True to life

Young Chang and Jennifer K Mahal

Pamela Bethke and her husband Rick sometimes take drinks and hors

d’oeuvres into their luxurious master bathroom and pretend they’re

picnicking in a European courtyard.

The arched entrance painted with two-dimensional cobblestones, the

images of trees blowing westward on the ceiling, the statue of Nocturne

with her arms swaying, the Venus in a shell painted on the wall near the

tub -- these touches leave little to the Bethkes’ imagination.

“It’s a fantasy world,” Pamela Bethke said of the murals in her

Newport Beach home. “Wallpaper -- it just puts a color on a wall. This is

fun -- your house starts coming alive.”

Murals and tromp l’oeil effects, like the ones artist Dana Ridenour

created for the Bethkes, are becoming more and more popular as a way for

people to add a personal touch to theirmass-produced houses and

apartments.

With prices of projects ranging anywhere from $400 to $10,000,

Ridenour said she has noticed more people getting creative with their

wall space.

Indeed, creating murals and tromp l’oeil has kept local artist Mary

Ann Ford on her toes. The Newport Beach resident is constantly busy,

going from site to site with her phone almost always ringing. It gives

her very little time for her own personal painting.

“My work gets done last,” said the artist who likes the works of

Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. “All of my

business is the work on the walls.”

Ford said her work brings a little whimsy into the lives of both

children and adults, making what could be a generic living space into a

personal haven. But it is not for everyone.

“It’s for the child within, the adult who wants to be different and

really personalize their home,” Ford said.

Beyond the personal, rising property values may play into why the

trend is catching on, said Ridenour, who owns Off The Palette in Costa

Mesa. Decorative touches often raise the value of a home when tenants

move out. And paint is much easier than wallpaper to deal with when

redecorating.

“I think the prices of homes are such an investment nowadays that

homes are like [residents’] personal haven,” Ridenour explained. “With

wallpaper, you have problems -- to change it you have to rip it all off.

For a bathroom it gets moldy and wallpapers fade.”

Also, Ridenour said the cost of painting a mural on a wall can be

comparable to the cost for wallpapering the same amount of space.

“This is our fourth home. The other three houses all had wallpaper and

it was all matching,” Bethke said. “It looked so ‘decorator.’ But for

this one, I wanted my personality.”

And personality is what she got.

Bethke had always wanted a cozy little Paris apartment, and the

downstairs powder room was transformed to reflect that.

With walls painted in thick stripes of pink and red, fluffy flowers

with green leaves and a trompe l’oeil cabinet colored an old-world French

country blue, the little bathroom gives off a Parisian feel.

“I think it’s a more mature person nowadays that has the confidence to

do something like this,” the client said. “With this, you have to be

adventurous.”

If you’re the painter, you also need to get to know the client to

figure out what they’ll be happy looking at day after day.

Some of Ridenour’s clients know exactly what they want. Others leave

it up to her, she said, in which case she tries to gage their tastes.

Both painters said that many of their clients have become their

friends.

Trish Steele, who had Ford do quite a bit of work on her former Port

Street house in Newport Beach, said that the time spent getting to know

one another is important. A nautical theme matching a cherished bath

stool was painted above the doorway in one bathroom. The dining room got

a touch of tromp l’oeil

“She tries hard to capture what her clients are looking for,” Steele

said.

Ford likes to add very personal touches to her work -- from painting

the family dog or the family parrot into murals to recreating the rocky

shores of Cuba in trompe l’oeil for a lawyer who wanted to remember his

heritage.

“I listen for their interests, sometimes their stories,” said the

artist whose work can be seen on the walls of At Ease in Fashion Island

and Baby Unique in Corona del Mar.

One little boy told her about a frog his uncle used to keep in his

pocket. The family’s mural now includes the unlikely pair.

In Bethke’s bathroom, if you look closely at the painted cobblestones

on an arch near the bathtub, you’ll see “Pamela & Rick” written in as if

someone had etched the names in stone.

“It’s not like [Ridenour’s] houses are done in cookie cutters,” Bethke

said. “With trompe l’oeil especially, you can create a world.”