Design

6 With Style TRINA TURK THE TRENDSETTER Style isn't informed by a single factor. If the clothes, the home, the commitment to community and culture define the person, then few embody and champion California style like Trina Turk. Since 1995, she has designed her namesake collections of womenswear, inspired by the San Fernando Valley of her youth, a place of kidney-shaped swimming pools and pretty women dressed in optimistic prints. Turk's fourth boutique, designed by Kelly Wearstler, is set to open in November in Newport Beach.

BEFORE construction had wrapped on Vanessa Choy and Andrew Wong's house in Studio City, the rumors had started swirling. The couple were building a halfway house for addicts, passersby speculated. The home was some sort of mean joke on the neighborhood, others feared. One woman screamed from the middle of the street: "You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" The consternation didn't seem rooted in the size or scale of the house, but by its style.

FOUNDED in the 1880s as a Wells Fargo stagecoach stop, the town of Ballard never became the seat of Santa Barbara County, but it's hardly a one-horse town. Here, equestrians and weekend ranchers own rolling paddocks where landscaping often involves little more than split rail fences and hay bales on pastures dotted with conifers and cactus. For Helene Aumont, however, this is a small part of a much prettier picture.

Boeing Co. says it has changed the design of a key part of its new 787 jetliner, but the company has not addressed rumors that the fix would contribute to further delays in the plane's first flight. "It is a normal part of the development of a new airplane to discover need for improvements, and that is what we are experiencing on the 787," Boeing spokeswoman Yvonne Leach said in a statement. Steven Udvar-Hazy, chairman of International Lease Finance Corp., one of Boeing's largest customers, this week said changes to the plane's center wing box could push back Boeing's 787 timeline.

It's a car. No, it's a truck. Whatever it is, it's back. General Motors Corp. has jumped into the auto industry's retro trend, unveiling a half-pickup, half-muscle car amalgamation bearing a striking resemblance to a long-lost classic: the Chevy El Camino. Introduced this week at the New York International Auto Show, the Pontiac-branded, er, vehicle is a throwback to the "coupe utility" machines that populated high school make-out spots throughout the 1960s and '70s. With its U.S. debut expected by next year, GM is betting that nostalgia for the El Camino, which it stopped making in 1987, will get buyers into showrooms.

Although U.S. companies' international theme parks contain many of the elements that made them famous, they all have to adapt -- at least in some way -- to the local culture. Consider Disney's learning experiences: When its Paris park opened, it banned alcohol but offered a variety of gourmet, sit-down restaurants. But Parisians wanted their Chardonnay -- and American fare. "They wanted what Americans do: hot dogs," said Al Lutz, editor of the Disney fan website Miceage.com.

When Mark Rios takes the microphone Tuesday evening at a public hearing inside Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, he'll be presenting two very different designs for the new civic park downtown. The first is what his Los Angeles firm, Rios Clementi Hale Studios, calls a "base" plan, for which the projected $56-million cost is already in hand -- paid by Related Cos. as part of its deal to develop a commercial project with Frank Gehry across Grand Avenue from Walt Disney Concert Hall.

If Craig Bassam lived in a graceful old Victorian or a classic Italianate home, its status as an architectural gem would be unquestioned. Bassam and others with Modernist homes -- boxy, low-slung structures with glass walls and stark angles -- hope a new preservation effort will secure the genre's place in architectural history and help save the homes from demolition. "Living in a Modern is very inspiring," said Bassam, an architect and furnishings designer who bought his 1951 home here last year with his partner, Scott Fellows.

For generations, the French upper classes made leisurely weekend lunches in the gardens of their country homes a hallmark of the "art of living well." On languid afternoons, they arrayed long outdoor tables with platters and tart molds imprinted with family monograms and crests; dessert arrived on trays splashed with vivid portraits of animals, and coffee came in pots decorated with fruits and flowers.

"I DIDN'T have a contractor," film producer Lyndall Hobbs says, cruising through a front succulent garden that reminds her of her native Australia. "I did it all myself because I figured I knew better -- even though I had never done anything of this scale before." The result? Workers toiling for months while Hobbs and her 12-year-old son retreated to various parts of the house as renovations moved from one space to the next.