Visitors are greeted at the driveway by this rustic assemblage, which looks like a Bavarian birdhouse. It’s where residents here have picked up deliveries from the U.S. Postal Service for five decades. Yes, it’s a cuckoo mailbox. Scharf, who bought the property 10 years ago for about $500,000, added the decorative doorknob. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
Scharf kept the kitchen’s original copper cabin lamp light fixture, built-in oven and cooktop with a copper backsplash decorated with a relief of a rooster. “Anything from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s I like,” he says. “Even this fake L.A. version of Switzerland with all the scalloped trims and that crazy birdhouse above the stove.” (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
Scharf, not Sharp: “I personalize all my appliances,” he says. “I don’t like to buy stuff at the store that looks like the same stuff everybody else bought at the store. If you put your own thing on it, it gives it more personality and a homey quality.”
Scharf decorated this one with a collage of slyly ironic images, including those of Fred and Wilma Flintstone (who appear frequently in his work) and stickers from organic produce. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
Advertisement
As a young artist living in New York City in the 1980s, Scharf often traded his paintings for midcentury furniture, including this 1960 fiberglass Tulip armchair by Erwine and Estelle Laverne, which echoes the shape of the African carving and the subjects of Scharf’s “Chickens,” an oil-on-canvas work he produced at age 7.
“I grew up in a one-story, flat-roofed modern house in Sherman Oaks that my parents designed and built in 1959, the year I was born. It had a big rock fireplace, a Japanese garden and a carport,” Scharf says. “So I love all the fun fantasy lines of midcentury architecture and furniture.”
Though it is far from modern in appearance, Scharf appreciates the knotty pine walls in the living and dining rooms. “It’s like being in a cabin in Lake Arrowhead,” he says, “a retreat far away from the city but still in the middle of town.” (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
One of Scharf’s more recent paintings hangs in the hallway that leads past two guest bedrooms to the master. At the end of the hall is an illuminated light box by fine art photographer Cindy Sherman. The ceiling fixture is original to the house. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
Scharf designed the steel four-poster bed and the chandelier above it. His round canvas, right, keeps company with works by Warhol and Basquiat.
“I don’t really believe in material objects as far as wealth and status,” he says. “Fun for me is not going shopping. I am not saying I am a Zen master, but I am really not concerned with things other than acquiring other people’s art.” (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
In the living room, Scharf’s dog, Beiju, chills out on a giant sofa with the TV tuned to classic cartoons. The metal media stand is Scharf’s design. In addition to vintage plastic lights made to look like stained-glass globes, an S-shaped Scharf-designed floor lamp provides additional lighting. An African textile on the floor echoes the squiggles Scharf painted on the speakers and TV cabinet.
“Some people might look at this and say it’s crazy,” Scharf says. “They are probably boring people who like the status quo.” (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
Advertisement
Scharf’s solution for an IKEA bookcase: a hand-painted wood-grain pattern. “There is something about the banality of a store-bought item that I react to,” he says. “I have to make it mine. I don’t accept just something because it’s what is given.”
A sliding door leads to a porch and the backyard beyond. The hilltop garden overlooks Culver City, where Scharf has a painting studio in an industrial space. “I love being above the city,” he says. “There is always a breeze, which makes it feel like being on the beach.”
The Asian lanterns on the tree in the distance were strung by Scharf’s neighbor, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” director Chris Paine, who lives next door at what he calls the Marrakesh house. “We have an open-door policy,” Scharf says. “He has parties that spill over into my yard and so he’s helped decorate the garden.” (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
An aged wrought-iron twin bed serves as a couch on the porch. The circular pillows feature Scharf’s “One Eye Guy” images, rendered in felt by the New York rug maker Liora Manne. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
Scharf snuggles with his cat, Boy, in a rope hammock covered with a scrap cotton rug. Behind him, two-handled fiberglass cups called “Madglad” are stacked to form a totem pole. The Scharf sculptures were originally used as individual planters; now the top one holds dried grass.
“At first, I thought my neighbor was a collector of 1950s Disneyland memorabilia,” says Chris Paine, who lives next door. “When I found out it was Kenny’s own work, that made it even better.” Paine says it’s beautiful to live by someone who celebrates art and to see “the crazy funky wonderful thing that Kenny does with everything he touches.” (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
The owners of the Rolling Greens nursery, which is located at the bottom of this hill, were the first residents of the house. They planted a drought-tolerant garden with flowering agapanthus and a Brazilian floss silk tree. The trident-shaped euphorbia, far left, was transplanted from the side of the house, which is filled with towering stands of 50-year-old cactuses.
“One thing that was strange was that the amazing view was completely cut off by all these pine trees,” Scharf says of this northern-facing vista.
After trimming the lower branches to open up the view, he took up xeriscaping. “I disconnected my sprinkler system years ago and ripped out the lawn,” he says. “I’m against lawns in Los Angeles. I think they’re a waste of water. It’s crazy that the government is trying to get people to use less water and at noon there are sprinklers going on the side of the freeway.” (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
Advertisement
Alternating square and circular pavers wind through the rocky garden, past golden barrel, opuntia and organpipe cactuses and potted succulents. Scharf’s inspiration comes from the Desert Garden at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, and his collection includes specimens from around the world, including varieties that look like stones and brains.
“A cactus often grows in a weird way that is individual and gives it personality,” Scharf says. “They do whatever they have to do to adapt and survive. Visually, they remind me of coral and the other-worldliness of undersea life.” (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
“When I took out the lawn, I replaced it with gravel and pieces of colored glass,” Scharf says. Here, a red-edged echeveria shares a bed with a young shoot of the blue ground cover Senecio serpens.
“The whole idea of xeriscaping with cactus and gravel is that they can be left alone. This can pretty much survive on rainwater. As far as water shortage doomsdays go, it will always be pretty up here.”
He hasn’t spent a lot of money on the garden. “I dumpster dive at Rolling Greens and have rescued lots of plants,” he says. “You don’t have to buy succulents. You just break a piece off them and stick them in the ground.”
Paine concurs: “Kenny gave me clippings form his garden, and I was amazed at how easy it was. They’re quite versatile.” (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
“Space Travel,” a 1988 Scharf bronze, stands in for the old-fashioned decorative armillary spheres often found in more formal gardens. In the foreground, a pair 1960s knockoffs of Saarnien chairs sits in the gravel. It’s a “Jetsons” touch in a “Flintstones” landscape — an apt reflection of Scharf’s work, which often features imagery from both cartoons.
“If I wasn’t an artist I’d be a gardener,” Scharf says. “Growing things and making a painting are kind of a similar process. There is a combination of the planned and the improvised. Nature doesn’t need a lot of help from us. Things with shape and color and texture pop up in the garden and I let them. The fact that it’s alive is even more wonderful.” (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
Scharf has let some shrubs die and has cut down others. “I’ll see a tree that causes too much shade, drinks too much water and is overcrowding everything,” he says. “At the same time, it has gone to so much trouble to create a trunk and branches, I didn’t just want to eradicate it. Why waste something that is there? So I had to think of how can I use it and change it to suit my needs.”
The answer was to think of stumps as pedestals. “I created these flat areas where I could put pots and planters and things on top of them,” he says. Here, epiphytes, known as air plants, sit on the stumps of a ficus. Says Scharf: “They attach themselves and grow. All they need is a little mist now once in a while.” (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
Advertisement
In a more dramatic example, Scharf turned an older ficus into a pedestal for potted plants. Throughout the garden he has transformed common planters into hand-painted pieces. “It’s like the ancient Greeks,” he says of the decorated pottery. “They embellished everything.”
Scharf uses gesso, a matte white acrylic medium used to prepare canvases for painting. “It sticks to anything, even plastic pots,” Scharf says. “And then you can paint another color on top of it, although I never really get around to it, so everything tends to stay white.” (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
Scharf’s landscaping philosophy allows for the “organic, random and constantly changing.” Some of his creations exude a Burning Man assemblage vibe, such as this tree stump flowering with old bottles, pots and broken crockery.
“It’s not like I consciously try to copy folk artists,” Scharf says. “But we have something in common: Don’t throw things away, use every knickknack for something, utilize the bits and pieces of your life and decorate with it. “ (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
Much of Scharf’s artistic output explores the tensions between a primordial past and a technological future. “I am interested in the relationship between the organic and the manmade,” he says. “Nature has a way of finding its own way into the cracks of a city and coexisting.”
Scharf’s garden reflects these contrasts. Works such as his 2000 bronze waterworks, “Fountain of Life,” and the totem poles of crockery provide architectural focal points in a rustic landscape. It is, Scharf admits, not everyone’s cup of tea.
“Maybe it does look mutant compared to the average garden, like a monster that is let go on its own,” he says. “I don’t look at that as a bad thing.” (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
A hummingbird, one of the many that visit daily, drinks from Scharf’s “Fountain of Life.” Though his work often depicts otherworldly realms, the artist says the natural world remains his chief inspiration. “Things that look fantastic and preposterous in a painting really aren’t,” he says. “Nature is so much crazier and more magical than any art can be. Art can only try to get close to that.”
More artists’ homes:
For a peek inside the Malibu seaside home of painter Charles Arnoldi.
The have-to-see-it-to-believe-it house of artist Anado McLauchlin and art historian Richard Schultz.
The private world of avant-garde puppeteer and performance artist Paul Zaloom. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
