House of Rock

by RICK MARIN

Forget Angelina Jolie. Jennifer Aniston may have lost Brad Pitt to an even hotter muse - architecture. Pitt is currently collaborating with Frank Gehry on a £260 million seafront redevelopment in Hove, and plans to take time off from acting to make a documentary about the project. He is also investing in a casino and hotel in Las Vegas with George Clooney, about which he will no doubt want to have a say on design.

Forensic analysis of a 2001 W magazine piece on Pitt's house in the Hollywood Hills reveals that: "When pressed, Pitt admits his wife may have slightly different ideas about decoration. 'She has an - ah - more matronly take on it,' he says gingerly." He's modern. She's matronly. It could never have worked.

But Pitt is not the only one succumbing to a love of design. Hayden Christensen, star of the latest Star Wars films, recently announced his willingness to trade his light saber for a drafting table.

"I don't find Hollywood interesting," he told the Sun. "So I'm thinking of studying architecture instead."

For male sex symbols who might have once raced cars or opened bars it is now acceptable - cool, even - to boast about their obsession with travertine or to pore over fabric swatches. And now rock god Lenny Kravitz, who owns some of the funkiest bachelor pads around, says if he hadn't been a musician he would have been a designer. This month he announced the formation of Kravitz Design, a firm focusing on commercial, residential and product design.

"When this tour ends in two weeks, it's going to be full-on designing," Kravitz insists, on the phone from his Paris hotel. He's coy about the details of deals in negotiation, but plans include "a hotel complex in Vegas, a hotel project in LA, and some residential places for very well-known people".

As for Pitt, who declined to be interviewed for this article, he met Gehry in 2001 when the architect visited Pitt and Aniston's home to renovate their wine cellar. Pitt later did an informal apprenticeship in Gehry's LA office. In Vanity Fair last year he quoted Gehry as method actors cite Lee Strasberg: "He said to me, 'If you know where it's going, it's not worth doing.' That's become like a mantra for me. That's the life of the artist."

At the Milan furniture fair in April the crystal company Swarovski showed a Kravitz Design chandelier called Casino Royale. Two blackened chrome shades with satin bronze linings surrounded amber, jet and clear crystal strands - all of which stood twice the height of a topless model posed beside it in a publicity shot.

With Kravitz's camera-ready residences in Miami, New York, New Orleans and the Bahamas, his hobby has been well documented in glossy home and design magazines. "This was something I did on the side, in between albums and tours," he says. "But how many houses can I buy and sell? How many times can I change one house that I've lived in? I want to do interiors, furniture. I want to do architecture, although I'm not an architect. Nor am I a trained interior designer."

Kravitz has been playing one for the last two years. His team was commissioned to design a private house in Portland, Oregon, and a recording studio for Setai Resort and Residences in Miami Beach.

In some circles, his design fame has eclipsed his musical success. "I'll bump into women on the Upper East Side who might not know me for my music, but they know me for my style," he says. Women such as Dawn Mello, doyenne of the fashion industry. "She said, since Tom Ford, my eye is the best eye she's ever seen," he confides. "She also kept asking me, 'Are you sure you're straight?' "

Maybe she should have asked the likes of former dates Lisa Bonet, Vanessa Paradis, Kylie Minogue, Natalie Imbruglia, Madonna, Naomi Campbell and Nicole Kidman. You have to go back to Frank Sinatra's Palm Springs compound and Hef in his Playboy prime (the Chicago Mansion) to find an international love god this décor-focused.

Fed up with the way his 215-year-old Creole cottage in New Orleans looked, Kravitz took a sledgehammer to it. Four small downstairs rooms became one big one: a mix of metal beading, gilded French furniture and a zebra chair that combine to evoke the bordello-modern mood.

He does not do it alone. On his first Miami Beach house, Kravitz worked with an architect friend, Michael Czysz, "who was very into Bauhaus and taught me about all that stuff," he says. "And I turned him on to my funky stuff."

To transform his Biscayne Bay house, Kravitz sought out the mad, mod visionary of Danish design, Verner Panton. "I love big monochromatic statements," he says. "Especially black and white - since my mother was black and my father white."

His mother, Roxie Roker, starred in the TV sitcom The Jeffersons. His father, Sy Kravitz, is a retired NBC producer. They lived in a one-bedroomed apartment on East 82nd Street. Little Lenny got the bedroom, and started decorating.

"I had the regular kid room your mother makes for you with the nice shelves and everything is nice and matchy," he says. "Then I started listening to Hendrix and Kiss and Led Zeppelin. I got into putting lighting behind things. In my environments, lighting is always very important. It's either going to bring out what you've done, or it's going to ruin it."

It is fair to say that Kravitz's retrofuturistic love shack in Miami spurred the Panton revival, just as the flares and big glasses he wore in videos for his first album 15 years ago pioneered the 1970s comeback.

"I was laughed at when I came out with my whole vibe," he says. "It took about five years for the culture to catch up. I was one of the first people to bring back shag carpeting. You couldn't find shag 15 years ago." Now, he says, "I've become a reference, which I think is hysterical."

Kravitz's principal collaborator has been Benjamin Noriega-Ortiz, who did Kravitz's penthouse - Lucite grand piano, Donald Deskey pool table - and worked on the New Orleans place and the Bahamian beach house Kravitz is building with a local architect, Jackson Burnside. Noriega-Ortiz, who is not involved in the Kravitz Design venture, schooled his client in eclecticism: that "mid-century" could also mean mid-18th century.

Discussing his client's design skills, Noriega-Ortiz is generous. "He knows styles and proportions and colour," he says of Kravitz. "And the shopping was great." Could he see him as a potential competitor? He doesn't seem to be worrying just yet: "I don't know how he'd mould his design to other people's taste," he says.

For one, Kravitz is an insane perfectionist. "Too much," Noriega-Ortiz says. "At some point, you have to let go. People have to move in."

Kravitz thinks he shares this quality with Pitt. (They met in a store once and exchanged numbers but never followed up.) "I think he's obsessed the way I am. Every screw, every hinge. Dude, details are details!"

Le Corbusier would surely have been in agreement.

-lifted from the scotsman