Kelly Wearstler:

10 Luxury Interior Design Projects!

Kelly Wearstler is an American interior designer regarded as one of the best in the world. Kelly Wearstler is known for her daring ideas and spectacular interior projects, she was a judge on Bravo’s Top Design, and her fourth book, Rhapsody, was published by Rizzoli in 2012. She is Playboy’s Playmate of the Month for September 1994, using the alias Kelly Gallagher. She was reportedly dubbed “the presiding grande dame of West Coast interior design” by The New Yorker.

Kelly Wearstler debuted her own fashion line, Kelly Wearstler, in the spring of 2011. Wearstler’s debut collection, for Fall 2011, took four years to create and use patterns and design sensibilities from his interior design work. According to the Los Angeles Times’s Booth Moore, the pieces are “absolutely wearable” and have the illusion of being handmade or one-of-a-kind, even if they aren’t.

Bergdorf Goodman was the exclusive retailer of the Winter 2011 line, which included ready-to-wear, handbags, and jewelry. Nicole Phelps of Style.com hailed this first season as having “feminine sensitivity.” Kelly Wearstler Spring 2012 collection included clashing patterns and a mod-glam vibe, according to Phelps. Bergdorf Goodman, as well as Neiman Marcus, Holt Renfrew, and Net-a-Porter, continue to carry her designs.

Under the pseudonym Kelly Gallagher in Playboy, Kelly Wearstler was named Playmate of the Month for September 1994. She put the money she earned from posing in Playboy towards paying off her student loans and launching her interior design firm. Kelly Wearstler claims she’s “not ashamed” of her appearance in Playboy: “If people ask, I did it…but I don’t talk about it,” she says, adding that “it’s a bit different today… I didn’t hang out at the mansion or anything like that. “It was just that I did it and that was the end of it.”

Kelly Wearstler established her design firm, Kelly Wearstler Interior Design, in 1995. (Kwid). She decorated the home of real estate developer Brad Korzen (whom she married in 2002) in the late 1990s and later provided design services for Korzen’s Kor Realty Group’s residential properties. Wearstler would later redesign the interior of the Avalon, a late-forties Beverly Hills hotel owned by Korzen. This sparked her interest in hotel interior design, and she went on to design “retro-theatrical” interiors for Korzen’s Viceroy Hotels and Resorts portfolio of boutique hotels, according to the New York Times.