the film industry as a set decorator. In 1992 she was a production assistant on HouseSitter, and the following year she served as an uncredited assistant art director on So I Married an Axe Murderer. After working small roles on several sets she decided not to pursue a film career, though the experience did lead to an interior design commission from a film producer. While working as a hostess at a Beverly Hills restaurant in 1994, she was scouted by a Playboy photographer and was featured as September Playmate of the Month under the name Kelly Gallagher. She used the money from the photoshoot to pay off student loans and help start her interior design business. Design career Early projects and hotel design (1990s-2000s) In 1995 Wearstler opened Kelly Wearstler Interior Design, her own design firm. The following year she was introduced to real estate developer Brad Korzen, who hired her to design his house in the Hollywood Hills and several residential properties owned by Korzen's company Kor Realty Group. The first of the residences was the Avalon hotel in Beverly Hills, which re-opened in 1999 with a style described in the press as "a playful take on mid-century modernism." With apartments filled with pieces from modernist artists such as Arne Jacobsen, Eero Saarinen and George Nelson, The New York Times would write a decade later that "her playful, elegantly over-the-top designs for the Avalon Beverly Hills changed the look of boutique hotels around the world." In 2000, she designed the small Maison 140 hotel in Beverly Hills. Her work on the Avalon and the Maison 140 led to a commission designing Viceroy Hotels and Resorts, a new chain of boutique hotels, which she gave an "almost theatrical" Hollywood aesthetic. The Viceroy in Palm Springs became "her most accomplished work" in 2001, and the design of the Viceroy that opened a year later in Santa Monica also earning praise in the press. By that time she was also working on the Viceroy Miami, and other notable designs include Viceroy Anguilla on the island of Anguilla and The Tides Hotel South Beach in Miami. Elle Decor would later write that "her luxury hotel interiors" featured "elegant bergère chairs, unexpected lacquer finishes (glistening lemon yellows, Amazon parrot greens) and old-style stately wallpapers." As of 2002 she had also completed design projects for clients such as Mercury Records, Ben Stiller, and Jeanne Tripplehorn.