THE CHAIR, a French provincial reproduction by...

THE CHAIR, a French provincial reproduction by Rose Tarlow labeled “Tumbleweed Armchair With Rush Seat,” sits amid the eclectic extravagance of the Randolph & Hein showroom on the third floor of the Pacific Design Center. But, as Ken Cinnamon and his wife, Karen Wengrod, stand contemplating it this particular Monday morning, they are envisioning it in the corner of the living room of their new three-bedroom home in Sherman Oaks. At the moment, the chair, a fanciful creation with a hand-painted, weathered-lacquer finish decorated with a dizzying display of rust-and-gold cross-hatching, is posing for a Polaroid, as the couple and their decorator, Frank Keshishian, study it admiringly. Having committed themselves to the chair a few days earlier, they have returned today to the Design Center to choose just the right fabric for the two rather jaunty pillows that cushion the chair’s seat and back. And as Daniel Witherspoon, the showroom’s salesman, hands them the developing image of the chair, Ken--he and Karen are both writers on the ABC comedy “Who’s the Boss?”--can’t help but joke: “Great. All we do now is stare at Polaroids. We don’t read; we don’t write. We just sit around and stare at all the Polaroids.”

But really, it’s no joking matter. The couple have decided to do their living room in country French, and they are determined to do it up right. This is the first time they have ever worked with a professional designer. “We did our last house by ourselves,” Karen laments. “And after spending two weeks trying to find the right lamps, I said never again.” And so, under Keshishian’s guidance, they’ve begun to transform their new house. The money they had budgeted, which they had originally hoped would carry them through three rooms, has now been allotted solely to the living room. But as they regard the chair, with a glow of self-satisfied discovery that is almost palpable, a sense of contentment seems to settle over them. Now, if only they can find just the right fabric to go with it.

“You have a lot of options,” Keshishian counsels them. “You can go with lavender, white, cream, probably a print again.”

“I worry about overpowering the line of the chair,” Ken muses aloud.

“When you see the right fabric, you’ll know,” Keshishian reassures them. “It will be something that jumps right out at you.”

WELCOME TO the newest obsession of the baby-boom generation. Self-transformation, the generational quest of the ‘70s, has long since run its course. Where the est-ian Werner Erhard and his competing legions of Me Decade gurus once held sway, the deliverers of the design message now rule--Paige Rense of Architectural Digest, Anna Wintour of House & Garden, Dorothy Kalins of Metropolitan Home, and Sir Terence Conran, Britain’s king of interior design, bi-continental furnishings magnate and author of “The House Book,” “The Kitchen Book,” “The Bed and Bath Book,” “The New House Book” and, most recently, “The Conran Directory of Design.”

Fashion designers as well are no longer quite the stars they once were; the search for the right cottons and linens and silks has less to do with what is worn than with what adorns the home. After all, now that Ralph Lauren is churning out his own home-furnishings line, clothing is just one facet of the properly outfitted living space.

And forget food. Bob Vila’s “This Old House” has replaced Julia Child’s “French Chef” as PBS’ premier do-it-yourself guide. Die-hard bands of foodies might still wander in search of the newest taste sensation--as Cajun bows to Caribbean--but the favored cuisine of the moment is, quite simply, take-out. Who wants to endure the clamor of a restaurant when they can eat well amid the comforts of home?

You can see signs of the New Homesteaders everywhere. When Michael’s old girlfriend showed up on a recent episode of “thirtysomething,” she complimented the house even before she acknowledged his wife and child. And in the current ghost comedy “Beetlejuice,” Catherine O’Hara’s postmodern trendoid is more horrified by her new home’s lack of closet space than by its resident poltergeists. In their first media incarnation, New Homesteaders were dismissed, derisively, as mere couch potatoes, a generation of TV addicts that had forsaken the bright lights of the big city for passive evenings in front of the tube. But true couch potatoes, content with little more than a Sony, a Barcalounger and an electric popcorn popper, represent only the lowest end of the spectrum. The New Homesteaders can’t relax until they’ve also assembled the right end tables and throw rugs and accent lights to soften the high-tech edges of their media rooms.

New Homesteading has also been characterized as nesting or cocooning , but those words suggest a somewhat dowdy vision of domesticity, with connotations of grad-student shabbiness, second-hand-furniture, swap-meet dishware and beat-up “antiques” that have been in the family for at least a generation. Certainly, the unique objet trouve is always welcome in any creative decorating scheme, but the New Homesteaders aren’t willing to settle for second-best. They approach their home improvements not with a sense of making do but with the challenge of making statements. In short, they exhibit all the symptoms of Interior Obsession. TRAILING FRANK Keshishian, Ken and Karen burst through the doors of Kneedler-Fauchere on the sixth floor of the Design Center like two winners of a supermarket shopping spree. The receptionist greets them all warmly--as well as she should since they’ve already spent several thousand dollars in the showroom.

“This is our chair,” Karen says, fondly pointing out a Charles Pollock reproduction.

“And this is our pine chest,” says Ken, patting a handsomely crafted chest of drawers.

They pause in front of the rustic couch they’ve also ordered as Beverly Levitt approaches and asks what she can help them with today.

Out comes the Polaroid of the new chair for which they’re seeking fabric. “I guess we can afford to go expensive,” Karen adds, “since we only need two yards.”

THE FIRST chords of Interior Obsession were struck in the haute design pages of Architectural Digest and its equally chic competitor, House & Garden, but they mainly delivered a fantasy, beyond reach for all but the most affluent. The real indicator that an obsession with interior design had begun to seep down into the middle classes is the ongoing success of Metropolitan Home, which began life in the ‘70s as the more modestly named Apartment Life but then rocketed to its current circulation of more than 700,000 when it traded up from apartment living, changing its name in 1981. “A.D. is for would-be social climbers,” observes Los Angeles interior designer William Hill. “Metropolitan Home is a sort of bible for yuppie people.”

“Our readers,” explains Ben Lloyd, the magazine’s editorial marketing director, “are the baby boom grown up, people between 35 and 45, the ones who are settling down. I hate the word cocooning , because it’s passive. It suggests only a defense against the world. That’s a part of it, but what we see, through our readers, is a more active use of the nest than just fleeing from the world.”

As Lloyd sees it, it’s all about the “wardrobization” of the home. The New Homesteaders may have already settled on a few basic pieces of furniture, just as in their closets hangs a favored suit or dress, but they are constantly updating the overall look of their homes. “A lot of old furnishing attitudes were that people buy furniture once and that’s it, but that’s simply not true,” he argues. “The success of Habitat (Terence Conran’s English furnishing chain) and Conran’s (its American cousin) proves that people will really buy home furnishings on a fashion basis. They will go on replenishing, replacing and refreshing.” Consider even the lowly faucet. Given the proliferation of faucet designs, Lloyd contends, “you could change them over a year’s time to suit your mood. I assume people must be doing that. It’s staggering. They’re like jewelry.”

Six years ago, Metropolitan Home’s editors decided to open their pages to their readers by holding a design contest. To their surprise, more than 1,400 readers responded with snapshots of their home improvements; the contest has since grown into an annual event, heralded in a special “Winners” issue each March, and inevitably, that’s the magazine’s best-selling issue.

Scott Spiegel, Los Angeles-based ABC executive producer of movies made for television and one of this year’s winners, confesses that he knew “absolutely nothing” when he first contemplated building a weekend country home in Santa Fe. To educate himself, he read through Conran’s “New House Book,” Tracy Kidder’s “House” and a “philosophic book about home building published in England in 1962. What I tried to do was understand theories of home building and theories of design so that I was able to try to make intelligent decisions about things that I had never decided on before in my life.” Working with architect Randy Scrafford, Spiegel designed a 2,300-square-foot home, blending the Indian-based adobe forms of traditional Southwestern style with contemporary design elements and then adding to the mix stucco buttresses reminiscent of an old Spanish mission. “I wanted the feeling of an ethnic crossroads,” Spiegel says. “My take on why this generation is more sophisticated than our parents’ when it comes to our living spaces is our incredible cultural consciousness. Our education included comprehensive liberal arts: history, design, cultural studies, art. We combine all that to create our environments. We went from being political activists to being cultural activists, and we’re using that to redefine our living space.”

Overseeing the construction job from his home in Los Angeles was, for Spiegel, analogous to producing a movie. “Mentally, I was prepared to deal with large numbers of people working on set schedules, knowing you’d have contingencies for your budget in case things came up,” he says. At the end of each week, he’d have his builders messenger him a videotape of the work-in-progress. Details were all-important to him, for Interior Obsession is the antithesis of the New Homesteaders’ postwar, prefab roots. When, for example, he realized that he couldn’t have a native mud floor done for a reasonable price, he improvised by pouring concrete colored a deep brown.

“It’s not just about buying a house and living in it,” explains Spiegel.

“YOU KNOW what would be great?” suggests Keshishian as Beverly Levitt sorts through the racks of fabric bolts. “Something to go with the zigzag,” as he points out the cross-hatched design on the chair’s finish. “We want something different,” he underscores, as Karen cautions, “But no tapestry-feeling look.”

“Around the corner, I have something more stripy,” Beverly offers as she leads the trio into another cul-de-sac of fabrics, from which she produces a goldish-tone, chevron-patterned sample.

“Let’s see what Karen says,” Ken says doubtfully. “I know she’s not a yellow person.”

Indeed, Karen grimaces slightly as she leans in for a closer look. “My least favorite color,” she says.

Still, since the shade is more gold than yellow, it just might do. “I like the idea of the zigzag,” says Keshishian. “It tunes into the chair.”

“You don’t think it looks like a throwback to our mothers’ houses?” Karen worries aloud. “It doesn’t look like something we grew up with?”

INTERIOR OBSESSION may begin in the pages of the glossy shelter magazines, but from there, the New Homesteaders want to go on to study the objects of their affections firsthand. Where their parents’ generation once entertained themselves on Sunday afternoons by visiting open houses in the newest housing tracts, the New Homesteaders flock to museums and historical home tours. “It’s difficult to assess,” comments Leslie Bowman, associate curator of decorative arts at the L.A. County Museum of Art. “But in areas like arts and crafts there is no question about it, that the interest is there. I’ve had members of our (support) council tell me that they are going to do their house over and so they want to study our collection.” Recent shows such as “The Arts and Crafts Movement” and “The Machine Age in America” posted strong attendance figures. “We’ve had to turn people away,” adds Jay Rounds, executive director of the 10-year-old Los Angeles Conservancy, which regularly schedules walking tours of architecturally significant buildings. Citing “both the nesting phenomenon and a very general resurgence of concern for the history of the city and its quality of life,” Rounds notes that more than 1,200 home buffs turned out for the group’s most recent tour of Lafayette Park, and he expects similar crowds for a June 5 tour.

Certainly the best place in L.A. to experience a range of interiors is the Pacific Design Center, a wholesale shopping mall of home furnishings rising above West Hollywood. The center’s original building--the 725,000-square-foot Blue Whale designed by Cesar Pelli and Gruen Associates--has just been joined by a neighboring, seven-story, 460,000-square-foot, green addition that officially opened March 23 and has already earned its own nickname, the Emerald City. The Blue Whale, which houses 185 showrooms, is filled to capacity, and 36% of the floor space in the Emerald City has already been leased. As soon as it’s fully occupied, a third building, to be sheathed in red, will join the two existing temples to interior consumption. The complex was the focal point of nearly $1.2 billion in wholesale home furnishings business last year in Los Angeles County (up from $819 million in 1980), according to the State Board of Equalization.

In all its blue-green glory, the Pacific Design Center is Mecca for the Interior-Obsessed of the western United States. “I had really exhausted St. Louis,” confesses Sue Dickens Schlichter, a Los Angeles native who is currently in the process of furnishing a country farmhouse she and her husband have just built outside of St. Louis. On a recent visit to Los Angeles, she dropped into the Design Center and was astonished. “I had looked at lighting fixtures in St. Louis and couldn’t find anything, but in the first (showroom) we went into there were five that I loved.” After three days of roaming the Design Center, Schlichter returned home, her decorating problems solved. Her favorite purchase: a dining room table made of barn wood imported from New England and hand-fashioned by a craftsman in Topanga Canyon.

Such selections come as no surprise to James Goodwin, the PDC’s director of marketing. “People are searching for a life style with value,” says Goodwin, “one that says something about themselves and that carries over into the home. And that doesn’t mean just an object off the shelf of a department store. People want to distinguish themselves. There’s an increased awareness about folk and cultural traditions and a whole flood of information that was not around 20 years ago. And the richer you are, the more you can lavish on your environment,” he says. “What we are seeing are people building not environments but icons of achievement.”

Technically, the showrooms at the PDC and the surrounding designer avenues such as Robertson and Melrose are open only “to the trade”--that is to say, decorators and designers with Board of Equalization resale numbers, and their clients. But that doesn’t prevent civilian shoppers from looking and, with the help of borrowed numbers, doing a little buying on their own. In addition, a secondary corps of smaller, more adventurous furnishings stores has sprouted in the shadow of the PDC as well as farther east on the hipper stretches of Melrose, Beverly and La Brea. “Today’s basic furniture store is incapable of responding to the needs of people in my circumstances,” notes Spiegel, who found several pieces for his Santa Fe residence at Skank World on Beverly Boulevard, which specializes in furniture from the ‘50s and ‘60s. “And if you don’t have a decorator or architect, there’s a problem finding access to what you want. People are going outside the system, so to speak.”

Gregory Evans, formerly an assistant to artist David Hockney, is one of the new breed of shopkeepers who are bringing an idiosyncratic touch to the area. “I don’t have an incredible feel for the design world, and I don’t deal in a classified look,” he admits. Specializing in floral fabrics and antique teapots, Evans, with some trepidation that he would be competing with the nearby Design Center, opened his own store at 509 N. Robertson Blvd. last October. “I’ve been seeing a lot of people from the art and entertainment worlds,” he reports. “The response has been good. Although there is still an homogenized look out there, certainly there are more interesting stores opening, catering to more personalized tastes. People are starting to take a chance.”

There is, of course, a trickle-down effect that is also affecting those home fixer-uppers who can’t quite afford the West Hollywood boutiques. Home emporiums such as STOR and Stylus cater to first-time buyers, eager to outfit an entire apartment in one afternoon. The ubiquitous Pottery Barns, which once defined low-tech living, are now moving upscale with offerings that include such postmodernist accessories as Temple Candlesticks, Corinthian Pedestals and Copper Torcheres. And, in the summer of ‘89, Conran’s itself will open its first West Coast outlet on the ground floor of the Beverly Center. With 15 stores now operating on the East Coast--the first, an immediate hit, opened in Manhattan’s Citicorp Center in 1977--the chain boasts of “serious design at affordable prices,” Interior Obsession on a budget.

THE GREAT fabric hunt seems to have stalled when Beverly Levitt suggests that the group take a look at the Clarence House collection in Kneedler- Fauchere’s fifth-floor showroom. Dutifully the little caravan troops downstairs, and the sampling ritual begins anew.

“How about a flame-stitch?” Levitt suggests.

“I hate flame-stitch,” says Karen, softening the rejection by adding: “It’s just personal.”

“How about an Oxford cloth stripe?” says Karen. “Too wintry,” says Levitt. Karen pulls out a multicolored silk. “Too modern,” Levitt says.

And then, as if sighting the Holy Grail, all eyes seize upon a beige-and-white silk print, with the euphonious name of Serengeti.

“I like that,” Ken says immediately.

“It jumps right out at you,” Keshishian agrees. “It makes a real connection.”

“It’s pinker, more than yellow,” Karen says, quite clearly pleased as she holds it up against samples of the fabric and paint that will be used elsewhere in the room.

Eureka, then, it’s Serengeti!

UNLIKE THEIR parents, the New Homesteaders would not dream of buying a suite of coordinated furniture in a department store. Interior Obsession decrees that one’s home should appear--at least in part--unique. “The worst thing is to have it all look like a model home or a room vignette” on the home-furnishings floor, says designer Hill. “If somebody’s really out there on their own, they want it to look as if their home has been done over a period of time and that real thought has gone into it. They want to have some real surprises in a room.”

While some valiant New Homesteaders bravely go about collecting furniture themselves, more and more are resorting to decorators and designers to help them sniff out custom-made treasures.

When Ken Cinnamon and Karen Wengrod decided to consult the experts, they found the prospects bewildering. “We looked in the phone book and interviewed a couple of people,” Ken Cinnamon says. But they were loath to pay the upfront fee most designers charge without seeing some evidence that they and their decorator would be working on the same wavelength. (With designers charging anywhere from $50 to $100 an hour, a general rule of thumb is that a designer’s fee will usually amount to 20% to 25% of the entire job.) A friend’s advice led them to 30-year-old Frank Keshishian, owner of the 3-year-old L.A. Design Concepts, who is a bit of a renegade in the sometimes forbidding field. Instead of charging a design fee plus the standard 33% markup on furnishings bought wholesale, Keshishian and his assistants offer to walk clients through the showrooms for a mere $10 an hour plus a 15% markup. For $65 an hour, Keshishian will even throw in his own design advice, estimating that the costs of designing and decorating a mid-sized living room range from $20,000 to $40,000. Beyond the obvious savings, “what appealed to us,” says Karen Wengrod, “is that it offered a way to work with someone without getting overly committed at first.” Needless to say, the design Establishment has yet to embrace Keshishian’s shopping service. “It’s probably a great venue if somebody just wants to buy a couch, perhaps,” says Stephen Stoner, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers. “But if they expect to rely on these people, and they have no visual sense of their own, they’re going to make mistakes.”

The New Homesteaders, according to designer Van-Martin Rowe, do have an inherent sense of quality. “This generation, which grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, grew up with handcrafted items in their hippie days. They appreciate things that are one-of-a-kind. I think we’re seeing a return to the arts and crafts movement, which made the point that you can combine good moral value with high quality. People today are looking for quality, not ostentation.” And yet, though Rowe sees an increasing awareness of design, he also maintains that “it still is amazing how much education is necessary. It’s not that people are stupid, it’s just that they are not always educated in those particular ways. So I like to take them places and tell them about things.”

A former fashion designer who rode the Zeitgeist by making the transition to architectural and interior design four years ago, Rowe sees a determination and willingness among his clients to get it right. “Now that a new generation is switching to big-ticket items,” he observes, “they are doing it with the same awareness that they dressed for success, that they went to the right restaurants.”

Rowe cautions, however, that the New Homesteaders, accustomed to instant gratification, may not be prepared for the often protracted ordeal of redoing a home. “This is also the Cup-A-Soup generation,” he warns. “They expect to wait no more than 90 seconds to eat. With a lot of my clients who are successful early in life, the longest thing they’ve ever waited for is the birth of a child. I tell them that no matter how much money they want to spend, it’s still going to take a certain amount of time. I tell them right off the bat to suspend all anxieties over time.”

“Had we been obsessed, I don’t think we would have tolerated two years of construction and delays,” observes Jan Woods, a production artist for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, who, along with her husband, attorney Edward Woods, recently completed a redo of their Santa Monica Canyon home. Actually, to call the inner and outer metamorphosis of their three-bedroom, hillside home a redo is to understate its transformation. “Our house is a view house, but we had no outside space, only little apartment-size balconies,” Jan Woods explains. “We wanted to build a deck, and it just mushroomed from that point.”

Having formally studied architecture at UCLA, Jan Woods knew she was searching for a “real minimalist, ultramodern look.” The solution, proposed by the husband-wife architectural team of Richard Katkov and Miriam Mulder, involved adding 650 square feet of decking--in effect, an interconnecting network of what Katkov calls “outdoor rooms,” including an entertainment deck, a service deck, a breakfast deck and a sunning deck. The entire house was then treated to a facelift, its exterior plywood paneling replaced by smooth-troweled, natural-colored stucco, mimicking concrete. As for the detailing, Katkov says, “we designed everything down to the tread walk on the steel stairs. There was nothing off the shelf.” The Woodses then worked with interior designer Michael Eselun to incorporate new, minimalist interior furnishings into the completely redesigned setting. “They came to us and said, we want a special look that represents us and you,” Katkov says of his collaboration with the Woodses. “The beauty of the house for them and for us is that it’s something that represents our firm and which they feel is absolutely personal. People are no longer afraid of tackling this kind of undertaking. They’re interested in making a personal statement.”

And that, ultimately, is what Interior Obsession is all about. The New Homesteaders are not fulfilled until they have completely customized their living spaces, inside and out.

AS THEY WALK back down Robertson Boulevard to Keshishian’s office, Ken and Karen are reviewing the situation. It will be at least three months before they see the handmade rug they’ve ordered, 10 to 12 weeks for the furniture. And then, of course, once the pieces are all in place, they’ll be back to go shopping for accessories.

The conversation turns to a car Keshishian is buying. He’s decided on a BMW convertible over a Corvette. “Get the navy with tan interior,” Ken advises. No, says Keshishian, he’s leaning toward white with navy.

“Just wait till we get to all our other rooms,” Karen says with a laugh. “Then, you’ll be able to afford a BMW and a Corvette.”

Michael Garland / Onyx ; Styled by Barbara Thornberg