LONG-DISTANCE CALLING
Living in Los Angeles didn’t stop Melbourne-born designer Hugh Lane from conducting a full refurbish on this apartment back home.
WHEN HUGH LANE first landed in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, he deemed it “an absolute dump”, but incongruously determined that he wanted to live there. “It was a city of gritty romance and robust optimism,” the Melbourne-born designer now recalls. “There was the wonder machine of Hollywood, all that unknown Victorian history and of course the climate — I haven’t had a cold in four years.” Self-describing as a late-bloomer with a box-ticking agenda of first buying a home in Melbourne before moving to California, Lane took a lengthy 15 years to realise the desired relocation, but when he finally did, in 2013, the young designer landed right in the LA dream. “I have just come from a Lautner house, one of his masterpieces,” he says of the storied American architect who fashioned an exuberant style of organic modernism. “I’ve been part of a three-year restoration of Silvertop. It’s what Australian designers dream of when moving to LA, but I never thought it would just happen.” And yet Lane, an alumnus of Melbourne firms Hecker Phelan & Guthrie and KPDO, had honed such holistic design skills in the service of Paul Hecker and Kerry Phelan that American practices must have perceived him the anomalous prize. “Most LA interior designers don’t do interior architecture,” he says, waxing lyrical about the excellence of Australian architecture and interiors. “Yes, I’m living the dream, but I want to be living my own dream, not someone else’s.” That longing was recently requited in this Melbourne apartment — two conjoined properties purchased off the plan by a client couple whose Toorak house the designer had refurbished six years ago. As Lane recalls it, they were downsizing from that large home into a Bates Smart-designed ‘tower of power’, in which they needed the full fit-out and furnish. ››
‹‹ No matter that Lane now lived in LA and would have to conceptualise schemes long-distance for rooms that were yet to materialise. They had enjoyed the previous working relationship with Lane and wanted him to do it. “I didn’t see the apartment until the day before the installation,” the designer says. “I was designing blind, but with the knowledge of standards acquired while working on multi-residential projects in Australia.” Envisaging an interior that affected the air of a life fully lived, Lane removed all existing carpets and cold LED lights and contrived a retro luxury with vintage finds and fully customised furnishings — all handcrafted in LA. From the sandblasted, ebonised oak dining table, on a convexing gold base, to the mid-century crafting of the cocktail bar, Lane detailed with an “organic glamour” that instantly imparted age. On this implied vintage base of dark woods and dusty greens and gold, he layered fine art and ’50s lighting found at LA flea markets and estate sales. “I have no intellectual snobbery about where things come from,” he says, informing that the clients brought only three things from their old home. “I look only at the quality, the love that has gone into making something and the patina it has developed.” His passion for the discard of LA’s halcyon design periods has developed into California Found and Made, a unique concept that combines the efficiencies of ecommerce — 100-piece collections of hand-picked LA vintage selling online, every six months — with a one-week pop-up in Sydney or Melbourne. Watch this space! Visit hughlane.com. au; foundandmade.store