Is Hollywood Regency design too luxe for ‘09?

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Chronicle Books’ ’High Style,’ released last fall, showcases the work of L.A.-based design team Ron Woodson and Jaime Rummerfield (pictured in their La Cienega showroom). The book’s design is perfectly in sync with their deluxe design sensibility: It’s got a gold-lettered, textured, black-on-black raw silk cover and gilt-edged pages.

Woodson and Rummerfield combine vintage pieces with those from high-end contemporary designers and bold colors and patterns -- they even design their own wallpapers, accessories and furniture pieces. The look, while modern, hearkens back to mid-20th century Hollywood interior design and decor, which was more informed by a cinematic idea of luxury and glamour than any single period or aesthetic. It’s an updated Hollywood Regency, which, Jonathan Adler says, ‘added a layer of pattern and decoration and opulence and glamor to the minimalism of mid-century modernism.’

This coffee table book demonstrates their design in its purest form -- as shown in their store in L.A., which is set up as a series of fully-decorated rooms -- as well as how it melds with various clients. A vintage-perfect Neutra house is more earth-toned; Courtney Love’s place is full of older-era antiques and fabrics; a Santa Monica bungalow (below) is more breezy, lacking heavy ornament.

As much as this shows they can apply their design aesthetic with discretion, there is something in the tone of the book that feels indiscreet, indulgent or even gauche after the Dow has dropped to below 8,000. Woodson and Rummerfield appear in many of the photographs, apparently demonstrating high-styling living; in one full-page spread, they sit, the caption specifies, in ‘a 1999 Ferrari 550 Maranello.’

The photographs that include people are overly polished, artificial and posed, even when ostensibly capturing casual moments during a design session with actress Kelly Preston or a dinner party. This adds an unnecessary layer of gloss, as if this kind of style is only ever achieved with the help of professional lighting crews and stylists and photo retouchers. Or maybe that’s the truth of it: Maybe Hollywood Regency is design best seen through a lens.

And that lens may be one of the past. Because who wants to flaunt their $200,000 car these days?

-- Carolyn Kellogg