Los Angeles – Fashion designer Johnson Hartig’s dresser is a tableau fit for an FBI profiler. The top of his antique highboy sports an incense holder rimmed with tiny skulls, a padlock and a Victorian glass case containing a taxidermy chipmunk. Nearby, on a Taschen book catalog, lie a black twill bow tie, a packet of Listerine breath strips and a pair of steel handcuffs. Hmmm.
Suave and provocative, this casual collision of objects is pure Hartig. As the Los Angeles-based half of the red-hot clothing line Libertine, he brings 19th-century English eccentricity and 21st-century California skater style to the label’s apparel.
In just six years, Hartig and design partner Cindy Greene have enchanted Vogue grande dame Anna Wintour, “It” girl Scarlett Johansson and British artist Damien Hirst with deconstructed tailoring, Old World silk-screen prints and Swarovski spider webs and skulls. Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld bought much of Libertine’s crystal-embellished spring 2006 collection for himself.
Libertine just launched its first mass-market women’s collection at Target stores. With clothes that cost less than $40, about one- tenth of Libertine’s one-of-a-kind creations, the new mass-market line dials down Goth glamour in favor of Edwardian dandyism and preppy punk.
In much the same way, Hartig’s recently renovated 1920s home in the Hancock Park area has become an exuberant collage of places, periods, preoccupations and prices. There are family hand-me- downs, such as an English Regency chest flanked by a pair of silvery Italian grotto chairs with seashell legs and dolphin arms. Other acquisitions include a mid-century chair by Mies van der Rohe, antique wood-spindle lollipop seats, and side tables scored for chump change at a Los Angeles estate sale.
“I don’t care where things come from or how much they cost,” Hartig says, “as long as they are chic and fit in.”
The designer, who favors T- shirts and the word “rad,” feels perfectly at home flopping onto a pricey white-slip-covered sofa by Ralph Lauren and propping his bare feet up on an inexpensive white Parsons table from West Elm.
Hartig thrives on juxtaposition, be it of cost, style, material or era. He tosses a Union Jack pillow on a French Louis-style sofa, places a crystal candelabra on an oversized Lucite table and perches cute vinyl Japanese toys near a Hirst sculpture of a dagger piercing a sheep’s heart.
Balancing luxury with comfort and class with brass, Hartig’s interiors are a colorful and cannily edited mix of antiques, catalog furnishings, flea market finds, 20th-century designer pieces and contemporary art.
“His house is not some hyper- designed unreal set,” says New York menswear designer Thom Browne, who has known Hartig since the 1990s. “It is who he really is – a unique and sophisticated individual whose taste is always evolving.”
That accounts for some of Hartig’s odd personal flourishes: a pristine Schwinn bicycle, an array of antique scale-model schooners under glass and a vast collection of valuable (and some might say kitschy) Staffordshire porcelain figurines, including a kennel’s worth of the English company’s signature spaniels.
Hartig has two live canine companions too: Pocket the Chihuahua and Terrance the miniature pinscher, both rescue dogs.
Vogue’s West Coast editor, Lisa Love, is a frequent guest at Hartig’s home. She’s not surprised that it is so “interesting and wacky.”
“You walk through an English country garden and into a Long Island living room and a Hamptons kitchen and dining room,” she says. “The master bedroom is a New York City gentleman’s apartment, and the pool area is quintessential California.” Hartig proudly displays Hirst’s recent spin-art works. A huge circular painting sprayed with color is the centerpiece of a living room wall, hung salon-style with photographs and canvases by Eric Ernest Johnson, Chris Johanson, Don Bachardy and artists.
The dining room is dominated by two Hirsts, a collage of nine 15-inch-diameter spin-art pieces and a diamond- shaped butterfly assemblage that looks like a Tiffany stained-glass window. One of the house’s three bedrooms is set aside as a painting studio for Hartig and his friends, with recently finished sketches taped to the wall.
The master bedroom is an update of Hartig’s first attempts at interior design. Hartig, who admits he lied to Time magazine about being 35 but declines to disclose his actual age, grew up in Whittier, about 20 miles southeast of Los Angeles. He and his four siblings were raised in a 1950s ranch by his mom and dad, a master gardener “who only wanted to grow things you could eat,” he says.
In 2000, Hartig met Cindy Greene, then a member of the performance-art rock group Fischerspooner and a graphic designer for DKNY. She sent him a shirt with a raccoon printed on the collar and a gorilla on the back. He cut and reconstructed it in his unconventional fashion, and a new design duo was born. At that time, he was living in an apartment in Koreatown.
“That was all Oriental rugs and red rooms and blue rooms and a yellow kitchen covered with 19th-century blue and white transferware,” he says. “My old apartment was more reflective of Libertine. This house is less decorated and more about the bones.”
