Variations to a Theme: William Haines at Sunnylands

The exhibition, Variations to a Theme: William Haines at Sunnylands, spotlights the custom-made furniture and interior décor that the legendary designer William Haines created for the extraordinary home that Walter and Leonore Annenberg constructed in the Southern California desert between 1963 and 1966.

Along with the Annenbergs, a dream team of Haines, his design partner Ted Graber, architect A. Quincy Jones, and variety of renown landscape architects fashioned 200 acres of raw desert scrub into an iconic midcentury modern estate that, to this day, houses the largest extant collection of William Haines furnishings in the world. In his signature Hollywood Regency style, Haines designed and installed more than 450 pieces—cabinets, tables, consoles, chairs, lamps, etc.—for the 25,000-square-foot home.

The design concept for the exhibition focused on keeping attention on the furniture while providing context via Haines’s drawings and material choices as well as utilizing vignettes to communicate how the objects lived in their original spaces. Two murals were commissioned to give visitors a sense of context without distracting from the pieces themselves.