Bringing It All Back Home: Internationally known designer Kenneth Brown returns to Louisiana to recover a sense of community.
When Kenneth Brown was eight, he liked to rake leaves—into floor plans.
“I’ve always been fascinated with houses,” says Brown, who grew up in Baton Rouge. “When I was twelve or thirteen, my mom and I would look at houses on weekends. After we left a house, I could get in the car and sketch the floor plan from memory.
“I’m extremely dyslexic. I can’t remember what I read, and I get telephone numbers mixed up. But I can visually remember a space.”
It took a while for Brown to realize that was a rare talent. After graduating from Parkview Baptist High School, he enrolled at LSU, majoring in pre-med. “I was just miserable in chemistry and biology,” he recalls. “I would think: What am I going to do with my life? I was so lost.”
“By chance a friend was taking introduction to interior design. I thought ‘easy A,’ but it wasn’t that easy. It’s not all paint chips and picking colors. It’s the bigger picture.
“I love the details of creating a space, the emotion you feel, that sense of something when you go into a space. It’s not just a house. Cars, planes, hotels, hospitals—interior design had a hand in every space you interact with. I became fascinated with how space could be manipulated.”
The day after his 1995 graduation, Brown moved to Los Angeles to work for a firm that designed casinos and hotels in Las Vegas.
“Casinos are precisely calculated to create an illusion—mostly a delusion,” he says. “The trend was to make the guest rooms as uncomfortable as possible. They didn’t want you in your room; they wanted you on the floor spending money. There was no sense of night or day. The room windows were heavily tinted. You didn’t look out and see a blue sky; you saw a cast of orange. They put the entrance as far away as possible so you’d have to walk past the slot machines. They pumped in oxygen to keep people awake. It was all about manipulating the people who used the space.”
The job was lucrative, but Brown’s heart wasn’t in it. “I was learning from really talented older people, but I got burned out really quick,” he says. “It was a formula—very thematic, corporate design.”
He kept circling back to his first love—houses. “I needed to be with people one on one," he says. "When I was between casino jobs, I would 'shadow' the designer of a residence. I saw the emotion between the homeowner and the designer. I thought: Wow, I want to do this.
“I quit my job after two and a half years with no idea of what I was going to do. By the time I was thirty, I had opened my own design firm in my garage. I would take on any job just to pay the bills. I did everything. I was the designer, the mailman, the janitor. It was all me.
“One of my contacts was a woman who was flipping houses. She was from the South—Georgia—and maybe that’s why we got on so well. She bought really old houses that looked like plantations and needed a lot of work.
“She hired me to do the interiors. My work became showcased to realtors in the high-end market in L.A. I started getting a lot of calls.”
The company that emerged, Kenneth Brown Design, created houses for celebrities Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, and Mia Hamm. Brown hosted several television series, including HGTV’s “reDesign,” and developed several product lines. But something was missing.
“I had become bored,” he says. “I felt there was little left to challenge me. In L. A. you just work like crazy. You constantly work. There’s tons of work. But how much more stuff can you have? You can still feel empty.”
Brown realized that love trumped work. He and his partner had a young daughter who was adored by his parents and siblings in Baton Rouge. When his mother died “suddenly and unexpectedly” two years ago, Brown felt the ties of home pulling him back.
In Los Angeles, he felt keenly “the lack of a sense of community, of having family nearby. I have two children now. [Daughter Harper is nearly four and son Sawyer is one.] Here, I live two doors down the street from my sister, and my dad and brother are nearby. I surrendered to all the forces that were pulling me back.”
One of those forces was the fact that his sister was pregnant with her first child. “I didn’t want her to be alone, without my mother here,” says Brown, who bought his house sight unseen over the phone. “It cost less than my last kitchen remodel in L. A.,” he says. “I intended it to be a place to come visit, but the more I stayed here, the more I didn’t want to go back.
“I want my children to be in a place where there are sidewalks instead of fifteen-foot walls between my house and the one next door. Harper was a very quiet child in L.A. Now that she has a community, she’s completely come out of her shell.”
By the Fourth of July, settled into their new home, Brown and his family celebrated with his brother and sister and their families. “We had all the kids with sparklers, and ice cream dripping down their elbows, and everybody eating watermelon. I thought: This is what it’s supposed to be like.”
Last May, Brown leased office space on Lafayette Street downtown and hired a small staff to continue his design work. A “tastemaker” for the Web site One Kings Lane, he recently selected furniture and objects to be photographed and sold on that Web site this month. They included a 1950s industrial worktable he found in Florida and a small round-top wooden table from Circa 1857 in Baton Rouge’s midcity.
Grabbing a set of plans from atop his desk, he describes the two-story house he is designing while he searches for a suitable lot. “I want it to feel Baton Rouge French from the front,” he says. “I like mixing that with the West Indies look. My rule of thumb is that every room should have light on two sides. So everything orients to a side yard. The house will be one room wide all the way back, like an overgrown shotgun.” He wants a stucco exterior, but not in the ubiquitous ochre. “It will be the color of rotten wood,” he says, pointing to the Circa table. “That’s my color palette.”
Meanwhile, he is leasing a second house, a midcentury modern in south Baton Rouge near his daughter’s school. “I’m doing everything over, even changing the front door,” he says. “I told the owner, ‘I’m nuts, I’m crazy, but I have to do this.’
“I’m perpetually buying a house and fixing it up and having a house on the market. I do it with my work and I do it with my own houses. Some people have an addiction to shoes. I have an addiction to real estate. It is my passion.”
His surroundings are so important to him that he has covered the tile floors of his office with sea grass area rugs. His ten-foot long desk, of polished walnut with bronze legs, holds a potted white orchid, an art deco clock, and framed photos of his children alongside his MacBook Pro.
Although work continues to pour in, Brown is not pursuing new projects. “I’m very low key,” he says. “I don’t advertise. We’re not yet open to the public. I don’t want that life again.”
Besides his own houses, Brown is designing ad-agency offices in California and Brazil and a ranch in Tucson. “We’re building it from the ground up with all authentic materials, including adobe that’s created on site,” he says. “It’s in its third year of construction. I’ve been with them since there were no walls. I selected wonderful beams from a French monastery.”
His ideal client—in L. A., Tucson, Brazil, or Louisiana—wants what he calls “a different look,” which he describes as a blend of “warm southern hospitality with clean southern California lines.
“Here in Louisiana, people like their roosters in the kitchen and their fleur de lis in the living room,” he says, rolling his eyes. “If they want that look, I’m not the guy for them.”
But he is quick to acknowledge his debt to the city where he grew up. Last fall, he taught the large junior-level studio-design class at LSU. In the future, he hopes to use his office space to benefit children.
“My goal is to hold events for a children’s charity. We’ll exhibit paintings and furniture that will be for sale. In this district [the Baton Rouge Arts and Entertainment Cultural District], the purchases will be tax free, and fifteen percent of the purchase price will go to a good cause.
“I no longer feel like I can make money without attaching it to a cause,” says Brown. “I’ll do anything when it comes to children.
“Family has trumped all of the things I’ve ever done. You reach a pinnacle of success and you can step back and look at it. I’m fortunate that that happened to me early. The first forty years of my life were about me. The next forty years of my life will be about my children.”
Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.
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For the August 12 sale of items selected by Brown, visit onekingslane.com.
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