CENTRAL casting couldn't have made Stephen Saint-Onge's latest makeover project any easier. When the interior designer decided to transform a cottage at the Motion Picture & Television Fund's retirement community in Woodland Hills, among the residents he could have chosen as his costar were Hollywood costumers, cameramen, stage managers and actors, including House Peters Jr., son of a silent-film star and the first Mr. Clean in TV commercials.
The role went, as they say, to a relative unknown.
John Alderson, an 89-year-old from the coal fields of northern England, had played hard guys and heroes in 1950s and '60s films with Errol Flynn and John Wayne and served as a technical advisor on all things British to George Cukor during the making of "My Fair Lady." A robust man with a catalog of Hollywood tales, Alderson represented everything Saint-Onge loved about the golden age of moviemaking.
"He had such a great personality and history," Saint-Onge recalls. "The space he lived in did not reflect the life he has led. I think he wanted to have a more gracious environment for his friends and his family to visit."
The actor also possessed another agreeable quality.
"I liked Stephen and trusted him," Alderson says with a chuckle. "I told him he could do whatever he wanted."
Not that he would. Saint-Onge, 37, has long had an interest in, and respect for, old Hollywood. Growing up in Vermont, he would sketch floor plans of settings in black-and-white MGM movies. In the mid-'90s he worked in production design on "Jefferson in Paris" and "Surviving Picasso" for British period-film maestros Merchant-Ivory, and more recently he starred as one of the designers on TLC's "While You Were Out."
During his run on that show, Saint-Onge was recognized as a designer with an uplifting mantra: "Design has the power to change people's lives." Focused on comfort rather than theatrics, he did not come across as a decorating diva who bulldozed people's feelings along with the buildings.
Though the seven-day makeover at Alderson's 380-square-foot cottage would involve a crew of a dozen contractors and would be documented on video to aid the Motion Picture & Television Fund's fundraising, this was not to be a made-for-TV production. A resident for nearly a decade, Alderson had settled into a reassuring routine, and Saint-Onge knew that any enhancements to his unit would have to be made with an eye on function and mobility rather than how it might look on camera.
"In film production, you are designing for fictitious characters and the room doesn't last," Saint-Onge says. "When you design for real people you need to create a space that not only works but creates an emotional connection. For John, that meant creating a warm space that reminded him of his native country. The charge that someone gets from feeling that they are home means everything to me. Doing makeovers is even more gratifying because you can speed up the design process and in a short period of time you get instant impact."
Not without an instant learning curve, however. Saint-Onge had to absorb a great deal about the needs of older residents. "The No. 1 fear is of falling," he says. "So loose rugs and even old wall-to-wall carpeting that can bunch up, and long drapes that you can trip over, have to go. Furniture needs to be made of softer materials and shapes, yet still be sturdy. And things need to be easy to open, so we switched traditional doorknobs to ones with lever handles."
But being safety-conscious did not mean dispensing with style.
"An environment geared toward an older person's needs doesn't have to be sterile, ugly and uninviting," Saint-Onge insists. "John still has the freedom to be able to function normally and live independently, so the goal of this project was to show that people like him can live in comfort, but yet have a world around them that is an elegant reflection of who they are."
The project was blessed with solid bones: Alderson's 1942 cottage, part of a row of units sharing common walls, had a sleeping and living area with an angled post-and-beam style ceiling and a sliding glass door leading to a small patio.
Saint-Onge brought more of the outdoors into the room with front and rear French doors equipped with interior silhouette shades that can be raised and lowered with a lever. "A big thing for seniors is appropriate lighting," the designer says. "Natural light and the use of color for seniors is really important because it affects your mood."
Saint-Onge used Behr's Desert Camel, a sunny shade of beige, on the walls that complemented new low-sheen dark wood flooring and a suite of substantial brown leather seating and storage chests from Z Gallerie.
"It was a little depressing and somber before," he says of the room, which was a hodgepodge of furniture. "I wanted to show that in a small space you can do a darker color on the walls and there is still spaciousness but also warmth."
