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A Lair With Flair

With mirrors and art and props of all kinds, personal style takes center stage

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BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER / THE SEATTLE TIMES This faux wall in the bedroom, painted white, creates an evocative, elegant "ruin." The wall is lightweight, made as if for the stage and hinged for access. The ruin motif is featured in the living room as well. BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER / THE SEATTLE TIMES Mistinguett is a costume designer and choreographer, and the statuary and poster establish a body-oriented show-biz theme at the main entry to her apartment. Note the theatrical Moroccan-inspired doorway at the far end of the hall. BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER / THE SEATTLE TIMES A rich appreciation for color and texture informs Mistinguett's apartment. "My apartment is kind of like a fantasy set piece," she says. BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER / THE SEATTLE TIMES Asian artifacts and zebra skin create an exotic mood in the living room. The broken mirror is on a large column that serves as a room divider. BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER / THE SEATTLE TIMES Plants, patterns and things fill the apartment, which is built into the corner of a commercial building.

Mistinguett, who goes by just one name and flashes a mop of multi-hued red hair, works out of town many months a year as a choreographer and costume designer. When at home, she wants her apartment to be a place where she can lie low. A lair. But a lair made with bold style and sensual flair.

The small apartment is built into the corner of a commercial building near the waterfront. She installed faux distressed brick walls around the main rooms — kind of like a bombed-out city. She crowded the interior with mirrors, Asian objects d'art, hunting trophies and a Moroccan-styled doorway. It's dwelling as "stage," loaded with props, a sense of drama and over-the-top knowingness. An interior people talk about after they leave.

Home design typically references other design, but in this apartment, as on the stage, the references are more cultural than formal. They draw meaning from a mash of romantic themes — ruins, nature, sexuality, and exotic people, places and things. A musk ox head commands part of the living room. The dim, golden-hued entry hall is lined with provocative photos of dancers, including herself.

Mistinguett tried a more conventional life and residence, but it was not for her. While married and pursuing a career as a graphic artist, feeling restless, she auditioned for a stint as a Las Vegas showgirl. That blossomed into her career as a choreographer and costume designer, and a life in theatrical production.

Design advice: In Decorating, Be Daring

Mistinguett takes a freewheeling approach to home design. "Decorating a space — you gotta mix it up," she says.

Drawing on her theater experience, she brings a sense that you can go to extremes, and that you don't have to use fine materials. All the world's a stage, after all. Her apartment is like a set, crowded with elaborate décor that creates a transporting if polyglot sensual illusion.

Mistinguett advises that home design doesn't have to be permanent or cost a lot of money. Get the look, she states. Express yourself. Break some boundaries.

After divorce she took the name Mistinguett, the leading Parisian entertainment figure of the late 1800s, star of the Moulin Rouge, lover of Maurice Chevalier. "I wanted a title more than a name," says the Mistinguett of today, 52. The choice also played into the French heritage in her family.

It gives you an idea of her priorities to say that her closets are three times the size of her kitchen. "It's a fantasy, this life. You get to dress up. And people say, 'It's OK, she's in show biz!' "

The living-room is modest, but the ceiling stretches up 30 feet; tall mirrors help overcome the small footprint and give a feeling of spaciousness. Theater lighting instruments spotlight a human-height winged Garuda, a pair of multi-hued guard dogs and other statuary thickly sprinkled about. Wonderful purchases from a fabulous trip to Thailand? No, acquisitions made on a whirlwind buying excursion through Seattle. Same for the exotic hunting trophies, including the ornately antlered deer and the musk ox that defies description. Splitting the main room in half is a classical column, 4 feet square and 20 feet tall. Hidden inside this towering room divider are audio equipment and a projection television.

Her bedroom carries on with the theme of bombed-out walls, also painted the pristine white that elevates the concept to high style, balanced with a side helping of glitter and fur. The bathroom, by contrast, is all-enveloping black. "I've been to so many white, austere hotel bathrooms," laments Mistinguett. "I wanted the opposite of that. It's just soothing." A hidden panel in the living room leads to Mistinguett's closets, two modest-sized rooms lined with dresses, costumes, hats, sequins and shoes, as well as boxes overflowing with jewelry. In between them is a simple dressing room with a large mirror. These are private spaces, unadorned and raw, which only Mistinguett visits, and where she dresses. Two 10-foot-tall cardboard cutouts of Mistinguett from her showgirl days, all fishnet stockings and big hair, actually once used on stage, are the only decor.

Some home interiors grow by accretion, with treasures from travels, as needs demand or finances allow. Others, like Mistinguett's, are the product of high concept, an outpouring of inspired impulse, assembled in toto in short order. The lesson of this apartment for would-be remodelers? Play, she says, even if it's just one room or one wall. "Let your inner soul come out."

David Berger is a Seattle freelance writer. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.