Episode 601: Tichenor and Thorp

Million Dollar Decorating

The husband-and-wife team of M. Brian Tichenor and Raun Thorp founded their namesake, multidiscipline, Los Angeles-based design practice Tichenor and Thorp in 1990. Since then, they and their talented, dedicated staff have completed more than 350 projects nationwide. Tichenor and Thorp emphasize craft. Licensed architects and AIA members, they are fluent in all aspects of the building arts and the history and precedents of American architecture. Widely recognized for original, artful designs that beautifully integrate large-scale residences and surrounding landscapes, the partners deftly parlay Mediterranean and American traditional vernaculars and the modern forms of the California Tradition into gracious, functional, luxuriously detailed environments. Equally adept at commercial architecture, landscape and garden design, and historic preservation and restoration, they also undertake the occasional select interiors. The firm gained an early reputation for sensitive, highly informed restorations of historically significant houses and landmark commercial structures by such noted California architects as Paul Williams, Roland Coate, John Byers, H. Roy Kelly, and Harwell Hamilton Harris. Among others, Tichenor and Thorp returned the historic Cecil B. DeMille residence, the former William Powell Estate (now owned by decorator Kelly Wearstler and her husband, Brad Korzen), and Hollywood’s landmark Capitol Records building and grounds to their former states of glory. The firm recently completed a ranch with an 8,000 bottle wine-cellar in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and the official, Santa Monica residence for the Director of the Getty Museum, as well as estates in Pebble Beach, ocean-view houses and gardens in Laguna Beach and the Newport Coast, a spectacular, multiacre Provencal-style retreat in Rancho Santa Fe, a luxe, modern apartment in New York, and a Brentwood, California screening room building. Now on the boards are projects in Carmel, Pasadena, Pebble Beach, Palm Desert, and the Santa Ynez Valley. Listed by The Robb Report as one its Top 30 Architects, Tichenor & Thorp received Westweek's "Stars of Design" award in 2007 for architectural achievement. The New York Times Magazine, Architectural Digest, Town & Country, The Robb Report, The Los Angeles Sunday Times Magazine, The World of Interiors, Elle Décor, and House & Garden have regularly featured the firm’s work, as have various television shows. Completed projects have also appeared in more than 20 books, including At Home, Classic Homes of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara Living, Private Landscapes: Modernist Gardens in Southern California, The New American Swimming Pool, and Los Angeles, A Certain Style. Explore their Website here Add their book, Outside In, to you design library by clicking here