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PERHAPS
it was the ball shapes that first attracted sports
fanatic Kevin Frankel to a circular dwelling overlooking
the
Malibu
coast. The living room is ringed like a hockey rink in
transparent materials. There’s a cherrywood divider with
an eight-foot-wide cutout that looks as if a giant
soccer ball was kicked through it. And the round
limestone floor is wide enough for a half-court
basketball game.
Whatever. Within 10 minutes of seeing the interior of
the newly built glass-and-steel house, Frankel, a serial
apartment dweller, decided to buy it. He soon
experienced an aesthetic awakening. The home has changed
his life, the 45-year-old attorney says. The former
workaholic who crashed in places with no particular
style is now a beach-crazed world traveler with a
newfound interest in design.
FREDO, a basenji, finds a
comfortable spot in the guest bedroom. “The house has to
take the wear and tear of me, my friends and my
cantankerous dog,” Frankel say.
The
self-confessed “numbers guy with no visual sense”
chucked the off-the-floor Southwest furniture he’d
bought after law school and started shopping at Diva and
other hip Los Angeles furniture stores. He began
discussing the merits of luster on solid wood, the right
legs for a table and the number of knots per square inch
in a high-end rug.
He also
traveled to exotic places and acquired contemporary art
to replace wood paintings of boxers and his other pub
paraphernalia.
His
passion for sports goes unabated—“Did I mention I’m
single?” he says as a way to answer most questions about
his sports-centric life—but there’s not one bobblehead,
autographed ball or dusty trophy in sight.
He’s
discovered that natural light isn’t an enemy to marathon
TV viewing, and sleek designer furniture can withstand
spills, sweat and tears as well as a Scotchgard
recliner. “Look, it’s embarrassing to admit, but when
I’m home the TV goes on,” says Frankel, who spends
hundreds of dollars a season subscribing to sports cable
channels, “and it goes off by a sleeper switch.”
He
watches TV while making dinner, eats his meals basking
in its glow and entertains his buddies by inviting them
over for games. And when a coach makes a bad call, he
can step out on the deck, breathe in the air and quell
his emotions, all the while keeping an eye on the
50-inch plasma TV.
FRANKEL (far right) stands
in the cutout pass-through that separates the living
room and kitchen, with Dei, who designed the circular
light fixtures, curved leather sofa and club chairs.
“When I
spend six hours watching games at other people’s houses,
I feel as if I’ve been in a cave all day,” Frankel says,
facing his view. “Here, I look outside and see the
ocean. It’s life-enhancing.”
“Kevin’s
house is a great place to hang out in,” says long-time
friend Craig Varnen, who is also an attorney. “Despite
it being an expensive place and that Kevin has taken an
interest for the first time in how he lives, this house
has a good flopability quality. There’s nothing out of
bounds.
“And
he’s changed because of it. It’s like night to day. He’s
relaxed, for him.”
The
entrance to the house, with its translucent glass front,
looks like a lighthouse. It draws you inside and leads
past a long walnut table with ripple-like curves into
the circular living room and kitchen. Though the
fishbowl design initially attracted Frankel, it
presented some distinct decorating challenges.
For
starters, where should the sofa go? Architect Ed R.
Niles, who designed the house, thought seating should
face the cherrywood wall that divides the two rooms into
separate half moons. But the built-in cabinets were too
low and too small, Frankel decided, to hold a big-screen
TV.
He
called in help.
“Everything hinged on the placement of the TV. He
couldn’t care less about the sofa,” says designer Ilan
Dei, whom Frankel hired after purchasing the house in
2001. Dei figured out that a large TV could go above the
glass-and-aluminum-framed fireplace on a wall opposite
the divider. To one side is a 20-foot-high wall of
glass.
“The
room gets a lot of light that impacts perfect TV
viewing,” Frankel says, “but we put up sheers and that’s
taken care of some of the problem.”
Venice-based Dei says that during three years of
decorating in phases, Frankel revealed a different side:
“He had good taste to start with—a nice car, nice
clothing—but not when it applied to a house. In the
beginning, he was reserved and relied on me. But as the
project progressed, so did his insight.”
When
Frankel was going to
New York
to see his favorite team, the Rams, Dei gave him a map
of the SoHo District and told him to check out showrooms
there. Frankel took pictures of leather sofas he liked,
and Dei used those images, along with the low lines of
Frankel’s Porsche seats, to design the living room set:
a leather sofa and three matching club chairs in burnt
sunset-orange.
Dei sees
the color as modern and warm. Frankel says he would
never have picked orange, but he likes it because “it’s
irreverent and fun.”
Sharing
the wall with the TV is a set of 50 white-and-orange
ceramic pieces shaped like birds and shells that Dei
made. He also designed three large white light fixtures,
with a swirl of sunshine yellow, that hover over the
curved sofa. Defining the seating area is a circle
within a circle: a rug in yellow and blue, hand-woven in
Nepal.
In the
center is a round, pale yellow ottoman five feet across.
It’s large enough to accommodate four sets of feet, plus
beer and pizzas, or, for playoff games, a spread from
Roscoe’s House of Chicken’ n Waffles.
“I
needed to mellow out,” Frankel recalls, standing in the
living room with a can of soda in his hand and one eye
on the TV. “I needed a house to relax in.”
When
Frankel settled into the
Malibu
house, he got a dog, an undertrained but much-beloved
basenji named Fredo. He also took surfing lessons and
became, for the first time, a regular boogie-boarding
beachgoer. Soon he was visiting beaches in Greece,
Mauritius and Thailand and coming home with art,
decorative boxes and place mats he’d found at local
shops.
As much
time as he has spent decorating, Frankel is pretty
easygoing about his home. He waited until Fredo was
older before he replaced the dog-chewed rug in the
entry. “I’m not one of those guys who make people take
their shoes off when they come in the house or worry
about crumbs,” Frankel says. “The house has to take the
wear and tear of me, my friends and my cantankerous
dog.”
Dei says
with a smile, “The goal was to make it beautiful and
indestructible. We fell short a bit because of the dog.” |
