Interview by Rachel K. Ward     

Portraits by Todd Cole • AFG Management     Collection Images by Tiago Molinos

Rachel K. Ward: You are based in Pasadena.  The Huntington Estate is such an amazing place.  Is there anything specific about California that has influenced your vision?

Kate Mulleavy: I grew up in Northern California so I think, on the whole, California in general had a huge influence on our perspectives on design.  We grew up in a small town right next to Santa Cruz.  We tell people this a lot, that Santa Cruz is where the movie The Lost Boys was based and filmed.  It is a really great, amazing place filled with so many different characters, like street punks, psychedelic skaters, surfers and yuppies, anything you can think of.  It is a really weird, interesting place, in terms of politics and the extremely beautiful environment.  It is Steinbeck country in a way, like Monterey, Carmel, Capitola and Santa Cruz. My father was a botanist so we grew up with these really amazing redwood forests and incredible greenhouses and always at the beach.  A lot of our early memories are of spending time at tide pools.  Northern California landscape is staggering.  It is probably one of the most beautiful places in the United States. It’s incredible.  Our grandparents and parents were raised in Los Angeles so we always spent a lot of time in L.A. and in Pasadena. After we finished school our parents had moved and so we moved to Pasadena.  That had a huge influence on us as well.  Pasadena is an interesting place because it is one of the older suburbs of L.A. It was originally built as a tourist destination for people coming from the east coast so there are all these older hotels and it is an older community in terms of houses, a place where every house is different.  For L.A. if something survives a hundred years it is a pretty big deal.  In Pasadena, the Huntington Gardens is one of my favorite places in the world.  Laura and I were always really obsessed with “pink perfection,” one of the oldest Camellia trees in California.  The Huntington estate was built on that property because of that tree.  It’s really amazing to see the left over railroad systems that were used to have all the art brought in on trains that led up to the house.  Something that is also interesting to me is the mythology of the west and how it spilled over.  I think of people like Van Dyke Parks, Terry Melcher, and John Lennon and their time in Los Angeles.  There are all these amazing layers to it, so I feel like it definitely had a huge influence on us.

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