DESIGN—Trendy Interiors

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WHEN THE LIKES OF JANET JACKSON AND CATHERINE ZETA-JONES NEED SOMETHING SPECIAL DONE WITH A ROOM, THEY CALL ON BOBBY TRENDY, WHO LIKES TO GO OVER THE TOP IN HELPING THEM SHOW OFF THEIR WEALTH

Bobby Trendy’s career at Kmart was halted at the corporate ladder’s first rung after he made a wisecrack to the store’s manager. He did, however, leave with an important lesson learned.

“The philosophy at Kmart is to give the customer whatever they want,” he said, “and my motto is, ‘Whatever pleasures you.'”

Trendy was all of 18 years old when his boss at the discount chain’s Valencia outlet took issue with the way he was sweeping the floor and asked whether he ever picked up things around his own house. “Yes, the telephone,” Trendy responded. Now he’s 23 and picking up some serious money; this year’s projected revenues for his interior design and custom furniture business are in excess of $1 million.

Designs by Bobby is cool enough to meet the standards of Carmen Electra, Dennis Rodman, Janet Jackson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Fay Resnick, Notorious VIP, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Cypress Hill and Limp Bizkit.

Or maybe it’s that these entertainer clients are cool enough for him.

Consider this: Trendy refuses to collaborate with other designers, “except when it’s just bedding or curtains,” and will only work on utterly empty rooms. He makes an effort to deliver orders while his clientele are entertaining. His deliverymen wear uniforms and white gloves and come bearing additional, suggested items that are usually pricier than what has already been ordered. “In front of all their friends, they inevitably buy something else,” Trendy says.

Trendy has just opened a custom furniture store on the pricier end of La Cienega Boulevard, just south of Melrose Avenue, but it wasn’t always thus. His first retail venture was a clothing store, specializing in men’s tank tops, on Santa Monica Boulevard at Westbourne Drive in West Hollywood. It did well enough, but didn’t seem to Trendy to have enough upside potential.

“These days, it’s ‘home this’ and ‘home that,’ and the markup on furniture is a lot higher than it is for clothing,” Trendy said. (Asked whether “Trendy” is really his given name, the entrepreneur refuses to say. However, his P.R. representative Jonathan Elkins says Trendy’s birth name was Trendih, but he had it legally changed.

Humble start

He opened his first furnishings and design store in a neighborhood he describes as “not very nice,” between Olympic and Washington boulevards. Early on, he received a fortuitous visit from a Texas heiress by the name of Kelly Stafford. “She walked in wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt and cowboy hat and bought everything off my sales floor. She spent about $45,000 $35,000 (of it) in cash.”

That was the boost that got Trendy rolling.

Today he’s filling the empty spaces in wealthy people’s houses with inspirations drawn, he says, primarily from books with titles like “Period Rooms in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” It’s all about showing off one’s worth or “optimal wealth” as Trendy calls it. “Everything I do is over the top,” he said.

A guided tour through his floor space is spiked with adjectives, the language of decoration rolling off his tongue in a uniquely commercial poetry: “This champagne velvet, rollback couch sells all day long, as do these Aubosson needlepoint rugs at $2,500 a piece Here’s a Victorian, ear-backed couch with fraying on the back that’s luxury, fraying where you can’t see it and double-bullion fraying on the bottom. The amber beading on this $500 pillow is $250 a yard. No expense is spared.”

The youthful designer was recently hired by the Sun America Theatre in Anaheim to redecorate its Sundial Lounge.

“We were looking for somebody to create a design, not ‘out there,’ but a little bit more on the edge,” said the theater’s Managing Partner Mario Ernst. “We were walking around Melrose, went into his shop and thought what he was doing would be perfect.” Ernst has nothing but the highest praise for Trendy’s talent and professionalism.

Specializing in ceilings, bedrooms

The current rage is the “fabricated ceiling,” in which expensive fabrics are stretched across the ceilings of high-end homes. Trendy created a fabricated ceiling for “Scary Movie” star Carmen Electra with material costing about $10 per square inch. “The job was about $100,000, because there are a lot of square inches in a ceiling,” Trendy says.

The fabricated ceiling is an important feature to the “smoke-out” room Hollywood’s golden children are currently cultivating. “It’s usually a dining room they convert into something special for them and their friends to hang out in,” Trendy explains.

Bedroom settings are another specialty. “They pay homage to the owner of the home,” he said.

How does one pay homage with a bedroom? “All my settings make use of hand-painted Belgian velvets with down coverlets, 15 pillows, one throw, and a skirt,” Trendy says.

He has done such jobs for as “low” as $5,000 and as high as $22,000 a job involving the use of 24-karat gold threading.

He claims to be applying e-commerce time frames to an ancient craft by turning jobs around in seven days or less. He has no employees, even running his store by himself, but he works with a group of freelance craftspeople with whom he splits the profit on each piece of furniture or custom bedding, 50-50.

“If I pay them by the hour, they don’t work at the speed I need,” Trendy says.

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