The blue pucker martinis are being iced and shaken. Guests, some armed with their monthly rent checks, pour into building manager Marc Yeber's silver and sapphire minimalist living room, part of a 1927 apartment building by architect Leland Bryant, designer of the landmark Argyle Hotel.
It's just another Tuesday-night gathering -- a contemporary design version of the Algonquin Round Table -- at the Four Gables in West Hollywood. In this 16-unit complex, half of the residents are artists or decorators in their 30s and 40s who have made their interiors as distinctive as the stately period revival architecture.
"It is so like a designer dorm here," says Dean Robert Jones, a couture wall upholsterer who has lived in the same lavishly appointed, two-story, two-bedroom apartment filled with antiques and chintz for the last 14 years. "We all go to each other's parties."
And host them. When Jones' neighbor, Jillian Kogan, threw a Mad Hatter's party for her 30th birthday, she held it in Yeber's streamlined space instead of her comfortably cluttered "Paris flea market" one-bedroom. Yeber's apartment, says Kogan, a production director of events for MTV Networks, "is the hangout, our Central Perk."
It is more than a hangout for "Friends." Old 1920s jewels such as this are a magnet, says Scott Roberts, an interior designer who manages the upscale L.A. furniture gallery Modern One.
"Los Angeles has always been a place where people can invent themselves, so designers want to live in buildings like the Four Gables because the history, the architecture and the interiors are part of their whole image," Roberts says. "It's a substantial piece of history. Living in it is inspiring to me as a designer and makes me feel connected to a creative past."
At the gathering, Roberts joins Kogan and Jones in Yeber's apartment. Also on hand is Emmanuel Cobbet, a partner in Yeber's Em Collaborative studio, a furniture design firm that recently opened a showroom on Beverly Boulevard. He warns latecomers that the bread with cheese, honey and nuts that he made hours ago is going stale.
Yeber's next-door neighbor, animator Greg Griffith, drops by without his "roommate," Isabel. Other than a couple of Griffith's houseguests, no one has ever seen her. Isabel is a ghost.
