A knack for knick-knacks

Jim Turner, co-founder and former creative director of Flaunt magazine, can't recall collecting anything as a kid growing up in Missouri.

But today, far-ranging collections are on display throughout his four-storey Spanish Revival villa in Hollywood Hills.

To name a few: vintage bears and glass elephants; 1960s Blenko glass and Frankoma-ware; copper vessels and vintage oil jars; wood santos and conquistador bronzes; carved boxes and Mexican souvenir plates; mercury glass and American quilts; taxidermy and concrete garden animals.

His father, a retired train engineer, devoted the family's entire guesthouse to railroad memorabilia.

Turner recalls a faux-caboose filled with model trains, scenic mountains and small towns, railroad-crossing signs, dining car china, menus and train posters galore.

Bit by the collecting bug

“I guess the acorn doesn't fall too far from the oak,'' he jokes.
The collecting bug bit Turner more than 20 years ago.

He had just moved into his first apartment after graduating from the Art Institute of Dallas and needed furniture.

Trained as a fashion illustrator, he was freelancing for a decorating company, making paintings for model apartments and not earning much money.

“I haunted flea markets to find bargains and just started collecting things,'' he says.

Turner has a sensibility others don't have, says Luis Barajas, publication director and co-founder of Flaunt. The two have been together since Dallas, where they founded Detour magazine in 1987. They moved to Los Angeles and started Flaunt in 1998.

Cutting-edge covers

Turner, who was the monthly fashion and culture magazine's art director for a decade, was known for his innovative covers and creative pop-ups that often made the magazine resemble a cutting-edge activity book. One issue featured an Eames chair that readers punched out and assembled.

One advertisement sported a black-and-white beach-ball insert; another, a bag of sand to promote the film Sahara.

“Jim likes a bit of kitsch and doesn't take design so seriously,'' Barajas says. “He especially likes to break the rules — something you can do only when you have a very sophisticated aesthetic.''

The pair moved from a Midcentury Rustic Canyon dwelling to their Mediterranean house on a ridge below the Hollywood sign four years ago.

Turner has been working on the 5,500-square-foot home and its adjacent two-storey guesthouse ever since.

Although the home, built by artist-designer Michael E. Arth in 1994, had great bones, the interior needed a facelift.

A previous occupant, former Guns N' Roses drummer Matt Sorum, had painted the tile floors black and the walls maroon.

Turner returned the tiles to their original terracotta colour. In keeping with a Spanish-style home, he stained the light trim around doors and windows dark, replaced light fixtures in each of the 18 rooms with Spanish Revival lamps, then Venetian-plastered the walls to an old-world finish in a palette of sunny Mediterranean hues.

But the real fascination lies in Turner's zany juxtapositions of eclectic furniture, collections and art.

His Monterey-style furniture, fabricated by Mason Manufacturing from 1929 through the mid-1940s, dominates many of the rooms.

Because Turner can't abide theme rooms with “everything matching'', he adds conversation pieces — a 1992 Cappellini chaise lounge upholstered in albino crocodile, for instance, or a resin deer head that glows in the dark or a grouping of vintage Blenko glass.

“I love pieces that have a story to tell or could spark a story in someone else,'' Turner says.

Another Turner obsession: holiday accessories. Closets throughout the house bulge with Halloween pumpkins and Day of the Dead skeletons, Easter rabbits in every conceivable size, shape and material and Christmas ornaments, including more than 100 Santas.

Turner has a different Christmas tree motif each year, Barajas says.

“One year, he collected pixies for a whole year for a pixie tree, the next year it was a candy tree hung with sweets from all over the world, another year it was a Day of the Dead tree, then there was the butterfly tree and the angel tree,'' Barajas says. “I don't know what he will do this year.''

Room decor — or a Christmas tree motif — starts with inspiration from a single item.

Turner thought his Andy Warhol silk screen of Jackie O. with burnt-orange field would be perfect over the dining room mantel, topped with his collection of copper vessels set against a pumpkin-frost-hued wall.

A pair of garden ornaments — sleeping Mexican figures with red sombreros — add to the disparate tableaux of objects that inevitably provokes smiles in first-time guests. “I'm sure Jackie would like her new home,'' Turner says.

Diverse taste

Turner sports an equally diverse taste in artwork. A mélange of vintage cowboy art; 20th-century works by Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein; and more contemporary mixed-media pieces add to the fun-house decor.

In the foyer, beneath a large antler chandelier, hangs a Terry Rodgers painting of a Hollywood party scene, used as the gatefold cover of Flaunt's August 2003 issue.

The hard part, Turner says, “is when I buy things, not to take them home''.

To continue collecting, Turner opened a new store 18 months ago that he dubbed Period, in a 1920s bungalow formerly occupied by a light shop.

One-time customers often show up with lamps in hand for rewiring, then linger in rooms filled with 1940s Hollywood Regency furnishings inspired by Billy Haines and Dorothy Draper and vintage wing chairs upholstered in zebra skins.

Aesthetic mix

“We carry different periods to show people that they can mix styles or simply add a piece or two as accents to liven up a room.

"A whole room done up in one style starts to look like a museum — it's much more fun to mix,'' says Turner, who now designs the same eclectic, world-traveller interiors for a tony clientele.

“If you do them in the right fabrics, colours and scale, everything fits together.''

To curb his collecting mania, Turner recently made a new rule.

“I promised myself not to add another piece to my home without taking something out,'' he says.