The Hollywood Reporter's 25 Most Influential Interior Designers in L.A.

The way Thomas Callaway sees it, interior design is a relationship business. And so is Hollywood. With that in mind, it’s easy to see how the onetime actor parlayed his Hollywood connections into a career in design. Callaway, as it turns out, met Emilio Estevez on the set of the film Young Guns, which led to one of his first commissions. “Word-of-mouth is your greatest source of new work, more than any advertising or article written about you,” says Callaway, who started his firm in 1989. While he began strictly as an interior designer, an interest in architecture led him to designing homes “from scratch” in 1994.

“After that, a good deal of our projects became from the ground up,” says Callaway, who recently built a Santa Monica residence for Silbermann. Other recent work includes a contemporary Malibu residence for former Lakers coach Pat Riley. That project, completed in summer 2011, was the first ground-up contemporary property Callaway designed. Much of his work has focused on traditional residences — what the designer, who has a furniture line and a forthcoming textile line, calls “classic interiors and architecture.”

Pet peeve: “Being different for different’s sake. Like, how far out there can I go and have someone say ‘wow.’ I find that tedious.”