The house is taller than it is wide. The living room is around 30 feet high,” says Todd Oldham of the “very strange” home that he and his partner (in business and in life), Tony Longoria, purchased in the Poconos in 1997. “We got the house just after it was finished.” It was “a blank slate,” Oldham adds, “so I went to town.”
The house is among his long-term projects, one of the many overlapping creative endeavors he has engaged in over the 40-plus years he has spent making the world a more interesting place to live.
Oldham had his own clothing line through the 1990s (and hosted MTV’s House of Style), yet the wasteful whims of fashion always weighed on him. While he was putting the finishing touches on an intricately made dress to be worn by Cindy Crawford for his final fashion show, he remembers thinking, Really? This is how you’re going to spend your time? He decided it wouldn’t be: “I never minded doing as much as possible, but for some reason that dress did something to me.”
He has done all manner of other things in addition to his fashion line, including producing monographs for AMMO Books on Alexander Girard, Joan Jett, Wayne White, Charley Harper, and others and designing tableware and fabrics for Fishs Eddy, interiors for hotels, and craft kits for kids.
Now, he’s turning to his past work. After years of experience partnering with museums, “I knew how to deal with an archive,” he says. “I wanted to make sure, should I want to use the endless things we made — hundreds of custom textiles, thousands of handmade buttons — they’d be in good shape. I got it out about a year ago and started to play around.” That led to his latest endeavor: Todd Oldham Maker Shop. He dug into his archive — the buttons and textiles and uncut bandanna fabric and custom silk prints and more — to create a sustainable collection of clothing and home accessories. There are quilts made from fashion textiles, end tables topped with prototype tiles, and crocheted throw blankets constructed out of hand-dyed yarns collected over decades so each one is unique. He will be collaborating with artists including his nephew Presley Oldham, Amy Sedaris, Larry Krone, Kathleen Hanna, Daniele Frazier, and She Chimp, who is hand-lettering text for the website.
As for the house, it “has never been finished,” he says, “as I kind of view design like gardening: You are just constantly doing something. It has been in a constant state of change, design just piling up.”
The Living Room: Oldham and Longoria’s dog, Eve, stands on the back of a couch that’s partially strewn with fabric from Pendleton. The ottoman is covered in a tablecloth Oldham made for Fishs Eddy from Charley Harper designs, and the afghan in the corner is from Todd Oldham Maker Shop. The framed birds are also by Harper. The painting above the window is by Woodrow White, and the painting with a red G is by Woodrow’s father, Wayne White.
The Living-Room Windows: Oldham created the crystal-adorned window treatments himself. The fireplace in the center blows soot, so Oldham thought he would incorporate it into the brick pattern he painted above it: “And then I kept going to make a background for that Robert Hawkins painting.”
The Stairs: “The stripes throughout the house are all painted in dimensions of three,” Oldham says: “six inches, nine inches, and 12 inches wide.” The stairs lead to the bedroom on the left of the landing, which is surrounded by pink and purple stripes.
The FLOR carpeting continues throughout the house and into the living room. “It’s from their office selection,” Oldham says. “I got 18 different tiles of the most boring tans and grays and then put the whole thing in. I plumbed it off the tiniest part of the house-the carpet lines up in the dining room, but in the entire house the carpet is crooked.”
“It took me a year to do,” Oldham says of the wall covering that entailed cutting out shapes of handmade Japanese paper and applying them to the wall he painted with 20 coats of lacquer. There is a handmade scrub brush on the counter and an original jug from Appalachia. The Russel Wright ceramic vase has flowers by Oldham’s mother made from coral, real pearls, and more.
The Bedroom: “The quilt is an amalgam of literally every year I made clothing, with some piece of fabric from all the collections,” Oldham says. “Our bedroom is kind of stuck on the outside of the house, and we had a leak and it damaged the paint and wall. I didn’t want to put it back like it was, so I just put up dripping red plywood and added a few more drips.”
Eve’s “Room”: Oldham turned this corner of the dining room over to their dog; Eve’s water and food bowls have pride of place. The tree is made by a local chain-saw artist, while the owl and Thumper are from a “bizarre Disney set of pressed cardboard from around the ’50s,” he says. As for the painting of the woman’s head, he has six of them — each sporting real hair.
His Studio: “My studio downstairs can also be an extra guest room,” Oldham says. The two tables are from Maker Shop. “The tiles are prototypes we made for hotels, residences, and malls — some of them never put in production — so all the tables are unique.” The photograph of Sharon Tate with a snowman was taken by Roman Polanski during a shoot for Playboy.
The Living Room: Oldham and Longoria’s dog, Eve, stands on the back of a couch that’s partially strewn with fabric from Pendleton. The ottoman is covered in a tablecloth Oldham made for Fishs Eddy from Charley Harper designs, and the afghan in the corner is from Todd Oldham Maker Shop. The framed birds are also by Harper. The painting above the window is by Woodrow White, and the painting with a red G is by Woodrow’s father, Wayne White.
The Living-Room Windows: Oldham created the crystal-adorned window treatments himself. The fireplace in the center blows soot, so Oldham thought he would incorporate it into the brick pattern he painted above it: “And then I kept going to make a background for that Robert Hawkins painting.”
The Stairs: “The stripes throughout the house are all painted in dimensions of three,” Oldham says: “six inches, nine inches, and 12 inches wide.” The stairs lead to the bedroom on the left of the landing, which is surrounded by pink and purple stripes.
The FLOR carpeting continues throughout the house and into the living room. “It’s from their office selection,” Oldham says. “I got 18 different tiles of the most boring tans and grays and then put the whole thing in. I plumbed it off the tiniest part of the house-the carpet lines up in the dining room, but in the entire house the carpet is crooked.”
“It took me a year to do,” Oldham says of the wall covering that entailed cutting out shapes of handmade Japanese paper and applying them to the wall he painted with 20 coats of lacquer. There is a handmade scrub brush on the counter and an original jug from Appalachia. The Russel Wright ceramic vase has flowers by Oldham’s mother made from coral, real pearls, and more.
The Bedroom: “The quilt is an amalgam of literally every year I made clothing, with some piece of fabric from all the collections,” Oldham says. “Our bedroom is kind of stuck on the outside of the house, and we had a leak and it damaged the paint and wall. I didn’t want to put it back like it was, so I just put up dripping red plywood and added a few more drips.”
Eve’s “Room”: Oldham turned this corner of the dining room over to their dog; Eve’s water and food bowls have pride of place. The tree is made by a local chain-saw artist, while the owl and Thumper are from a “bizarre Disney set of pressed cardboard from around the ’50s,” he says. As for the painting of the woman’s head, he has six of them — each sporting real hair.
His Studio: “My studio downstairs can also be an extra guest room,” Oldham says. The two tables are from Maker Shop. “The tiles are prototypes we made for hotels, residences, and malls — some of them never put in production — so all the tables are unique.” The photograph of Sharon Tate with a snowman was taken by Roman Polanski during a shoot for Playboy.
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