Each year the award-winning Rose Parade float designer turns his home into an ornate fantasy of light and color.
In the last daylight hours of December afternoons, as shadows lengthen, Raul Rodriguez’s stately Mediterranean house in the Hancock Park area gradually becomes a wonderland.
From the curving staircase in the foyer to the far corners of the high ceilings in the living and dining rooms, masses of twinkling white lights heighten the sheen of graceful gold and silver lame wreaths and gold-leaf fruit arrangements.
Renaissance angels on various lofty perches seem ready to burst into a Corelli fanfare, and oversize ornaments massed on a 9-foot tree sparkle in a rainbow of jewel tones. In a recessed front window, St. Nicholas, resplendent in white fur and red velvet, stands beside a snowy tree with tiny white lights. It almost seems the snow is falling.
Standing in his living room one day last week, Rodriguez surveyed the opulent scene thoughtfully. “I didn’t do as much this year.”
For Rodriguez, in his 50s and one of the world’s foremost designers of fantasy--he has a record 20 floats in the Jan. 1 Rose Parade--holiday decorating means incorporating lavish objects into a baroque symphony of sculpture, art treasures and crystal.
And, to the public’s delight, his decorated lawn at 3rd Street and Windsor Avenue becomes a traffic-stopping toy land with re-created scenes from past Rose Parade floats.
It’s a true celebration of his home, he said.
In fact, the holiday season is an annual celebration of all aspects of Rodriguez’s personal creativity. A premier designer of parade floats, he’ll be riding in the float he designed for the 21st Century Insurance Co. in the parade titled “Celebration 2000--Visions of the Future.”
“It’s a great theme,” he said with characteristic enthusiasm, flipping through a sheaf of sketches illustrating each RRR (Raul R. Rodriguez) Design float--a medley of mythic temples, medieval castles, genies and spaceships. “Thank God, I’ve always been a visual person.”
His own story has its mythic qualities. Raised in Boyle Heights, he won a high school contest to design a float for the city of Whittier, and has since become the most honored float designer in the history of the Rose Parade. As a student at the old Art Center College of Design on 3rd Street, he rode three buses to get to class.
“I used to pass this house and I actually vowed to live there someday,” he said, with a smile. Rodriguez, a bachelor, now shares the two-story house with his cousin and business manager, Dena Cortez, along with two cats and two macaws that “get along fine.”
Eighteen years ago he bought the house, which was built in 1919 and is modeled after a larger-scale estate, and his enthusiasm for it has not dimmed. “I love it,” he said. “I love its warmth and ambience. It’s comfortable. We’ve had a tremendous amount of good times here.”
And it’s also his studio. “My work is an extension of my life,” he said. “I can’t imagine life without the Tournament of Roses, or without my house and beauty and friends. It’s all part of who I am.”
For now, the parade floats are finished and he is focusing on beauty and friends. Wearing a red and black leather jacket over a black Tournament of Roses T-shirt, he led an informal tour of the decorated house whose rooms seemed like a series of movie sets.
This is the first year he’s had an artificial tree, he said, a little ruefully. “We were loading the tree so heavily with ornaments that artificial works better,” he said, “and this pine looks totally realistic.”
The gorgeous decorated European ornaments, trimmed with ribbons, pearls, satins and lace, are the work of his friend designer Hal Cunningham. “He also made all these Faberge-style eggs,” Rodriguez said, pointing to a coffee table laden with the jeweled eggs, Russian boxes and candelabra decorated with gold pine cones.
In the living room, a sculpture over the fireplace mantle is festooned with gold tassels and a tangle of gold-leaf fruit and vines, glowing in amber light. In one corner rests a big basket of pine cones and greenery with white pin lights, and he has added a gold wreath with Renaissance angels to a French Empire cabinet.
In one corner of his formal dining room, dominated by a long glass table, stands a small grove of snow-laden pine trees with clusters of red poinsettias and a gold deer. And a white Carrara marble bust of a child is wearing a jaunty Santa cap.
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Rodriguez changes his holiday look every year, incorporating things from past years and other holidays, and buying new decorations, pleased with the extraordinary variety available. “Today there is access to so much,” he said. “You can get lights that give a texture and a fullness. I used to shop at the downtown specialty shops, but you can buy things everywhere now. I like Pic ‘N’ Save, and the drugstores have tons of great stuff.”
The annual decorating project is an ongoing process lasting several days. “I hire a few people for the intensive decorating, and the rest are family and friends. We spend a couple of evenings, and have pizza and champagne and it’s a party.”
It also ties into his philosophy that “a house with beautiful things is nothing unless you can share it. We are only the caretakers of these lovely things that come into our lives.” Although he has several parties planned, including a reception for the Hancock Park-Windsor Square carolers, the real sharing takes place outdoors. Rodriguez’s yard, at the corner of 3rd and Windsor, is a little Rose Parade in itself.
The frontyard on Windsor uses larger-than-life images of Our Gang characters and “Nutcracker”-style toy soldiers, all from Rose Parade floats of years past. Deer with red velvet bows graze amid giant snowflakes, and oversize peppermint sticks point the way to the front door.
On the 3rd Street side of his lawn, in a classical Currier & Ives moment, figures of children play before a Victorian house and sleigh.
It’s all protected by a chain-link fence, for safety purposes, said Rodriguez. “Children were coming into the yard, which is full of wires and electric boxes.”
The flood-lit panorama will cause minor traffic jams until the first of January, when everything gets put away. Rodriguez, who is already working on float concepts for 2001, has a philosophy about that too.
“I don’t mind un-decorating the house any more than I mind taking the floats apart,” he said. “Life is a series of moments of beauty. They save us from becoming stagnant.”
Connie Koenenn can be reached at connie.koenenn@latimes.com.
