The designer gives T a tour of her pretty but punk home in one of California’s most scenic trailer parks.
The thing about pink, Betsey Johnson will tell you, is that it contains subtleties, so you’ve got to get specific. For the facade of her house in Malibu, California’s Point Dume Club — a gated trailer park set on a bluff jutting toward the Pacific, about 200 feet below — she gave the painter a swatch that wasn’t Day-Glo pink, the color she chose for the kitchen at her vacation home in Barra de Potosí, Mexico, in the 1990s, or the bright bubble gum pink she selected for her Manhattan loft in the 1980s. Rather, she says, “the shade was close to a ballerina, with a touch of salmon.” But the precise tone, she explains, changes each day along with the light, taking on a bit of the dusty rose and orange Creamsicle of the sun as it sets. That Johnson would opt for some kind of pink, however, was never really in question. As she puts it, “When it comes down to it, what other color could my house be?”
Indeed, pink has been integral to the 78-year-old designer’s career, though it alone fails to capture the full scope of her aesthetic, which often combines the frilly with the brooding: fluorescent tulle and black mesh, floral prints and skull motifs. This pretty and punk alchemy — honed during a childhood in Connecticut and a young adulthood in New York, where, for a time, she made clothes for the Velvet Underground — has opened up sartorial possibilities for women, allowing them to dress, with a knowing nod, like their complex, contradictory selves, ever since Johnson launched her namesake line in 1978. Her first collection featured form-fitting pieces made exclusively in a cotton-Lycra blend, and patterned with black, white and red stripes. And in the mid-80s, when Johnson incorporated puff sleeves and full skirts into her offering, the company really took off. At its height in the mid-aughts, the Betsey Johnson brand had 63 stores, did $150 million in annual sales and was a favorite choice for prom. When expansion outpaced business several years later, the brand — which was mired in financial troubles — was acquired by Steve Madden. It is under this umbrella that Johnson continues to serve as creative director.
After years of designing for a variety of categories, however (she has 15 licenses under the Steve Madden brand), it’s in devising her own homes’ interiors — free from business constraints — that Johnson feels most inspired. “My houses have always been my creative, shopping and antiquing outlets — they just combine everything I like to do,” she explains. In a way, this is not surprising: Her clothes, like her “Betsey girls,” as she calls her fans, have always been part of a completist vision, an entire way of being.
Johnson’s path to acquiring her Point Dume home started in 2016, when she moved from the East Coast with her daughter, Lulu Johnson, and two granddaughters. After a stint in a trailer, which she also painted pink, in nearby Paradise Cove, the designer bought and began renovating a 3,000-square-foot house in the same area with 360-degree views of the mountains and sea. As soon as the papers were signed, however, and especially when Covid-19 hit shortly after, Johnson developed misgivings about its size. “I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing?!’” she says. As it happened, Lulu had recently found a listing for a trailer in Point Dume — a three-bedroom, one-story colonial-style one with white interiors and exteriors — and Johnson leapt at the opportunity, selling off the house. At 2,300 square feet, the trailer is undoubtedly more modest, but Johnson also appreciates its setting. “I love the idea that, with a trailer park, you’re in a kind of community,” she says. “At my age, if I fall down in the middle of the street, I want someone to go, ‘Hey! What’s that girl doing in the middle of the street?’” Less appealing was all the white. “I realized, ‘I’ve got to create a new house for myself,’” she says, “And I decided that it was going to be a dollhouse.”
Her inspirations were the kitschy 1950s-era sets of the Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” (2020), which Johnson tore through during the pandemic, and the meticulously wallpapered dollhouse that her father made for her as a child — she can still picture the botanical and plaid prints. And so, Johnson set out to cover every inch of her walls. She soon discovered the California-based company Bradbury & Bradbury, which reproduces a wide variety of vintage patterns, and pored over its offerings from the 1930s and ’40s. She was delighted to find one with pink roses and latticework that was an exact match for the wallpaper in her childhood home, and hung it in her living room. After that, Johnson went all in on florals, to the extent that the interior now brings to mind an English garden (the wallpaper in the entryway is even patterned with gnomes).
That’s the prettiness. But of course it’s also a backdrop for other cherished elements, and the everlasting aesthetic conversation taking place in Johnson’s mind. She bought very few new pieces to decorate the space, instead repurposing her existing collection of art and furniture, which combines her loves of Danish and midcentury modern (a pink Eero Saarinen womb chair), Americana (Victorian-style Cathouse iron beds) and rock ’n’ roll (portraits of her and Lulu by Mick Rock). “I just think it’s what any person is,” she says of her varied tastes. “They’ve got a right side and a left side.”
The designer spends most of her time in the main room, which stretches from a sitting area — outfitted with orange Art Deco-style swivel chairs and a convex mirror that reflects the coastline — to a kitchen to a living space, where she watches TCM movies on a TV above the mantel. Opposite the fireplace is a coffee table laid with what she calls “1920s to 1950s weirdnesses” sourced from Blue Door, a vintage store in Santa Barbara, and antique shops and dealers in upstate New York: iron book ends shaped like dancing women and painted jade green, Japanese tea tins, a ceramic clown-adorned ashtray and a six-inch-tall plastic figurine of a tuxedo-clad male. “He’s the only man allowed in my house — not that I don’t love men,” Johnson explains, “I just don’t love them visually.” In another corner of the main room, a 1950s-era Warren Platner table and chairs sit under a pair of original Sputnik light fixtures — two of 13 total chandeliers in the house.
Clearly, Johnson doesn’t shy away from the old-fashioned — she’s quick to point out that her claw-foot bathtub features brass hardware from the British company Barber Wilsons, which also supplies fixtures to the royal family — and likes to hold on to objects that remind her of her own past. “I’ve had the most incredible life, time zone-wise. To go through all of the decades, there will never be anything like it,” she says. “I like to remember all the stuff those years churned out. All of it is inspiring to me.” The side entryway of the house features three portraits of women — all by an unknown artist with the last name Herrmann — that Johnson amassed over time. She vividly remembers saving up to pay installments for the first one — a nude in a white veil — in the mid-80s, when her business started to turn a profit. “They’re a sign of my success,” she says of the “sisters,” as she’s come to call them. And next to the kitchen sink, she keeps a shell ashtray from the 1950s that reminds her of Robert Mapplethorpe. “He had one like it in the bathroom of his loft on 23rd Street,” she says. “When I saw this one, it made me remember him. My most favorite photographer.”
The sink is the part of the kitchen — which also contains her collection of 1940s teapots, mismatched Murano glass, pastel ceramics and a wall of Astier de Villatte china — where Johnson’s most likely to be, brushing her teeth or filling her French press. “I don’t shop and I don’t cook,” she says. “Except for dye. I’m huge at dying clothes. I’m a little dye factory.” When it comes to meals, though, “It’s massively important for me to go out to a restaurant and get waited on and served good food,” says Johnson, who likes to dine alone, often at Lucky’s, Malibu’s buzzy new steakhouse, where she has her own table and usually orders the Dover sole, or at the nearby Thai fusion restaurant Thaia, to which she travels via golf cart. (The Pacific Coast Highway frightens her, so she gave away her 1980s Mercedes convertible.)
That factory also churns out home décor, like the flamingo-pink lace curtains in Johnson's bathroom, which she dyed to match the wallpaper and complement the coral Ann Sacks tiles. Next, she’ll work on the garden and the patio, where she wants to update the furniture, currently upholstered in a Beverly Hills Hotel banana leaf print, because she feels the pattern has become too popular. Johnson, you see, has never been a follower. And she’s not much of a brooder these days, either. This house, she says, is the happiest one she’s ever known.
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Inside Betsey Johnson’s Malibu Dream House - The New York Times
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