Light, sound, touch: vision

Eric Brun-Sanglard, who is blind, relies on other senses to visualize interiors. He taps his feet to get a feel for the scale of rooms, he absorbs the sun on his face and hands to know when and where the light falls and he touches everything -- walls, windows, doorknobs, moldings, tiles, fabrics and plants -- to literally get a feel for a home’s shape, texture and dimension.

“When I discover a house that needs work, I don’t see what’s there, so it’s easier for me to visualize the potential,” says Brun-Sanglard, 42, an interior designer who has worked on homes throughout Los Angeles, including midcentury Bel-Air retreats and Hancock Park Mediterranean mansions.

When it came to remodeling his West Hollywood house -- once a forlorn fixer, now a sleek city oasis with water features and subtle Zen detailing -- it was just another day in the converted home office for Brun-Sanglard, who has been professionally remodeling, decorating and landscaping homes for nine years.

For his home, he designed an expanded and updated kitchen, created a master bedroom suite with a fireplace and walk-in closet, and selected a palette of earth-tone furnishings throughout. “My overall style is masculine, but I like to get in lots of natural materials and soft fabrics like cashmere and silk,” Brun-Sanglard says.

Sure, the idea of a blind designer might sound absurd. And in Brun-Sanglard’s case, it even has an odder twist: He came to the profession after losing his sight. “Vision is great, but design is also about texture, light and sounds,” says Brun-Sanglard, who landed in Los Angeles from France more than two decades ago but still looks perfectly Cote d’Azur casual in white linen drawstring pants and a cashmere sweater.

Brun-Sanglard’s greatest gift as a designer, however, may be less about sourcing sofas and side tables and more about finding a home’s optimal flow, something he says is a direct result of his blindness. For this he spends days walking through a house until he has memorized its movement from room to room, a process he describes as “almost like doing psychotherapy. I get a subconscious feeling and understanding of what needs to be done. It’s about finding out how homes breathe and how rooms need to work together,” he says.

To study the layout of a house, he reconfigured a child’s toy into a primitive Braille machine that pops out floor plans with raised lines. By running his fingers over the printouts, he figures out how to correct the flow by moving, expanding and rethinking rooms, rerouting passages, shifting walls and creating an interior logic that he says is often “locked up in homes like a series of boxes.”

“Eric’s most extraordinary strength is his sense of space,” says Peter Dunham, an interior. “If you think about it, that’s the one thing that would seem to be most challenging to someone who is blind, but that’s what he’s strongest at.”

“I’ve seen about five of his houses, and the whole design of them was amazing,” says Craig Van Skaik, who has hired Brun-Sanglard to remodel his 7,000-square-foot Hancock Park Tudor. “He knows where things need to go. He’s designed an enormous kitchen-den-dining area, and has also redesigned six bathrooms as well as the master bedroom..”

Before he lost his sight, “houses were for entertaining and impressing friends,” says Brun-Sanglard, whose retinas detached in 1995 as a result of a virus associated with HIV. “Afterward, designing homes became about creating manageable little worlds. The experience gave me a craving to build a very safe haven.”

He gave up his career as an advertising executive who shuttled between L.A., New York and Paris and began flipping houses with his then-boyfriend. One year later, they started taking on clients as a full-service remodel team, with Brun-Sanglard working as the designer and his partner as the contractor.

Watching Brun-Sanglard walk through his home, it’s difficult to tell he’s blind. Legion, his seeing-eye dog, lies on the dark wood floors, officially off-duty as Brun-Sanglard cooks and cleans, reads and writes e-mails with the help of a speech-to-text program, soaks in the tub while listening to TV and screens calls via a talking Palm Pilot.

Three stairs separating the living and dining rooms look like a hazard-in-the-making for the sightless. But Brun-Sanglard, who walks up and down the steps almost without hesitating, says they were one of the house’s main selling points.

“I saw potential in this house because of the high ceiling in the living room, and I immediately loved those steps going up to the dining room,” says Brun-Sanglard, who has filled the house with art and objects from his travels to Bali. “I’d never gone there when I was sighted. I started building a new memory bank based on my senses when I went there.”

Even after Brun-Sanglard and his boyfriend broke up in 1997, they continued working together. At the pinnacle of their professional partnership in 1998, he was living the high life, making more money as a designer than he had as an executive, and redesigning his own 3,500-square-foot Hollywood Hills villa with city-to-ocean views.

“Even though I’m blind I like great views,” he says. With its swimming pool, private patios and Balinese-inspired indoor-outdoor rooms, he saw the home as proof that he was back on top.

But Brun-Sanglard says the most difficult challenge in his life was still to come. In 2000, the designer says he discovered that his partner had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from him by obtaining credit cards in his name. “Within a year, I owed $250,000 on my American Express and had another $350,000 to repay from another line of credit,” he says.

He was forced to put the Hollywood Hills home on the market in July 2001 for $1.85 million, a last-ditch measure to repay part of the debt that had been amassed in his name. “I had lost my company, my home, most importantly my sense of trust. I found myself alone with no money, no job and a big depression,” Brun-Sanglard says.

At that point “remodeling” took on new meaning. “I decided that I wanted to remodel myself too. Even though I was blind, I had still been living in a world based on appearances, and I had been trying to prove to the world that I was OK,” he says.

With a loan from his family, Brun-Sanglard bought his present house on Crescent Heights Boulevard in 2001 and spent six months renovating it. Putting a fence around the property, one of his signature design statements, became even more important in creating a sense of safety, and today the 8-foot wall made of twigs and stained wood is one of the house’s stand-out characteristics. Water features in the front and backyards anchor and orient the house via sound, and throughout, he has planted sweet-smelling plants like jasmine and lavender.

After completing the house, Brun-Sanglard was ready to strike out on his own as a designer. His first project, a midcentury house in Beachwood Canyon, led to more work, and now he’s back to juggling projects, including a 6,000-square-foot Hancock Park English Tudor that’s in the planning phase. In the last four years, Brun-Sanglard has worked on five large-scale projects.

Richard Krug, a real estate agent for Sotheby’s International Realty, hired the designer to remodel two of his homes. “He knows exactly what to do when it comes to design,” says Krug. “It’s as if everyone knows Eric’s blind except Eric.”

“I had to lose everything, including my sight, to get my own vision, and I want to share that with other people, to show them that we only set our own limitations,” says Brun-Sanglard, who adds that he has been symptom-free of HIV for eight years.

And what would a comeback story be without landing your own TV show? He is hammering out a deal for his own TV makeover show that’s scheduled to air later this summer on A&E.; He’ll work with sighted couples having troubling communicating a shared design vision.

When his Palm Pilot announces a call from his producer, Brun-Sanglard politely excuses himself. In search of a little privacy, he walks up the stairs, through the dining room, past the kitchen and toward the back garden where he’s soon hidden by towering papyrus plants.