If you stroll into Willis Wonderland, your eye doesn’t know the place to land. The North Hollywood home, which songwriter Allee Willis first bought in 1980 and was a dwelling ode to all issues kitsch, is awash in trinkets and tchotchkes. But additionally in coveted artwork items and trendy furnishings.
The lounge alone includes a lavender Plycraft chair and a Sputnik chandelier in addition to a Weltron Area Ball Retro stereo boasting an Earth, Wind & Hearth 8-Monitor and a “Sock It To Me” squished beer ashtray. It’s all simply the best way Willis had it earlier than she died in 2019 at 72.
The pop-up ebook is opened to Allee Willis’ lounge in her lounge, full with pink sofa and Willis sitting in her signature wacky wardrobe. The ebook is stuffed with pleasant easter eggs identical to the house.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Occasions)
And now, for individuals who have all the time wished they might tour this most lovely of L.A. homes the place everybody from Lily Tomlin, Paul Reubens and Cassandra Peterson as soon as partied, comes a brand new pop-up ebook that brings it into your individual, seemingly much less fantastical, dwelling.
“Willis Wonderland: The Legendary House of Atomic Kitsch” was written by Willis’ pal Hillary Carlip and Trudi Roth, designed by Carlip, illustrated by Neal McCullough and paper-engineered by Mike Malkovas. And, like the home it hopes to seize and mythologize in equal measure, the pop-up ebook is a celebration of Willis’ personal “more is more” sensibility.
“When you walk in, it’s full of surprises,” Carlip tells me as we stroll round the home on a sunny Friday morning and admire the Jason Mecier portrait of Willis product of trash trinkets. “You keep finding new things. I’ve been here hundreds of times, and I saw something today I hadn’t seen before. I wanted to do that with the pop-up book. To have easter eggs and things where you pull and spin and open and that kind of thing. I just think the interactivity, where you really immerse yourself in it, is really important now, especially since so much is digital.”
Hillary Carlip poses beside the Jason Mecier portrait of her pal Allee Willis.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Occasions)
The tactility of the ebook encourages you to discover each nook and cranny of the home, which does already really feel like a museum of kinds. Of kitsch, maybe, but in addition of Willis herself. The extra you get to be taught each about this well-kept constructing (as soon as rumored to be an MGM get together home), you additionally be taught extra about Willis’ extraordinary profession.
Willis is probably finest often called the songwriter behind such hits as Earth, Wind & Hearth’s “September” and “Boogie Wonderland.” However over her four-decade profession, she additionally co-wrote the songs for Broadway musical “The Color Purple”; penned a Grammy-winning tune for “Beverly Hills Cop”; and labored with acts as diversified because the Pet Store Boys, Dusty Springfield, Patti LaBelle, Cyndi Lauper and Taylor Dayne.
However she was additionally a visible artist, a designer, a sculptor and an avid collector. Together with her signature asymmetrical haircut, her loud, trendy outfits and a penchant for all issues off-kilter, the Detroit-born artist made little distinction between her work and her life. It is smart her abode, a pink William Kesling single-family home (certainly one of solely 15 constructed within the Los Angeles space within the Nineteen Thirties) dotted with bowling balls and palm bushes, would function a continuation of her wild, wondrous aesthetic.
Hillary Carlip, sitting by Allee Willis’ pool, needed the pop-up ebook displaying her pal’s dwelling to really feel as detailed because the quirky home is in actual life.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Occasions)
The yard pool space, dotted by bowling bowls, as seen from above
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Occasions)
When Willis died, the query of what to do along with her Willis Wonderland was entangled with tips on how to additional cement her legacy. Her accomplice, animator and producer Prudence Fenton, knew the famed home would have to be cared for. And, maybe extra importantly, memorialized.
When Fenton and Vincent Beggs — the manager director of the Willis Wonderland Basis, launched in 2022 — got here up with the concept of a ebook about the home, they knew it couldn’t be simply any type of ebook. They toyed with a modern espresso desk ebook with beautiful images of the home. However that might’ve been too sterile. Too staid. Willis, they knew, deserved one thing bolder.
The pop-up ebook presents as immersive a tour of the home as you’ll be able to dream of. The scene on the so-called “kitsch-en,” as an example, splendidly captures Willis’ dedication to playfulness as a central design conceit — one thing all too uncommon in a world typically wearing fundamental neutrals.
Allee Willis referred to as her kitchen the “kitsch-en” — it’s filled with knick-knacks and novelty objects, identical to different rooms in her retro dwelling.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Occasions)
The eating nook, certainly one of Allee Willis’s favourite locations in her dwelling, and the pop-up ebook model of the area.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Occasions)
A pink-leather dinette anchors an area that’s all however drowning in tiki mugs, salt and pepper shakers and adorned with artworks (together with a group of Zel caricatures). Willis’ humor is clearly prevalent all through.
That’s nowhere extra apparent than in her “Rec Room.” A blue-hued linoleum flooring made to appear like an aquarium, replete with singing fish and turtles, brightens the dark-wooded downstairs area and echoes the nautical parts Kesling launched into his Streamline Moderne properties. Right here, this underwater area serves as a repository for “Allee’s Legendary Landfill of Esthetic Essentials.”
The recreation room, with its blue flooring, is crammed with collectibles, identical to within the pop-up ebook.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Occasions)
The tiled flooring and ornamental inlays within the recreation room at Allee Willis’ home.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Occasions)
The cabinets, because the ebook reveals, are stuffed to the brim with collectibles, a lot of them a part of the gathering of Black tradition, which her pal James Brown first helped her curate. Lunchboxes, magazines, data, motion figures and sculptures all however beg you to spend hours upon hours inspecting every certainly one of them. That is thrifting as cultural historical past. Kitsch as historic remembrance.
In Carlip’s pop-up model of this room, you’ll be able to see, amongst many different issues, a topped Miss America Vanessa Williams Corn Flakes field, a slew of Afro picks prepared for the taking, a Harlem Globetrotters coloring ebook, a Diana Ross doll and a Chubby Checker Tornado sport.
“It’s a funny thing, because Mike, the paper engineer, who’s done many other books and clients and everything, kept saying, ‘You can’t have so much detail. You have to edit,’” Carlip shares. “And I was like, ‘Nope.’ I just stood my ground. I was like, ‘It’s Allee. It’s all got to be in there.’ But then I finally relented and said, ‘How about there’s a downloadable poster where people can get descriptions of items and see them up close?’”
In that poster, you’ll be able to see “Libby the Lovely Liberated Lady” doll, a Girls’s Liberation toy that’s as hilarious as she sounds (you’re inspired to drag her skirt for a shock). And you may also see a photograph of the famed Riverside Market signal that adorns the home’s outside pool subsequent to a conveyable bar Willis had hand-sculpted from Motor Metropolis-found objects.
As the way forward for the home because it stands stays up within the air, with Carlip not sure what the Basis has deliberate for it, the pop-up ebook (like final 12 months’s “The World According To Allee Willis” documentary) hopes to verify Willis’ artistry is preserved in methods she would most get pleasure from.
A tongue-in-cheek faux-Picasso hangs above the hearth.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Occasions)
“I just think it really captures her whimsy, her thoughtfulness, her creativity and the joy,” Carlip provides, about the home and ebook alike. “Everything she created had so much joy in it. I think when people come into this house, they feel all those things, they’re inspired to create. I think just the breadth of her creativity is infectious. You cannot help but be inspired by being in here.”
Carlip factors to a portray that sits atop the hearth proper above a Sascha Brastoff gold ceramic bull. The piece includes a blue-hued lady whose irregular options (daring neon lips, perky colourful nipples) are deliberately meant to evoke a sure famed artist. It’s signed “P. Picasso.”
“People would always ask her, ‘Is this …?’” Carlip remembers with amusing. “It’s not. I mean, it’s called ‘Girl with Blue Period.’”
