THE TALENT: Brooke Gardner
By Andrew Myers

Tipping the Scales

“Get the Balance Right” is the profession and prescription of Los Angeles-based interior designer Brooke Gardner. It’s also the title of a 1983 song from British alternative band Depeche Mode, and it’s the intersection of these leitmotifs and lyrics that defines as well as distinguishes the 38-year-old green-eyed blonde who, in the framework of the musical Grease, has the wholesome, just-exfoliated good looks of Sandy combined with the wit-on-wry wisdom (and, ultimately, the compassion) of Rizzo.
Born and raised in Ventura, beachside between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, Gardner grew up in a Southern California that is largely Gone With the Tides and Traffic Patterns. New and affordable Cape Cod homes close to the water? Housing developments without gated entries but with horse shoe-shaped streets to encourage neighborly speeds?
Yes siree, along with a father in the police department (a Detective Sergeant who later started a security consulting business specializing in environmental planning) who, while strict, didn’t feel the need to know his only child’s whereabouts 24/7; and a mother less interested in scheduling playdates and tutors than keeping time unstructured for dreaming, romps and exploration, confident that a kindergarten kid (who after trips to the local library would pretend to be the librarian conducting her own “story times,” complete with multiple, much-read copies of her favorite books) could carve out her own cool niche. There were also two complete sets of grandparents who lived close-by. “Grandma Lollie would always take me to Saks for story time,” says Gardner, confessing an early love for chic department stores, “I’d get to listen to stories in a constantly changing, carefully considered environment, and get to wear my latest ensemble,” which might have included a white and black polka-dotted dress complemented by black bows in her goldie locks. (By third grade, Gardner was fusing Sandy and Rizzo and becoming a real Pink Lady, dressing herself in hot pink Dittos, a satin roller derby jacket and pink shirt.)
Safe, secure, the perfect springboard on which to rebel. Or not. “I always thought I was a girlie girl, but recently I ran into a kid I went to grade school with who remembered me as a tomboy,” says Gardner, sipping mint tea at a sidewalk café in Sunset Plaza, wearing blue jeans, red slippers and a short sleeved, sharp shouldered, spring green top with a cinched Empire waist, stitched quatrefoil, and jewel-set onyx buttons. “Interesting. I wore dresses, but I was never afraid of getting dirty, of going full speed at full steam, up a tree or down a gully. Basically, I don’t think I’ve changed much since I was four years old.” An encouraged and supported self-confidence and acceptance thus laid an intuitive foundation upon which a more refined aesthetic was built, one that came to support Gardner’s point-of-view and comprehensive aestheticism.
But if the cornerstone were black and white polka dots and hot pink Dittos, the rebar was music. The Smiths, The Cure, Yaz, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Echo and the Bunnyman, New Order, Adam and the Ants, Soft Cell, B-52’s, The English Beat, Pet Shop Boys, Big Audio Dynamite, (the post-punk/New Wave list goes on). Gardner discovered them as a tween. “It was new, it was experimental, and while these bands weren’t underground they weren’t mainstream either,” she says, noting that concomitant with the music were fashion, design, art—specific choices creating very specific worlds. A perfect storm of subculture and timing, most of the bands had a “look”—how they presented themselves, including clothes, hair, makeup, decorative accessories, lighting even. “It taught me that presentation matters, that it’s a reflection of the final product,” she says.
Perhaps more importantly, it also taught Gardner that it was not just all right to be different but, in terms of generating ideas and creative solutions, essential. As is often the case for the young, the Eureka! came first as a jolt of negativity. “I would never have been caught dead wearing LA Gear or listening to Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. Music was much more compartmentalized than it is today: if you listened to New Wave or post-punk you didn’t listen to Hip Hop or Top 40—at least not if you had any self respect.” The translation, however, was never the dyed-hair Tim Burton-like bit-o-Goth-blackness. Rather, it evolved into an openness atypical in her parochial high school class. While her friends were voted “Best Looking,” “Best Legs,” and “Best Hair,” Gardner garnered “Most Unusual.” “Even in middle school, I remember a girl told me I was ‘too sophisticated.’ I remember thinking, ‘What am I supposed to be, a total idiot?’”
Following Depeche Mode’s advice, Gardner kept the balance right. Could she have studied fashion design, psychology, biology? All interested her (“If we could remove the ‘fashion industry’ from fashion and the blood from biology,” she adds). But interior design was a synthesis. In addition to the design of music videos, the set design of movies (Dangerous Liaison a particular late ‘80s favorite: “The textiles alone!”), innumerable AIA (American Institute of Architect) tours in Los Angeles and throughout SoCal with her mom, there was the whole concept of synthesis. “A song can stand alone, an item of clothing can stand alone, and while furniture and decorative arts can be and often are pieces of art in and of themselves, they are meant to be a part of a whole, and their beauty is usually enhanced by its surroundings; that’s what I was interested in.”
So Gardner bided her time and amended her Catholic-school uniform with tights and cardigans, and eventually landed at Woodbury University. There she studied interior design and architecture, and came to understand firsthand how music (or one artistic medium) might directly affect her own work. The assignment was to design photo studio in the vein of Los Angeles’ Smashbox Studios. All semester Gardner listened to the album Dummy by Portishead. “The instructor would always come by to see what I was listening to,” she says, explaining that she wanted her studio, exploring the concept of aberration, to be as atmospheric as possible. “At the semester’s end, she said she understood completely how the tone of the music fir the aesthetic of the design.”
Post graduation, Gardner spent five years working for noted Santa Monica and Santa Barbara-based architect Marc Appleton, whose firm is rooted in classicism and traditional architecture, including vernacular styles such as Spanish Colonial Revival. In addition to putting her education to practice and further developing her technical skills, she was instrumental in the production of Appleton’s book, George Washington Smith: An Architect’s Scrapbook, as well as with his introduction to the reprint of Rexford Newcomb’s seminal Mediterranean Domestic Architecture in the United State].
Gardner’s understanding of classical and traditional architecture and aesthetics have deepened since she established her own design firm in 2005. She is a founding member, and currently a board member, of the five-year-old Southern California Chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America; and last year, in partnership with architect Cindy Grant and Tierra Sol y Mar, won “Best Overall Design” in the Institute’s inaugural Affordable Housing Design Competition (in conjunction with Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles).
Which is not to say that Gardner in any way eschews modernism, from the work of Southern California’s mid-century icons to contemporary architects such as Pritzker prize-winner Tadao Ando, whose poured-in-place, topographically-tracing, light-sensitive designs strike a particularly resonant chord. “Whatever the particular style, what is crucial to me is that one—that I—strive for perfection in execution; that an artist, designer or craftsman bring his or her best game every single day, and that the result always be at an exemplary level,” she says. “It’s about integrity and authenticity, about establishing a base upon which the client’s aesthetic can be filtered, distilling and strengthening their choices for their home.”
Who, then, are the contemporary artists on Gardner’s playlist? IAMX (“A genius! I listen and want to be … more myeslf!”), Franz Ferdinand, The Strokes, Artic Monkeys, Interpol, Muse, Metric, Vampire Weekend. What they share in common is, as Gardner says, an art-driven vibe, borrowing sounds from the ‘80s while remaining unique and “totally modern.” “Once again, this influences my work in the sense that history and tradition are recognized but not followed slavishly. Precedent is important but you can’t go back, you must move forward. The goal is to improve upon precedent—to channel those ideas from the past while making them better for today.”