By Sarah Medford | Photography by Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

For as long as she can remember, Julia Louis-Dreyfus has been living inside Peter Dunham's head -- or at least inside the handcrafted, multicolor world the interior designer conjured for her, down to the pottery on her nightstand and the nightstand itself.

"Peter understands the psychology of home," Louis-Dreyfus says. "Why it matters -- and that objects precious to someone, be it a photograph or a book or a piece of art, need to be acknowledged and held thoughtfully and tenderly. And he does that in his design."

On January 7, Louis-Dreyfus's family home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles burned to the ground, taking their possessions and 31 years' worth of memories with it.

"It's been the blow of blows," she says, struggling to process the past few months. One of the first calls she got that day was from Dunham. Stuck in West Hollywood and feeling powerless to help, he began reaching out to friends and clients whose domestic lives he'd come to know with astonishing intimacy.

"Maybe this word is overused, but Peter's work has sort of a bohemian undercurrent and an awareness of the handmade that makes everything kind of friendly and cozy and not too fancy," Louis-Dreyfus says, sounding wistful. "Because we're not fancy people."

A chameleon of the design trade, Dunham creates textiles, furniture and lighting that account for about 40 percent of his revenue. His soaring retail showroom on North La Cienega Boulevard, Hollywood at Home, also includes vintage pieces and represents other brands that share the relaxed, permanent-vacation vibes of his own. A second showroom opened last fall in New York. But his sweet spot is residential design, especially renovation or construction projects that engage his eye for proportion and scale.

Among his followers, Dunham has become best known for his fabrics. "Particularly on Instagram," he says, "where pattern and color really show." This tends to obscure what he calls his "more grown-up work": custom sofas in dun-colored raw silk beneath a Basquiat painting, or an iridescent grid of Persian tiles enveloping a pool-house fireplace.

Where his client list once leaned heavily to young Hollywood, including the actresses Jennifer Garner, Hilary Swank, Jessica Biel, Drew Barrymore and Minnie Driver, Dunham now works primarily for studio executives and independent producers, as well as tech clients and venture capitalists. As a group, he says, "they share a practicality, a connection to reality. I think there's a mutual appreciation of not being insane in their demands." He's comfortable reviewing line-item budgets with them, "because honestly, most people are concerned more by that than they are about which shade of blue you're going to use."

Well before the fires, L.A.'s entertainment industry was in the throes of an economic downturn. New streaming platforms were cutting into profits, while labor disputes and strikes had forced many out of work. Dunham says that even established talent feels it is "barely limping along."

A shelf crowded with Roman sculptural fragments ("rubble," he calls them) underlines drawings by Philip Taaffe, Sol LeWitt and the local artists Dunham and Torres-Macias collect.

Diminutive houses like these were his bread and butter early in his career. Jennifer Garner remembers a Palisades bungalow they worked on together in the 1990s, with stenciled dining room walls and a Craftsman-style table she has been carting around ever since.

"We did a whole room that was upholstered in one fabric -- a bold stripe, pink and orange and red," says the actress. "It was a crazy thing to do. I'm sure it was Peter's idea. I was always up for his crazy ideas. But Peter is also pragmatic. He's not afraid to say, 'You don't like that red? OK, screw it. We won't do that. You want white? It can be white.' "

Dunham was born in Paris, in 1962, to a Franco-American father and an English mother. At the Mediterranean farmhouse in Spain where his family spent summers, he remembers strong colors in close combinations -- green with blue, ombré sunsets -- and fig trees dropping fruit onto the stony ground.

After Salvador Dalí's cook, Paquita, befriended him at the local market, he began visiting the artist and his wife at home in the afternoons by their phallus-shaped swimming pool, where Dalí would be busily drawing under a shaded pavilion. Thirty years later, Dunham designed a fig-leaf fabric based on one in Dalí's entry hall that became a bestseller.

Dispatched to boarding school in England, he discovered Georgian architecture and became "a professional houseguest," he says. Weekends were often spent at Britwell House, the home of classmate Ashley Hicks, whose parents, interior designer David Hicks and Lady Pamela Mountbatten, had transformed it into one of Britain's most stylish estates. "David showed me the entire house, every corner of it, because I'd studied all his books that Ashley had," Dunham recalls. "I really had a big hero worship for him."

He studied at Oxford and the American University of Paris, then settled in New York City and spent the '80s selling real estate, rehabbing and flipping properties to fund adventures in India and North Africa. Nearly losing his shirt on a Downing Street townhouse ("really a crack den when I bought it," Dunham says), he decided to follow his boyfriend to L.A. in 1989, ready to give decorating a try.

The first domain name Dunham tried to buy for his business was Hippy Deluxe. "It felt like that was what L.A. needed," he explains. When it was taken, he grabbed Hollywood at Home and went on to summon the louche, Paul Bowles--meets--Marella Agnelli aura he'd originally envisioned. What began as a two-person office became a fulfillment point for fabrics, then a small showroom and a bigger one, evolving in self-funded leaps to where it is today.

The past few months have been agonizing for Dunham's displaced friends and clients as they confront the realities of insurance payouts, remediation and construction costs. He's donating furniture and fundraising, aware that a sales downturn may be inevitable before the renewal of two of the city's most desirable neighborhoods can begin. The prospect of his design services being in high demand feels like a distant one.

For Dunham's friends Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner, architects and partners in the Santa Monica design/build firm Marmol Radziner, the recent months have brought scores of calls from potential clients hoping to understand the new construction landscape.

"We're giving people advice where we can, to the best that we can," says Radziner, who's been thinking about new housing types and modular solutions. "The act of hiring an architect to design you a home today is a big deal."

Dunham strongly believes that many in L.A. will find a way to rebuild. "I don't know what we're going to do, to tell the truth," Louis-Dreyfus says. "We haven't figured that part of our life out yet." Those who do, he says, may opt for smaller spaces with a higher level of comfort and greater attention to something he values deeply: atmosphere.

"There's been a return to wanting something that feels more charming and more human, and a lot more tactile," he says. With his rose-colored pottery lamps and his Berber cushions, Dunham seems well-positioned to help.

"I think of myself as an eclecticist," he adds, leaning back in an Ecuadorean leather rocker. "We have to give people life and optimism and happiness. That is really my credo. It's about mood rather than look."

Sittings editor, Tessa Watson

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 16, 2025 08:00 ET (12:00 GMT)

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