Background and career
Kelly Wearstler (born November 21, 1967) is an American interior designer, author, and entrepreneur. She founded her firm, Kelly Wearstler Interior Design, in Los Angeles in 1995, and leads a multidisciplinary studio working across residential, commercial, retail, and hospitality interiors, as well as product and furniture design and lifestyle collections. She serves as lead designer of the Proper Hotels brand. The New Yorker described her in 2009 as "the presiding grande dame of West Coast interior design," and Architectural Digest has written that her "bold, maximalist approach has significantly shaped our perception of modern American interior spaces." Wearstler has authored six books, including Synchronicity (Rizzoli, 2023), taught the first interior-design course on MasterClass, partnered with H&M Home on a global collection, and founded the gallery Side Hustle in 2025. She has appeared on Architectural Digest's AD100 list annually since 2011 and was inducted into its Hall of Fame in 2021, is a member of Elle Decor's A-List and was named to its inaugural Legends class in 2026, and has appeared on Wallpaper*'s USA 400 list.
Wearstler was born on November 21, 1967 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Her father was an engineer and her mother an antique dealer, whose interest in design influenced Wearstler from a young age. As a child she would come home from school to find rooms freshly painted in new colors, and she and her older sister accompanied their mother to thrift shops, auctions, and flea markets, which helped develop her early interest in fashion and design. She took a babysitting job at 12 and began working in a beachside café at 13, using her earnings to buy vintage jewelry and clothing. Wearstler attended the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, where she took architecture classes and earned a bachelor's degree in interior and graphic design. While paying her way through college by waitressing, she held internships at the design firm Cambridge Seven Associates in Boston and with graphic designer Milton Glaser — the studio responsible for the I Love New York logo — in New York. She then relocated to Los Angeles, where, hoping to become a set decorator, she found piecemeal work in the art departments of films; one such job led to a commission to refurbish a room in a producer's house, an early step toward her design practice. Her film work has been described as encompassing set decoration and art direction, and elsewhere as production-assistant work on film sets. In 1994 she was featured in Playboy, later saying she used the proceeds to help pay off student loans and start her business.
Wearstler has described her first design project as her own Los Angeles apartment, on Detroit Street in the Hancock Park neighborhood. Working with little money, she painted the walls, redid the floors, and carried out much of the renovation herself. She hired an interior photographer to shoot the apartment; he was assembling a portfolio of up-and-coming designers and encouraged her to submit the images to Elle Décor, which published them. According to Wearstler, the exposure and subsequent word-of-mouth referrals launched her practice: a referral led her to decorate two rooms of a friend's home, which grew into the full house, after which another observer of that project brought further commissions. In 1995, Wearstler founded her own firm, Kelly Wearstler Interior Design (KWID), initially working alone from her Los Angeles apartment; the firm's early focus was residential design. A personal introduction led to a commission from real estate developer Brad Korzen — whom she married in 2002 — to design his home, and Korzen subsequently engaged her for properties owned by his company; her interiors for the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills (1999) became her breakthrough into hospitality design. In 2006, a commission for the BG Restaurant at Bergdorf Goodman led the retailer to invite her to open a boutique, or shop-in-shop, in 2007 — the beginning of the studio's product-design practice. In the years that followed, the studio expanded into the multidisciplinary practice described below, working across hospitality, residential, commercial, and retail interiors, product and furniture design, curation, and media. By 2025 the studio employed a team of 65.
Wearstler's first major hospitality project was the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills, commissioned by developer Brad Korzen and reopened in 1999 with a style described in the press as "a playful take on mid-century modernism." The New York Times later wrote that "her playful, elegantly over-the-top designs for the Avalon Beverly Hills changed the look of boutique hotels around the world." In 2001 she redesigned Maison 140, a boutique hotel in Beverly Hills, as a fusion of French and Asian styles. Her work on these properties led to a commission for the Viceroy Hotels and Resorts chain. The Viceroy Palm Springs was described as "her most accomplished work" in 2001, and the Viceroy Santa Monica opened the following year. She also completed Viceroy properties in Miami and Anguilla. Since the mid-2010s, hospitality has been the studio's most prominent body of work, anchored by Wearstler's role as lead designer of the Proper Hotels brand. She designed the San Francisco (2017), Santa Monica (2019), Austin (2019), and Downtown Los Angeles (2021) Proper hotels, together with their restaurants and bars; the Downtown L.A. Proper Hotel won Hotel and short-stay interior of the year at the 2022 Dezeen Awards. Her broader hospitality portfolio includes the Four Seasons Anguilla (2016). In December 2025, she completed the dining spaces, the Beefbar restaurant, at L'Apogée Courchevel in the French Alps — her first European hospitality project — in a raw, tactile style the press described as "Alpine Brutalism"; the hotel's interiors are by Joseph Dirand and India Mahdavi. The hotel holds the French government's Palace distinction — a status that predates her work there — which was among the 27 renewed when Atout France announced its 2026 Palace collection of 33 hotels. In 2025 the studio was reported to be working on the Cal Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe and on interiors for Kappo Kappo, a sushi restaurant at the Austin Proper Hotel.
Residential design was the original focus of Wearstler's firm and remains a core practice of the studio alongside its hospitality work. Her residential clients have included Cameron Diaz, whose prewar West Village apartment in Manhattan she designed in a palette drawn from burnished metals and minerals — malachite, onyx, rose gold, silver, and copper — featured in ELLE Decor in 2013, and Gwen Stefani, whose seven-bedroom Beverly Hills mansion she decorated with contrasting marbles, graphic black-and-white patterns, and vivid color. Published studio projects in Southern California include the Marlboro Residence, the Malibu Beach Residence, and the Beverly Hills Residence. Wearstler has said that many of her residential commissions are never published, at her clients' request for privacy. The Financial Times reported in 2025 that the studio's residential work then under way included houses in Bangkok, Melbourne, and Stockholm. In a 2009 profile for The New Yorker, Dana Goodyear called her "the presiding grande dame of West Coast interior design."
Wearstler's commercial and retail work began with the BG Restaurant at Bergdorf Goodman in 2006 and the shop-in-shop that followed in 2007. In 2017, the $1 billion redevelopment of Westfield Century City in Los Angeles, for which she designed the public spaces, reopened. Alongside the retail boutiques she opened in Los Angeles during the 2010s, she added a concession at Harrods in London in 2022. In 2023, she designed the two-storey West Hollywood flagship store for the fashion brand Ulla Johnson.
