After 3 decades, Kelly Wearstler remains an interior design celebrity

If you were suddenly blindfolded and transported to Dahlia, a cocktail bar that opened in May at the Downtown Proper Hotel in Los Angeles, you might have wondered: where am I in the world? ?

The tall walls are painted dusty pink, and the booth cushions are covered in a velvety brown, like the desert floor after rain. Artwork in a terracotta palette covers the walls, including a bulbous wicker sculpture that seemed somewhat suggestive, like one of Georgia O'Keeffe's abstract flowers.

There was a sweating glass bottle of Mexican mineral water on a table, with a small plate of lime wedges so fat and juicy they seemed supernatural.

Were you dropped off at a boutique hotel or bar in San Miguel de Allende? Sedona? Santa Fe?

The answer perhaps didn't become clearer when Kelly Wearstler, the woman who designed the bar and hotel, walked through the doors in the stained glass windows. She was dressed in oversized denim from head to toe in her leather Loewe ankle boots, which had a built-in denim cuff folded over the upper. When she spoke, it was with a slight Southern accent.

"Oh, can you still hear the accent?" asked Ms. Wearstler, 55, who was born and raised in South Carolina before moving to Massachusetts for college.

Shortly after graduating , she moved to Los Angeles, where she has lived for 30 years. Aside from her jobs as a waitress and former Playboy model, she spent most of her time designing decadent homes, high-end hotels, and idiosyncratic objects to decorate them, like marble sofas, large splashbacks and lamps covered in spore-like spheres.

She also became one of the world's most famous interior designers. She has 2.1 million followers on Instagram, where she often shares her work alongside photos of herself wearing outrageous clothing. (Riding a public bike in Paris in knee-high Givenchy boots, for example, or balancing in Loewe's deflated balloon heels while potting plants in your living room.) Each article has its own magazine-style caption , and some are sponsored.

She judged a Bravo reality show called "Top Design" in the mid-2000s. She has a MasterClass. This summer, she appeared on the covers of Harper’s Bazaar’s Netherlands and Architectural Digest China. His sixth book, “Synchronicity,” will be published on September 26 and includes, among other things, glossy photographs of his hotel projects. Her latest book, "Evocative Style," was released in 2019 and is on Amazon's list of best-selling interior and home design books.

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