Power of the palette

"It is as individual as a table is communal," he says. "A chair is a symbol of economic stature that goes back to when kings sat on thrones and common folk sat on the ground."

Shire himself is perched on a polished concrete floor in the newly refurbished lower level of his 1937 home, which he describes as "California bungalow gone wrong." Surrounding him, like a swarm of Mondrian-colored Tinkertoy constructions, are the sculptural seats he designed for "Chairs," a new exhibition at the Frank Lloyd Gallery in Santa Monica.

Upstairs, the 1,400-square-foot space where Shire and his wife, Donna, have lived for more than two decades is a similar riot of color and texture. This is what the home of a working -- some would say obsessively prodigious -- artist looks like.

The original stone fireplace with weeping mortar is painted lavender, complemented with a mint mantle set against a crimson wall. Bookcases hold volumes on art and the ceramic teapots that Shire has made since his days at Chouinard, the famed and now-defunct Los Angeles art school. Cats sprawl on the kitchen floor, a crazy quilt of 1950s-flavored green, gray and pink linoleum tile. Shire's hand-built furniture -- Douglas fir cabinets with vibrant teal-painted details from the 1980s, and more recent steel and glass tables -- are layered with paintings and drawings.

"Organized chaos is the artist's inevitability," Shire says.

His spouse puts it another way.

"The house is overrun with art," she says with an indulgent smile. "There are even sketchbooks in the bathroom."

Shire, whose nearby studio is nearly five times the size of his home, just grins.

"Donna says we can't have people over for dinner," he says before taking over his wife's part in the dialogue. "All our friends are designers. What will they think of the way we live?"

"It's a comfortable, lived-in space," says Adrian Saxe, Shire's former classmate and now a professor of art at UCLA. "There are some artists' houses that are so tricked out, God knows where they sit down and enjoy themselves."

Shire's younger brother, who owns the Billy Shire Fine Arts gallery in Culver City and the Soap Plant/Wacko in Silver Lake, says the house is something of a design laboratory.

"Peter has mastered so many materials and industrial processes and used them in his home in a way that feels warm and organic," Billy Shire says. "It strikes a balance between looking crazy and being functional."

Much of Shire's decor is a bit of both. He splattered paint on old medical lamps and dressed a "funked-up sofa that we bought at a garage sale" with a slipcover that resembles Joseph's amazing Technicolor dreamcoat. He devised a bookshelf with steel wheels that rolls away from the wall so that he can access his furnace room. He even cut and welded his own curtain rods, which are powder-coated in fire-engine red.