![]() 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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