My Favorite Room: Brittany Curran keeps things fresh in her retro-skewed kitchen
Because she spends only half a year in Los Angeles, Brittany Curran didn’t want to focus too much energy on redoing her Valley Village-area home.
But the kitchen was different.
The 27-year-old actress will in June start filming the fourth season of the television series “The Magicians,” which shoots in Vancouver. But when she is on hiatus, she decamps to her 750-square-foot area apartment here, where on weekends she and her boyfriend transform their kitchen.
Why is this your favorite room?
I love to cook and bake pies. I host a lot of themed parties. Everything happens in the kitchen.
What kind of parties?
For Christmas, we did a Bing Crosby 1950s-themed brunch. After, we watched “White Christmas.” We did a “Jurassic Park” one where I baked things that looked like dinosaur eggs. My next one will be a “Westworld” theme. I have a saloon-girl outfit that I’ll wear, and I have a bunch of vintage glasses I’ll put out with the kind of whiskey they would have drunk at that time.
What did you have to do to the kitchen?
We changed the floors. Before, they were this awful white linoleum that had started aging. We tore it up and then had the lovely surprise of finding there were five layers of flooring underneath that dated back to the 1950s.
The walls are a pretty color.
They used to be this off-white color, but I wanted a nice sky-blue with white.
Are you a do-it-yourselfer?
My boyfriend and I have done a few projects where we take a whole weekend, listen to music for two days straight, and work.
You seem to like anything retro.
I’ve always loved vintage. I used to write for a newsletter that was part of a program for actors, and I would interview people in the industry. One of them was a prop man on “The Wizard of Oz.” I loved hearing those stories and started to fall in love with the aesthetic of old movie posters.
Do you collect them?
There’s one in my kitchen that’s an old Belgian print from “A Place in the Sun.” I have another western one that isn’t framed yet but will go up in the kitchen. The next one on my list is “Rear Window.” I get them from a gallery in North Hollywood called L’Imagerie. I tell them what I want, in what language and price, and they find it.
What else is meaningful in this room?
My boyfriend found this vintage sideboard with funky stone knobs. I collect teas from the farmers market and put them in these glass jars on my counter. I used to write for a wine newsletter, and a winery gave me a poster of the art that’s on their wine bottles. And I have a bunch of vintage champagne glasses from the 1950s. My boyfriend called up as many antique stores as he could to find them, and we built this collection.
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