insider CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT Working
with Mark Rios at Lloyd Wright’s Avery House in Brentwood, Fernandez chose a piece by contemporary Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone for David and Suzanne Johnson. A sunlit dining room. At the Offer house, a custom Waldo’s Designs bench. Fernandez did all the architecture and interiors for his East Hampton home.
Waldo Fernandez
C 32 SPRING HOME 2014
OFFER HOUSE: TRIA GIOVAN. PORTRAIT: COURTESY OF WALDO’S DESIGNS
H
e started out in Hollywood designing sets, and like the proverbial boy in the mailroom who winds up running the studio, Waldo Fernandez is an international success story with deep roots in unfettered California cool. His worldwide roster of clients, including young Hollywood stars and an expansive vitrine of visionary entertainment execs, certain of whom actually did come from the mailroom, appreciate his easy way with the most sophisticated juxtapositions of fine art, furniture and architecture. The eternally handsome, Havana-born designer is in his element in California but knows his way around his Left Bank Ruhlmanns and Royères. He’s an Old World adventurist and a midcentury mixologist, and he moves fast. “I’m sick of Danish furniture everywhere,” he says. “Quality French furniture will come back. I always start with buying books for clients. Like for Brad [Pitt, a longtime pal] I said, ‘You like Jean-Michel Frank? Here. Look.’ It’s interesting—one will mark the book, excited. One looks. Another never opens the book.” A John Lautner monograph comes off the shelf for Jamie McCourt—he’s having fun right now redoing a house for her in Malibu, a Lautner previously owned by Courteney Cox. One assumes she perused her pages well. Decorators are often, shall we say, tight-lipped when it comes to complimenting their own kind, but it’s hard to