Channeling his Peruvian roots, the iconic lensman transformed a Los Angeles hacienda into a vibrant showcase for his aesthetic—and now captures the results with his own camera.

Mario Testino grew up in Lima, Peru, an endlessly intriguing city of brooding conquistador-era palaces and leafy suburbs surrounded by hills and lapped by the crashing Pacific. Here he disported himself with fellow gilded youths and partied in the grand, sequestered houses of the well-to-do. In these sprawling homes he absorbed the uniquely Peruvian approach to decor, reflective of the country’s layered history, with naïf seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraits of los arcángeles peering down on roomscapes crowded with colonial silver plates, the huacos artifacts of the Incas, and a jostle of imposing dark Spanish-inspired furniture and sleek mid-century design statements.

This giddy eclecticism has continued to inform Testino’s own adventures in decorating. At the turn of the eighties he moved to London, fell in with a group of fledgling English tastemakers, and abandoned the study of economics and law (which left him cold) to take up photography. The world of insouciant aristocratic British style would have a profound impact on his aesthetic. But on a fashion shoot in Peru a decade after his move to England, Testino realized that he “had the right amount of detachment to go back and really appreciate what I had grown up with. There’s a particular style that is very Peru that you don’t see anywhere else; it’s got so many different imprints. When you mix Incan minimalism with the heavy, ornate Spanish Baroque, it is very interesting.”

In the first London apartment that he decorated himself, his proposed color scheme—a staircase painted melon, lime green, duck-egg blue, and black, and bookcases in gray and puce against bottle-green walls, for instance—set his friends “on the floor laughing at the bad taste,” Testino admits. However, these color mixes proved unexpectedly successful, evocative of the turn-of-the-century houses on the outskirts of Lima that seem settings for a Mario Vargas Llosa novel.

Testino’s idiosyncratic journey continued in Paris, where he turned a shoe box into a jewel box glittering with gold starred paper, and then, as his career blossomed, graduated to an expansive aerie above the Canal St.-Martin, where the mix included a dining room hung with antique gold damask curtains and painted the pink of a matador’s cape in honor of a visit by Madonna, and a collection of Indian maharajah photographs gathered on a trip to Rajasthan (framed in gaily colored papers and wood beading that Testino hauled back from Jaipur expressly for the purpose). “I was more baroque then,” he says, laughing. In London, more recently, he transformed the drawing room of an apartment in a Holland Park villa into a symphony of green-on-green tones. He hung the walls, salon style, with contemporary art, an endlessly growing collection that he began amassing fifteen years ago following an introduction to the prescient dealer Sadie Coles.
“The art came at a very interesting time in my career because I needed to be excited by something other than fashion,” says Testino. “It showed me that these artists had a certain freedom—it opened a lot of possibilities in my own work. Fine artists reflect and then they act. Fashion photographers—we act and then we reflect.”

Three decades after his arrival in London, Testino felt that he was “of an age when I wanted to have a proper house in Peru.” But fate intervened when his friend Erick Jussen, a Los Angeles–based locations maestro, found a house that might tempt Testino from the Chateau Marmont bungalow that had become virtually a home from home. High in the Hollywood hills, the house provided commanding views of the city—a view dappled by the branches of towering eucalyptus trees in the canyon below. Built in 1933 in the Spanish style, the house was shrouded in bougainvillea and painted in vivid Mexican hues. “It looked like a Peruvian house!” says Testino. “I loved its energy from the moment I walked in.”

Testino didn’t work with an architect or decorator; he enjoys the creative process too much to cede it. “I’m so obsessed with it,” he says. “I have no real training in the history of fine art or furniture; my eye just works by proportions. I react intuitively.” During a yearlong renovation, Testino banished any fiesta colors. “In London, it’s all about color because the weather is so gray and in that cold light they look beautiful,” he explains. “Coming here, I was inspired by rusts and browns and greens and ochers. The light is so bright, all of a sudden bright colors become garish; they look like bubble gum.”

So Testino let the light in. He had spent years looking at California locations with Jussen, so they shared a visual language, and together they rationalized the floor plan. Today, the front door opens directly to a picture window framing the view, and Testino’s master bathroom and sitting room, with their own broad windows and glass doors, invite the gardens in. Inside and out the rough-plastered walls were whitewashed, while the amber glass in the leaded windows was replaced with clear, as were the stable doors, with metal-framed French windows.

Testino also revised the garden’s plantings. “It’s semi-arid desert here—similar to Peru,” he says. “I wanted the garden to be something real to this area.” So he looked to plants that would thrive in the dry Californian climate, pines, olives, and oleanders among them.
 
Following his habitual pattern, Testino shopped for the house wherever he found himself. “I’m really in no one city more than two months during the year,” he admits. “I’m constantly having to readapt my eye to new locations. When you’re doing a house, your mind is on it all the time. You might need door handles but you’re not in L.A., so you find them in Venice!” His living room is carpeted with a patchwork of Mauritanian leather–stitched straw mats and sheep-colored carpets latticed with giant black lozenges from the Middle Atlas, both found in Marrakech during downtime from a shoot.

In Peru, Testino had always admired the handwoven ponchos favored by riders of paso horses, though he would never have worn them. Instead, he used the fabric to upholster banquettes he’d built in the living room, flanking a fireplace that he reconstructed after designs by Cliff May, maestro of mid-century California ranch-house architecture. As pre-Columbian artifacts cannot be removed from Peru, Testino began collecting glazed-terra-cotta jugs made in that vernacular in the fifties and sixties, and huacos-inspired sculptured pieces by the contemporary artist Juan Javier Salazar. In his native country he also found a craftsman who made furniture inspired by colonial originals, often incorporating antique elements—the dining-table top, for instance, is a solid eighteenth-century door. “What I wanted to do was to mix the periods that I like,” says Testino, “the Spanish mixed with the Indian, with the Inca. But then I wanted a seventies element. Really, it’s just a backdrop for the art.”

In place of those arcángeles the walls are hung with pieces from his own collection, many of them acquired from Los Angeles’s own lively art scene—Friedrich Kunath and Walead Beshty among them. “I try to display it in a way that is respectful to the artists but at the same time pleasing to my eye.”

The results set up a multitude of unexpected dialogues—between the art and the objects and furnishings. “I like the idea of things that show your travels around the world—show your life,” says Testino. “And I enjoy the idea of all the different cultures meeting here. Japan meets Peru, Peru meets America, America meets England, England meets Denmark, Denmark meets France, you know. Total integration of cultures. I guess it’s the future, no?”