Kelly Wearstler

Kelly Wearstler (born November 21, 1967) is an American designer.

Kelly Wearstler was born in 1967 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and raised in Myrtle Beach.

Her father was an engineer and her mother an antique dealer.

Her mother's interest in design had a major influence on Wearstler from a young age.

She would come home from school to find rooms often painted new colors.

When they were young, Wearstler and her older sister would accompany their mother to thrift shops, auctions, and flea markets, which helped develop Wearstler's early interest in fashion and design.

She started collecting vintage clothing at age 15 and later attended the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, where she took architecture classes, and obtained her bachelor's degree in interior and graphic design.

While paying her way through college by waitressing, she held internships at the design firms Cambridge Seven Associates in Boston and Milton Glaser in New York.

Wearstler moved to Los Angeles in her mid-twenties, hoping to work in the film industry as a set decorator.

She founded her own design firm Kelly Wearstler Interior Design (or KWID) in the mid-1990s, serving mainly the hotel industry, and now designs across high-end residential, commercial, retail and hospitality spaces.

In 1992 she was a production assistant on HouseSitter, and the following year she served as an uncredited assistant art director on So I Married an Axe Murderer.

After working small roles on several sets she decided not to pursue a film career, though the experience did lead to an interior design commission from a film producer.

While working as a hostess at a Beverly Hills restaurant in 1994, she was scouted by a Playboy photographer and was featured as September Playmate of the Month under the name Kelly Gallagher.

She used the money from the photoshoot to pay off student loans and help start her interior design business.

In 1995 Wearstler opened Kelly Wearstler Interior Design, her own design firm.

The following year she was introduced to her future husband real estate developer Brad Korzen, who hired her to design his house in the Hollywood Hills and several residential properties owned by Korzen's company Kor Realty Group.

The first of the residences was the Avalon hotel in Beverly Hills, which re-opened in 1999 with a style described in the press as "a playful take on mid-century modernism."

With apartments filled with pieces from modernist artists such as Arne Jacobsen, Eero Saarinen and George Nelson, The New York Times would write a decade later that "her playful, elegantly over-the-top designs for the Avalon Beverly Hills changed the look of boutique hotels around the world."

Her designs for the Viceroy hotel chain in the early 2000s have been noted for their influence on the design industry.

In 2000, she designed the small Maison 140 hotel in Beverly Hills.

Her work on the Avalon and the Maison 140 led to a commission designing Viceroy Hotels and Resorts, a new chain of boutique hotels, which she gave an "almost theatrical" Hollywood aesthetic.

The Viceroy in Palm Springs became "her most accomplished work" in 2001, and the design of the Viceroy that opened a year later in Santa Monica also earning praise in the press.

By that time she was also working on the Viceroy Miami, and other notable designs include Viceroy Anguilla on the island of Anguilla and The Tides Hotel South Beach in Miami.

Elle Decor would later write that "her luxury hotel interiors" featured "elegant bergère chairs, unexpected lacquer finishes (glistening lemon yellows, Amazon parrot greens) and old-style stately wallpapers."

As of 2002 she had also completed design projects for clients such as Mercury Records, Ben Stiller, and Jeanne Tripplehorn.

Wearstler published her first book of design in March 2004.

Titled Modern Glamour: The Art of Unexpected Style, it was co-written with Jane Bogart and released through Regan Books.

Publishers Weekly wrote that the book's "large, full-bleed color photographs do justice to the variety of [Wearstler's] creations."

Her first, Modern Glamour: The Art of Unexpected Style, was named a best seller by the Los Angeles Times in 2006.

In 2006 Wearstler designed the restaurant and lounge, BG Restaurant, at the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store.

HarperCollins published Wearstler's Domicilium Decoratus in 2006, a style book featuring photographs of her Beverly Hills mansion and herself dressed in evening gowns.

David Colman of the New York Times described it as "a kind of lavish brochure for Ms. Wearstler’s vision (she has a fabric line and has carpet, furniture and china lines in the works), which involves a decadent Hollywood riposte to Martha Stewart’s stolidly tasteful East Coast domesticity."

With filming starting in 2006, she served as one of three primary judges on Top Design, a reality show contest that premiered on Bravo in January 2007.

She has designed properties for clients such as Gwen Stefani, Cameron Diaz and Stacey Snider, and served as a judge on all episodes of Bravo's Top Design reality contest in 2007 and 2008.

Wearstler has released five books.

Other publications include Domicilium Decoratus and her most recent, Evocative Style in 2019.

Her eponymous luxury lifestyle brand incorporates her own designs as well as pieces she finds at auction houses, and she sells her own furniture, lighting, home accessories, and objets d'art collections.

Wearstler is the design partner for the Proper Hotel Group.

Wearstler is the first interior designer to be part of the MasterClass Series and the first outside designer to partner with Farrow & Ball.

She has won numerous awards including AD 100 Hall of Fame, Time Magazine the Design 100, Elle Decor A-List Designers and Vogue Best Dressed.