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Often, clients walk into a designer’s studio with a mood board on their iPad and a fully formed idea of what they want: a neo-Georgian manor, a Nantucket-styled getaway, a modernist haven. But it’s easy to imagine even the most assertive client taking a peek inside the beguiling 1924 Hollywood Hills home of Los Angeles-based decorator Scott Formby, throwing up their hands, and saying, “Please, just make my house feel like this.
Formby outside of his Spanish Colonial–style house in the Hollywood Hills.
Trevor Tondro
A Boujaad rug, French table and chairs, and vintage Indian candelabra make for a globe-trotting mix in the dining room.
Trevor TondroFormby has owned the 3,000-square-foot Spanish Colonial for two decades, but only recently made it his full-time home. Until a few years ago, he split his time between here and an apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, while also constantly traveling for his work in creative direction for brands like Frette, Ralph Lauren, and J.Crew. When he divorced during the pandemic, however, he moved to the West Coast full-time and left the corporate world to open his own residential design practice.
Moroccan daybeds covered in vintage textiles from Michael Smith serve as sofas in the living room; the 1950s Arturo Pani coffee table holds a collection of dishes by artist Pepe Mendoza.
Trevor TondroHis house—with three bedrooms over two levels and large windows overlooking a garden with cacti and citrus trees—is subtle, sophisticated, and meticulously detailed. It also embodies Formby’s own unpretentious charm, a reflection of his unusual upbringing: Raised in north Texas near Amarillo, his father was a radio personality and station owner; his mother, an English teacher, founded the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame, now a full-fledged museum that occupies a 33,000-square-foot space in Fort Worth. (She also opened the authentically funky Cowgirl restaurant in New York’s West Village in 1988, which is still going strong.) “She was deeply entrepreneurial and way before her time, and that had a huge impact on me,” Formby says.
The statuesque living room fireplace is original to the 1924 home; it features a Latin inscription and motifs. The 1960s redwood chair was bought at auction. Formby’s collection of Pepe Mendoza works include the pendant and table lamps, candelabra, and fireplace tools.
Trevor TondroHis childhood was steeped in the motifs and craft ethos of the far West, with its Mesoamerican and indigenous underpinnings, and over the years that he lived in New York and traveled through Europe and Asia for work, those formative influences became braided together in the rich aesthetic tapestry that defines his practice and his home. In the mid-2000s, he began to collect the work of an artist who also united the disparate threads of European midcentury minimalism and the artisanal brio of Latin America: José “Pepe” Mendoza, a seminal mid-20th century Mexican ceramicist, architect, and designer.
The main bedroom was conceived around a set of photographic plates from midcentury artist Sam Haskins; their high contrast is complemented by a marble-topped Pepe Mendoza table on which one of the Mexican designer’s palm frond lamps sits.
Trevor Tondro
Pierre Frey’s Mauritius wallpaper evokes the garden outside the windows of the primary bath. Hans-Agne Jakobsson sconces hang above the windows; the table is Stickley Brothers circa 1900. The rattan pendant was a Rose Bowl Flea Market find.
Trevor TondroMendoza’s lighting, drawer pulls, and objects, many of which were created using a cloisonné-type technique on brass with inlays of turquoise and other semiprecious stones, are now a leitmotif of Formby’s life: A tall sculptural brass lamp, a set of fireplace tools, and a lotus flower side table are gracefully woven into the airy layout of the high-ceilinged living room; in a guest bedroom, with colors inspired by a Picasso painting, a Portuguese wedding bed is gently lit by a Mendoza lamp with a pineapple-shaped base.
In the guest bedroom, a sculptural Portuguese wedding bed suits the house’s Spanish Colonial architecture. The sunset-hued palette was inspired by a Picasso painting. The pineapple-based lamp is a prized Pepe Mendoza find.
TREVOR TONDROAs the sun sets, Formby can be found relaxing in the lounge off the concrete-tiled patio, Negroni in hand. The room has an intimate retro decadence, with a sofa of his design covered in cardamom velvet, a dangling capiz shell chandelier, and vintage paisley wallpaper. The only sounds are the burble of a fountain outside and the cacophonous song of California scrub jays and yellowthroats. “It was huge for me to move here, to stop traveling endlessly, to start a business where I could really express myself,” the designer says. “But this house reminds me how important it is to live somewhere—I mean, really, fully live.”
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THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN VOLUME 16 OF FREDERIC MAGAZINE. CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE!
