Kelly Wearstler: THE EVOLUTION OF AN ICON

When I first met Kelly Wearstler in the early 1990s, she was an aspiring interior designer who shared a small apartment with a roommate across from a sporting goods store in the heart of LA. But the South Carolina transplant had a big dream and the talent to achieve it. I have had the good fortune to be part of that journey camera-in-hand.

- MARK EDWARD HARRIS

Kelly's first clients were apartments, condominiums, and homeowners seeking to put some flair into their living spaces. I would document the results on film loaded into Nikon bodies, usually with a Nikkor 28mm locked down on a tripod with a cable release. When the project was completed, we would often do a carefully crafted environmental portrait of Kelly in her creation.

It was obvious early on that Kelly's genius went far beyond an innate sense of style. Her ability to instantly match seemingly unrelatable furniture, clothing, and art pieces across every period of the design, fashion, and art worlds is almost unfathomable.

Those sensibilities combined with graphic design studies at the Massachusetts College of Art and internships with Cambridge Seven Associates and Milton Glaser (who created the iconic I Love NY logo with a heart replacing the word love) gave Kelly a solid platform to launch her career. She opened her own design firm, Kelly Wearstler Interior Design (KWID), in 1995. Throughout her career, Kelly has attended art auctions and trolled the flea markets and antique stores of the world, collecting pieces that spoke to her. They might end up in her storage facility for years until the proper match or mismatch in one of her designs would call for them to be dusted off and staged en scene.

The Big Break