A maximalist designer brings ‘organized chaos’ to an Angelino Heights Victorian

Photo by Leela Cyd for Curbed.

Designer Gere Kavanaugh bought her two-story Victorian house in Los Angeles’s Angelino Heights in the early 1980s, slowly transforming its rundown interior into a showcase for treasures made by friends, artisans, and, principally, herself. “What I like in a house is organized chaos,” she told Women’s Wear Daily in 1969. “Everything I have has special meaning. It all relates to my work.” She would say the same today.

Over the course of her 65-year career, Kavanaugh designed trade shows for General Motors, department stores for Joseph Magnin, fabrics for Isabel Scott, 10-foot-high metal flowers for shopping malls, and a city-planning playset for children. Reminders of each of these phases, her maximalist sense of color and texture undisturbed by the passage of modernism, postmodernism, deconstructivism, and neo-modernism, pepper Kavanaugh’s house, demonstrating the truth of a statement she wrote decades ago for her Cranbrook Academy of Art graduation: “Design is an accumulation of everything that you perceive. It is all taken in, chewed and digested and stored for a future time. When the proper time comes, an idea is born of this.”