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"View Slideshow\n\nThrough nearly four decades of shifting tastes, in an industry known for fickleness, in a city that worships at the altar of the new and the next, Los Angeles designer Waldo Fernandez has endured. At this point in his storied career, the indefatigable decorator could easily rest on his laurels. After all, his list of celebrity clients, which has included everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, could fill the credits of multiple blockbusters. Likewise, the roster of clubs and restaurants he's decorated\u2014most recently the reincarnation of Wolfgang Puck's Spago in Beverly Hills\u2014reads like a social history of Tinseltown power players since the 1970s. Yet for all his accolades and accomplishments, Fernandez has no intention of slowing down.\n\n\"I'm having so much fun right now, I could not imagine stopping,\" the Havana-born talent says. To underscore his point, he rattles off his current assignments: a Four Seasons hotel commissioned by the royal family of Bahrain; a swank L.A. hot spot for hospitality impresario Sam Nazarian; additional restaurants and new apartment complexes; and, of course, a slate of stylish residences for Hollywood's bold and beautiful.\n\nOver the years Fernandez has also revamped a number of homes for himself, including the three-bedroom '60s house he's now inhabiting in Beverly Hills. \"It may not have been done by one of L.A.'s famous midcentury architects, but the bones were solid and I loved the way it seemed to float over the hillside,\" Fernandez recalls. \"I could really put my stamp on it.\"\n\nHis imprimatur is now unmistakable. Fernandez completely overhauled the original layout, building a second level for a master bedroom suite, and in the backyard, he replaced a poky kidney-shaped pool with a new cliff-hugging infinity-edge version. He transformed the look of the interiors as well, creating a series of pristine white volumes with dark wenge-wood floors and overscale doors, the latter of which are finished in exactly 17 coats of deep brown\u2013black lacquer. Fernandez's interpretation of midcentury modernism is all polished and pressed for a new millennium. \"I'm obsessed with keeping the house fresh. I spend my time making lists of things that need touching up,\" he says, adding with a self-deprecating laugh, \"there's a painter here every two weeks.\"\n\nWith all those white walls and glossy doors free of smudges, Fernandez can channel his perfectionist disposition into the more rewarding work of assembling and arranging his first-rate collections of furniture and contemporary art. A trailblazer in the subtle discipline of mixing objects of widely varying periods and styles, the designer had the foresight to acquire pieces by many of the past century's decorative arts virtuosos before the international auction market drove prices into the stratosphere. An inveterate hunter-gatherer, he continues to scour art and antiques fairs and remains a familiar presence at gallery and museum openings in L.A. and beyond. \"I always set a price in my mind based on what I think something is actually worth, and I never exceed it. If it's meant to be mine, I'll get it,\" he says.\n\nAnd so it is that around every corner in Fernandez's home there are treasures that seduce the eye\u2014a drawing by Paul Klee, ceramics by Axel Salto and Guido Gambone, an Yves Klein Blue Venussculpture, and a 1940s Venetian mirror from the estate of Helena Rubinstein, to name but a few. \"These are all things that represent different times in my life and my career,\" he explains. \"Each one has a special meaning.\"\n\nThe adjoining living and dining rooms alone boast a dizzying assortment of furnishings that includes chairs and a cabinet by \u00C9mile-Jacques Ruhlmann, gilded R\u00E9gence fauteuils, a rare Evelyn Wyld lacquer table, sculptures by Diego Giacometti, an Andr\u00E9 Sornay dining table, a sideboard by Eug\u00E8ne Printz, and a flock of sheep sculptures by Fran\u00E7ois-Xavier Lalanne. Presiding over this top-notch lineup is a monumental Roman bust from the second century, part of an idiosyncratic, freewheeling art collection that comprises 20th-century masters like Lucio Fontana and Cy Twombly as well as contemporary-art stars Aaron Curry, Sterling Ruby, and others. Even the kitchen, with its gleaming cabinets and appliances, displays a Henry Moore lithograph, while the adjacent sitting area features a Jean Roy\u00E8re sofa and cocktail table alongside a Carlo Mollino wing chair.\n\nAt night the decorator retreats to an ebony-paneled bedroom with a princely Paul Dupr\u00E9-Lafon bed and a reference library any design school would envy. More than anything, all the furnishings, artworks, and objets de vertu are testaments to the joy Fernandez takes in his work. \"I started out in Hollywood doing sets for studios,\" he says. \"I'd read the script and fantasize about what I could do with the space\u2014what kind of magic I could make. In essence that's still what I do.\"\n\nClick here to view the slide show of Waldo Fernandez's carefully collected Los Angeles home..\n\nView Slideshow"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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