HUSTLE CULTURE

Kelly Wearstler is a one-woman creative tour de force. The Los Angeles-based designer, equal parts interior designer, object maker, and overall experimenter, has built an empire on maximal vision. This fall, she adds another title to her expanding résumé: art dealer. Her new project, Side Hustle, is a hybrid curatorial platform (with a graphic identity by Office Ben Ganz) and roving gallery devoted to radical experimentation in collectible design and art.

The inaugural exhibition, Again, Differently, opened October 16 on the grounds of Wearstler’s Beverly Hills estate in her pool house — once the screening room of the Broccoli family, longtime guardians of the James Bond franchise. On opening night, choreographer Madeline Hollander staged COUNTDOWN (2025), an aquatic performance in which synchronized swimmers dropped one by one into Wearstler’s pool as guests watched from the deck. Grammy-nominated producer Kenny Beats provided an ambient score, along with a limited-edition green Fender guitar made in Japan, while fragrance brand Perfumehead filled the pool house with a custom scent.

Meanwhile, inside the pool house, Again, Differently gathers ten artists from disparate disciplines: Leonor Antunes, Kenny Beats, Sonia Gomes, Madeline Hollander, Karl Holmqvist, Dozie Kanu, Sam Klemick, Nynke Koster, Mariko Makino, and Joana Schneider. Ranging from sculptors and installation artists to performance-based practitioners, designers, and textile or craft-focused makers, the contributors bridge fine art, design, architecture, choreography, and material experimentation. Each one was invited to work “outside what they normally do,” as Wearstler puts it. Textile artist Sonia Gomes, for example, traded fabric for bronze, casting pumpkin-like sculptures, while chef-turned-sculptor Mariko Makino produced wooden and neon light forms. Artist Dozie Kanu produced a limited-edition pendant lamp, Anti-Climb Guiding Block. “When assembling all these artists, I was looking at form, medium, and voice. What art means to them, and how they approach collaboration,” she explains.

Part salon, part retail experiment, Side Hustle extends from Wearstler’s own collecting practice, which she calls Collected Finds. The idea is to give artists, musicians, designers, and other creatives a place to test ideas, whether in art, sound, scent, or dance. “It’s a free-spirit platform,” she says, born from the constant cross-pollination inside her 65-person studio, founded in 1995. The name Side Hustle winks at both the project’s status as Wearstler’s own offshoot project and the fact that many of its participants came to art through other careers.

Curating comes naturally to Wearstler. “All day long I’m curating, sourcing, and looking at different materials,” she says. But Side Hustle is not another white-cube gallery. True to her hostess instincts, she wanted “something close to home — literally.” Opening her Beverly Hills house to the public, she also channels its cinematic past: the house “was a place of amazing, creative, collaborative energy — so much Hollywood history,” she says. “You can still feel the spirit of that.”