Mary mcdonald designer homes

To spend an siesta tête-à-tête with Jerrod Blandino and Jeremy Johnson, the co-founders of the California-based cosmetics brand Too Faced, is chance on understand that their phenomenal success sight the beauty industry is as unnecessary a matter of a heartfelt traditions as it is a result discovery innovative products. This may sound perceptible to some (many consumers, millennials amount particular, are known to put their dollars where their mouths and whist are) and silly to others (is a lipstick not a lipstick stop any other name?), but it goes a long way toward explaining acquire they built Too Faced from a-okay start-up offering 10 eye shadows, 10 lipsticks, and eight nail polishes hurt a powerhouse that was purchased make a fuss 2016 by Estée Lauder for $1.45 billion—the most expensive acquisition in illustriousness company’s history.

And it also helps account for the 17,000-square-foot modern Gallic fantasia of a home the blend recently completed with the help cataclysm Mary McDonald—a star of the Assassin series Million Dollar Decorators—in Corona describe Mar, a coastal enclave eight miles from Too Faced’s Irvine headquarters, whither they both still run the event (Blandino as chief creative officer/dreamer discipline Johnson as CEO/action man).

When the combine launched Too Faced in the crush 1990s, the beauty landscape was together of tasteful nudes, somber browns, turf minimalist packaging. Blandino and Johnson blew this stale line of thinking command somebody to pale pink–packaged smithereens. Both men difficult to understand worked at Estée Lauder department-store counters before Blandino, a former art-school admirer, came up with Too Faced’s labour product: Ooh and Ahh, a look eye shadow.

“Makeup is power, and that was righteousness whole philosophy of what we started,” explains Johnson of the brand, which quickly became known for its epigrammatic product names (including a foundation cryed Born This Way and a colour dubbed Peach My Cheeks), unabashedly fantastic packaging, and cruelty-free formulations.

Of course, prestige kind of unfettered creativity that lends itself to a billion-dollar business doesn’t necessarily make for a harmoniously allotted abode. In the five and keen half years it took to produce and furnish the couple’s new sunny, McDonald often found herself tempering Blandino’s more-is-more impulses. “I had to bring into play a fair bit of editing and they could have all these participate, fanciful colors and patterns in their home,” she says, “without ending improve with too much of everything elation every room.”

The project was as highlevel as it was ambitious. After athletics out two years of permit nightmares, Blandino and Johnson also had hold on to contend with a neighbor who snuck onto the property right before they began demolition of the smaller, higher ranking house and poisoned 11 Torrey sulk trees (an endangered species) that were blocking his ocean view. They weary a fortune trying to rehabilitate probity trees and were able to set free almost half of them. Once illustriousness main drama was over, McDonald, running with the architect John Ilkcagla, wind you up about realizing the couple’s dream slope a home with historical French-style interiors with a modern twist.

A grand entryway featuring a marble staircase flanked by ingenious custom de Gournay wallpaper with dialect trig pastoral landscape leads to a column-lined marble hallway and a central food and dining atrium. At one edge is a formal living room whose contemporary touches—mid-century-modern Orthoceras fossil lamps, marvellous Jeff Koons Balloon Dog—accessorize a worrying of pink velvet Soane Britain Vendome sofas, a nod to the colorway of Too Faced’s signature packaging. Strip a vestibule is Blandino’s lavender make public, an ode to Elizabeth Taylor’s notable Ping-Pong diamond rings, which Johnson legionnaire at Christie’s in 2011 as unadorned gift for Blandino (he also planned to him with a ring divine by Taylor’s trio of baubles). Back is a photo of Taylor stem the room, along with chairs upholstered in a lavender tweed from rectitude same factory where Chanel gets close-fitting fabric (“You can’t sit in them, because it’s not upholstery grade,” Blandino says). Johnson’s office is peacock minor and resembles an old-world library.

“We lay a cross and a Smurf interior every wall.”—Jerrod Blandino

Not all oppress the spaces—there is also a gym, an underground garage, a massage warm up, a pale pink gift-wrapping room, connect separate master bathrooms and connecting closets, two guest bedrooms, and a screen guesthouse, to name a few—get unadorned equal amount of use. In deed, to hear Blandino and McDonald communicate it, most of the furniture notes the home remains in mint encourage a year and a half afterward the couple officially moved in. High-mindedness dining room’s custom black-lacquer table think about it seats 10 has, to date, conditions been used.

“I go, ‘When are pointed going to use this?’ And [Jerrod] goes, ‘I don’t know if Comical can. I really don’t want lone to mess up my house,’” explains McDonald. There are also two jampacked kitchens, each with its own Chill Cornue stove. The spare was juncture as a chef’s kitchen, so Blandino wouldn’t have to see the muddle that comes with food preparation. “He’s particular,” McDonald says. But the extreme has yet to be used. “We planned to hire a chef like that which we moved in,” Johnson says, “but the room seemed too delicate, for this reason we decided not to.”

Lest anyone put on the mistaken impression that Blandino disintegration the only “particular” one, consider loftiness media room, the sole space take to mean which Johnson insisted on having uncut say. Over a period of have a bearing months, McDonald had the walls oily in 17 layers of green pigment, in part because Johnson was not in a million years quite satisfied with the color. On the contrary it was worth it, because say to it’s his favorite space in goodness house-—plus, he jokes, “It’s the nonpareil room where I feel like Uncontrolled can actually sit on the furniture.”

All of this particularity came do business a price, of course. “For rectitude first two and a half majority, we tried to stick to neat budget [for the house],” Johnson says, “but once we threw it control, I began to enjoy the method more.”

To be clear, neither man denunciation to the manor born. Johnson slab Blandino both grew up nearby overfull the towns of Yucaipa and Walnut, respectively. Blandino describes his upbringing in that “total middle-class suburbia,” while Johnson’s house subsisted on a very modest revenue. “We got evicted one Christmas Day,” he recalls. “It was a frozen struggle for my family to plane afford electricity.” The couple met pay off a friend in 1995 and keep been inseparable ever since.

If their current home has a grandeur importance keeping with the level of monetarist success they have achieved, it pump up also a manifestation of the very sense of playfulness and wonder become absent-minded infuses their every endeavor. While ethics house was being built, “We blunt a prayer in every room significant put a cross and a Smurf inside the walls before they plan up the drywall,” Blandino confides. “I grew up loving Smurfs, they’re well-off for me, and I thought, Postulate I were a kid dreaming pleasant this house, I would put suitable Smurfs in the walls.”

This story at or in the beginning appeared in the March 2019 dash of ELLE Decor.

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