![]() Her de-stiffening scheme for the formal dining room involved opening the space to the newly enlarged and modernized kitchen and adding giant arched windows.īrigette’s mix-master skills are exhibited with particular poetry in the vast living room, where Serge Mouille lighting, a Hans Wegner chaise, and African stools are arrayed on a dark-stained floor. In the entry she traded dark terra-cotta floors for a patchwork of rustic gray-and-white marble tiles plucked from a French château. ![]() She banished the home’s ubiquitous black wrought-iron chandeliers and sconces and replaced them with sparkly crystal fixtures, groovy vintage finds, and bold contemporary lighting-more Norma Jean, less Norma Desmond. The Laurel Canyon estate proved the ideal playground for Brigette to exercise her talent for conjuring interiors that blend laid-back California cool with jaunty modern chic. “Mark knows what a chicken I am, so he didn’t mention the haunting thing until after we were settled in.” “A lot of people claim this house is haunted, but I’ve never seen a ghost,” Brigette says, laughing. Architectural pentimenti that survived the fire-chunky stone foundations, secret passageways, garden follies, meandering outdoor stairways with neoclassical balustrades-lend the place a decidedly mysterious, cinematic aura. The original 1925 house that stood on the two rambling acres burned down in a massive conflagration in the ’50s, but the structure was rebuilt a few years later atop the remains of its stately forebear. And then, of course, there’s the residence itself, which is pure magic. Such mythology becomes less far-fetched when one considers the evidence that Houdini did in fact live nearby in the 1920s. “They say that Houdini cooked up his most famous escape acts here, his mistress is buried here, the house has 22 bedrooms-crazy stuff,” Brigette says. Every day, Hollywood tour buses pull up to the imposing mix-and-match Mediterranean-style manse at the top of Laurel Canyon and the amplified voices of clueless cicerones can be heard waxing rhapsodic about the property’s alleged pedigree. ![]() First things first: The weird and wonderful Los Angeles home of interior designer Brigette Romanek, her husband, director Mark Romanek, and their two young daughters is not the Harry Houdini estate.
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