I know this may sounds crazy but…I kind of prefer Carrie’s closet from her single gal apartment. I suppose it’s because I’m more of a fan of Sex and the City the show rather than the movies. Plus, so many amazing fashion moments happened in that closet! The one she shares with Big still makes for good eye candy.

The world Hollywood movies projected in the mid-to late 1920s and throughout the 1930s was of lavish, glamorous rooms with sharply defined geometric designs. These movies were inhabited by the likes of Jean Harlow in clinging white satin or Ginger Rogers shedding the fanciful feathers of a ball gown as she danced across a vast black-marble floor and came down what seemed like hundreds of spiraling steps on Fred Astaire’s tuxedoed arm.

Movie star homes of that period often reflected the images on the screen. Magazines published photographs of the grandest of them, among which was the mansion of Hollywood’s top art director, Cedric Gibbons, and his exotic actress wife, Dolores Del Rio. Handsome enough to have been a movie star, Gibbons was head of the art department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. No other art director so greatly imposed his own taste upon the films he designed. We now call it Art Déco, but it was known then as Art Moderne.

One cannot talk about the Art Déco years of the silver screen without including the masterful works of Richard Day (The Dark Angel), William Cameron Menzies (The Thief of Bagdad), Merrill Pye, Anton Grot, Ben Carré, Charles D. Hall and Hans Dreier (who won three Academy Awards—one for 1950’s Sunset Boulevard—in a career that spanned three decades).

When glorious Technicolor gained popularity in the late 1930s, the silver screen came to an end. With the advent of color, Art Déco style slowly went out of fashion, to be revived only in period films or pastiches of the era.

source: Architectural Digest

In 1964 actress Sophia Loren graced the cover of at least 40 magazines internationally, was earning a reported one million dollars for The Fall of the Roman Empire and would soon be Oscar-nominated for her role as a 17-year-old prostitute in Marriage, Italian Style. Also that year, Loren posed for photographer Alfred Eisenstaed in the villa outside Rome she shared with her husband, producer Carlo Ponti. “I remember our dwelling with great fondness,” recalls her son Carlo Ponti, Jr., today the music director and conductor of Southern California’s San Bernardino Symphony Orchestra. “I think it was—and still is—the most beautiful house I have ever seen.”

“Audrey was shooting The Unforgiven (1960), with Burt Lancaster, directed by John Huston,” explained actor and director Mel Ferrer about a location shoot involving his wife, actress Audrey Hepburn, with whom he shared a house on Kimridge Road in Beverly Hills. “Audrey’s agent and I had gone to Mexico to see the production…we were barely back when I got the fateful phone call. Audrey had broken her back. Always ready for the most difficult assignments, she had not flinched when Huston—who had almost drowned Gregory Peck during the filming of Moby Dick (1956)—asked her to ride out of a shot on the back of a horse at the end of a scene. She rode out, bareback, and slipped off the horse halfway up a steep hill. Lamentably, she landed on a rock. I knew that Audrey had never had any experience as a rider. But John should have known it and checked before asking her to run the risk.”

After finding a bone specialist to treat Hepburn, Ferrer set about transporting the actress back to their Los Angeles home. “I got a hospital bed moved in, with all the concomitant equipment,” Ferrer recalled. “The Kimridge house looked like a hospital ward.”

“There’s always been just one way—what’s right for me,” said the indomitable Mae West. Like many performers, West was a mixture of show-off and recluse, a personality at once calculatingly public and insistently private. These two facets of the actress’s nature were reflected in her home and the life she led there—not in any balanced way but, like nesting boxes, one hidden within the other. Outside was the Mae West persona, sex-obsessed and self-loving, for which she found a domestic equivalent in the apartment she moved into in 1932, when she first arrived in Los Angeles, and where, in what may well be a record for residential longevity in Hollywood, she remained for the next 48 years.

Located on the sixth floor of the Ravenswood, an Art Déco building on Rossmore Avenue whose other tenants included Ava Gardner, Hedda Hopper and Judy Garland, West’s apartment was modest in size. It had just two bedrooms, a tiny kitchen, and common rooms that were by no means grand, but the decoration aspired to grandeur, and beyond. “Quality, quality—that’s all I heard [from my mother],” West told Life magazine in 1969. “Everything has proportion, nothing is jarring. Everything is symphony.” Fearful of the damaging effects of sunlight and fresh air on her beauty, she kept the blinds permanently drawn and the air conditioning perpetually humming.

“I had no desire to be a film actress, to always play somebody else, to be beautiful with somebody constantly straightening out your every eyelash,” said Marlene Dietrich in 1964. “It was always a big bother to me.” The actress arrived in Hollywood from her native Germany in 1930 with her mentor, director Josef von Sternberg and ended up renting a number of residences. She never truly settled in Hollywood, though her Beverly Hills residence in the mid-1930s reflected her preference for high-contrast black-and-white furniture in a home that featured a tuxedo sofa, a mural of a leopard and a zebra, a zebra-print throw, 19th-century Chinese wallcoverings and an ankle-deep carpet of fur. “I would like to have lived in Hollywood at another time,” Dietrich once remarked. “The anecdotes about the days of the silent films made my mouth water.”

“It was a magical place for a small kid,” comments Aissa Wayne about the lush acreage in San Fernando Valley that she shared with her siblings, her mother and her father, actor John Wayne. “My dad had a huge soft spot for animals, children and the needy and he was extremely generous. For birthday parties my parents would arrange for a cotton candy machine, ponies, carnival rides and even a baby elephant one year. Dad loved to watch the kids get a kick out of it all; it pleased him to see happy children. He was the first one awake on Christmas morning because he took such pleasure in seeing children open their gifts. I remember he would pace the hallways at 4:00 A.M., and I thought it was Santa—but it was my dad waiting for daylight so we could open our presents… Funny, isn’t it? For a tough cowboy, he was the biggest mush-ball you ever came across.”

Read more at Architectural Digest

The staircase of Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay’s home

“I believe in flashy entrances,” said Jayne Mansfield, whose Pink Palace in Bel-Air epitomized the camp icon’s screen and celebrity image in the early 1960s. Her collection of hundreds of magazine covers adorned the staircase—she appeared in Life as well as in Playboy. “Publicity has always come to me. I haven’t gone to it,” the actress once said. “But I’ve been cooperative.”

Mansfield on the balcony overlooking the living room

“I would rather stay at home…and have a dinner before the fireplace,” said Mansfield, who identified with her character in The Girl Can’t Help It: “All she wants is to be a wife and mother, but sex keeps getting in the way.” The lettering in the arabesque above the living room fireplace commemorated her marriage to Hargitay, who did much of the handiwork in the house. Her favored heart motif was quilted into the purple sofas.

Mansfield and Hargitay in their office

“Nobody cares about a figure like 163,” she said of her supposed IQ. “They’re more interested in 40-21-35.” The typewriter carried the house’s predominant color, pink, into the red leather office.

Mansfield in the pink bedroom

The couple shared the Pink Palace with Powderpuff, a Pekingese, several Chihuahuas and an ocelot. One of her Playboy spreads, partially shot in the pink bedroom, was banned in Chicago.

Mansfield in her bath

Mansfield announced her ambition to have a house in Beverly Hills and a million dollars—and to be a star. She traded promotional appearances for an estimated $150,000 worth of merchandise for the house, including the pink shag for the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling treatment in the bath.

Jayne Mansfield patiently awaiting the completion of her heart-shaped swimming pool

Husband Mickey Hargitay, who owned his own construction company before becoming 1955’s Mr. Universe, built the pool for her as a part of her “Pink Palace” with a matching heart-shaped jacuzzi.

As a special surprise, Mickey even inscribed the words “I love you Jaynie” in gold leaf mosaic at the bottom of the pool.

Mansfield in her pool

Mansfield relaxes in the couple’s forty-foot-wide pool surrounded by dozens of Jayne Mansfield Hot Water Bottles, a novelty item introduced in 1957. She demanded “a heart-shaped house with a heart-shaped pool” as a precondition for her marriage to Mickey Hargitay.

source: architectural digest and weheartit