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Fall/Winter 2003
By Jeanie Pyon

Courteney's Show Goes On

     Courteney Cox Arquette never stops looking for great home buys. While shooting a recent Coca-Cola commercial--the one where she packs husband David Arquette's glass with so much ice that she gets the lion's share of the last can-- she took fancy to the green leather Eames chair on the set and decided to buy it. Of course, the ultramodern home you see in the ad isn't theirs. The paintings are ours, though, Cox Arquette points out, sitting in the master bathroom of their real home in the Hollywood Hills. It's house No. 7 for the actress, who has bought, redecorated and sold five residences since arriving in Los Angeles in 1986. (No. 6 is a Malibu beach place she still owns.
     Through Family Ties (she played the girlfriend of Michael J. Fox's character), a crop of hot movies (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and the Scream series), and nine seasons of Friends, Cox Arquette, 39, has hired multiple teams of contractors and designers, made scores of decisions involving paint chips and fabric swatches, gone through nine different decor schemes (three in her old Brentwood, Calif., house alone) and bought several warehouses worth of furniture. I'm most happy when I have a lot to do, and the more I have to do, the more I get accomplished, she says.
     Now the tireless actress will be taming spaces in the public arena: The new decorating series she and Arquette are producing, Mix it Up, airs this fall on the WE: Women's Entertainment Network (Arquette also contributes design ideas and music). On the show, a design conflict between two people who live together-- a couple, mother and daughter, roommates--gets resolved within three days for less than $2,500.
     Like many a compelling reality TV show, Mix it UP is based on, well, real life. I was sitting around and talking wiht some friends of mine, says Cox Arquette. Someone brought up the fact that when David moved in, everything changed in my home because he had so much stuff to incorporate. I just thought it would be a great idea for a show. Cox Arquette hopes the show will have something for everyone. There's always some conflict-- people have problems in their relationships because they can't come together on their style, she says, or one person's a neat freak and the other's a clutterbug.
     On both counts, the couple would know. Arquette loves collecting massive quantities of everything from amusement-park lawn sculpture to lunch boxes to furniture-size shoes-- plus he has an extravagant wardrobe. Cox Arquette, while not exactly a minimalist, doesn't love things for their own sake. I won't go to a flea market with David ever again because he likes to stop and see every little piece that's on each table, she says. Me, I'm like radar: I go straight to what we might need or things I'm attracted to. I don't sift through very well. but David could look at thousands of things. It drives me crazy.
     When it came to fitting Arquette's purchases into their home, Cox Arquette did a Harry Truman and pursued a containment policy. It's not easy to pull off however. If only I could confine all his stuff to his study-- but David overflows through the rest of the house, she says laughing, so Cox Arquette maximizes storage with high shelves on the ceiling, where ever I can. When she runs out of room in the house, she goes outside: We have two garages here, and we're taking one and making a whole wardrobe wall for his clothes. There are moments, though, when she uses her veto power. When we were first dating, I definitely tried to work his stuff into the house, she says. We had this figure from A Clockwork Orange, with a woman in bondage as the base, and I tried to work that into my living room. Now I don't give his things that much of a chance.
     It's clear when you see her multitasking that Cox Arquette was born to produce. During this interview, she resolved plumbing issues in her Malibu home, planned the schedule for next week's house-guests, and wrote thank-you notes with her assistant, all while having her hair, makeup and manicure done. I didn't know I wanted to be a producer, but when the show didn't work out with another production company I opened my own, says Cox Arquette. She soon relished being the boss. I'm not walking into someone's office and going "Can I use the editing room" I own the editing room, she says. "I'm so happy."
     Mix It Up is a natural new home for Cox Arquette. Before she became an actress, she was an architecture student at Mount Vernon College in Washington D.C. That's what I wanted to be, she says, adding, "I would go back. I'm interested in [architects like John] Lautner, [Richard] Neutra, A. Quincy Jones and Harold Levitt." Design runs in her family. Her father, now deceased, owned a pool construction company, and her mother made a stylish home in a comfortable suburb of Birmingham, Ala., where Cox Arquette grew up. Early on, she exhibited a love of design i n the room she shared with her sister Dottie: "I was constantly taking our twin beds and her stereo and moving them around."
     Since then, Cox Arquette has traded up quite a bit. The couple's previous home, a 1950's single story bungalow in Brentwood,was decorated in a modern Moroccan-meets-art-decco style when it was sold to Rikki Lake last December for close to $6.5 million. in February they bought ther current four-bedroom home for about $4.5 million (outbidding Ellen DeGeneres). The one -story modern stone and glass marvel, designed by Kip Kelly, includes an infinity pool, which appears to drop off the horizon on one side. A massive stone floor-to-ceiling, double sided fireplace is the hub around which are situated a dining room, screening room, kitchen, extended living room, master and guest bedrooms, and two bathrooms. Classic and midcentury-modern furniture, including a Hans Wegner rope chair, punctuates the space. "There's so much color in this house," she says. "I'm geared to fuchsia, chartreuse, icy blue. David and I put it together, so it's both our personalities." Beyond the mutal color splash-out, the other obvious evidence of Arquette are the three-foot-high red-and-gold carnivalesque letters that greet visitors at the entrance. They spell out the French phrase coq d or, which means "golden rooster."
     The Malibu home, designed by iconic L.A. architect Lautner, is composed almost entirely of glass and wood, with sweeping curves that reflect the shoreline. Cox Arquette paid $10 million for it two years ago and swears she'll never sell it. "The beach house was way out of my range at the time" -- even though the year before, the Friends cast had each successfully negotiated salaries of $750,000 per episode--"but real estate is a good investment, and I always feel like things will work out," she says. "still, it was more money than I should have spent."
     You get the feeling that Cox Arquette is careful with cash- a good quality in aproducer working on a design show for the masses. And she's still not completely accustomed to working without a budget. She contrasts her style with that of co-star Jennifer Aniston and Aniston's husband, Brad Pitt, who recently completed renovating their $13.5 million, six-bedroom French Provincial-style house in Beverly Hills. "It's phenomenal. Brad let his imagination go wild and accomplished every goal he tried to reach- just the detail that was put into the house, like the door hinges," says Cox Arquette. "While I don't want to wait , he's probaly more patient and really resourceful. I've always done things on a budget until now and never really let myself go to that extreme."
     As Cox Arquette is about to sit for her portrait in living room, she directs two assistants to move a large planter. Suddenly she darts to and from the kitchen, then drops to the floor, Dissolve It! bottle in hand. She's spotted a scratch in the finish, and she's scrubbing and muttering about how her dog is allowed to make scratches in the stained- wood floor, but photographers and their crews aren't and, boy will David be mad. Moments later, she alights to her stilettoed feet, with barely a crease in her Yves Saint Laurent pencil skirt. Scratch gone, crisis averted, collective sign. After all, good design is in the details.