cardboard. A tall religious statue in the breakfast grotto will shortly be transformed into a representation of Neptune, complete with a crown of shells. ‘Immediate gratification’ comes high on Johnson’s list of decorating pleasures. ‘To be able to convert something into something else in ten minutes brings me enormous joy,’ he says of the many aspects of the rooms’ design he has created from tape, imagination and an ebullient sense of fun.
The house’s previous owners were avid gardeners. It was this aspect that confirmed, on Johnson’s first viewing, the property’s ‘rightness’. Today, a leafy embrace is apparent throughout, an inside/outside feeling in rooms flooded with light from tall windows. ‘It feels like I live in the middle of the country, but I couldn’t be more dead-centre LA.’ Johnson created a kitchen garden of raised beds bisected by gravel paths; other elements, including the hard landscaping, he left intact. The garden’s exuberance, and its vigorous contrasts of silver foliage with yellow, mauve and pink flowers, act as a frothy introduction to the house itself, its bold fecundity a romantic preparation for the floriferous lushness beyond the green-painted front door.
‘Eclecticism’ has long been an exhausted term in interiors journalism, too often used to describe predictable contrasts. In the case of this house, these ‘eclectic’ rooms suggest – quite misleadingly – long tenure. In pointing to a lifetime’s collecting, however, the impression is not so wide of the mark. ‘I’m passionate about colour, art history, objets,’ he says. He has created rooms in which bold and beautiful colour, a passion for art of many periods and magpie instincts for pretty, striking or unexpected objects coalesce. Their life-enhancing qualities delight him on a daily basis and, he says, surprise him every time he steps inside the house.
Johnson has described interior design as his ‘next frontier’. ‘I’m just as passionate about decorating as I am about clothes. Fashion kind of fell into my lap, but it could just as easily have been interior design. If one has this bug, it’s just in one.’ He’s currently working on a second collection for Schumacher. Fruits of his first collection recur throughout the house, including his black-and-white ‘Modern Toile’ that lines a guest bedroom and the gloriously dense ‘Plates and Platters’ wallpaper in the breakfast space. For Johnson, these are first forays into decorating with wallpaper: his convert’s zeal yields high-impact results.
Decorating, Johnson reflects, is ‘such a personal thing’. In the house he shares with his dog Flower, he has realised a very personal vision of diverse elements and gorgeous confidence that is embracing, arresting and, above all, comforting – just as he hoped.
For more about Johnson Hartig and Libertine, visit ilovelibertine.com
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