Interior designer Cliff Fong has forged a life around collecting, arranging, and recontextualizing beautiful things to create unforgettable spaces that feel elevated, but alive. As founder of the design firm Matt Blacke Inc. and the influential antique showroom Galerie Half, Fong has helped define a distinctly Los Angeles vision of lived-in sophistication. His clients have included Ryan Murphy, Michael Voltaggio, and Ellen DeGeneres—for whom Fong also served as a judge and host on Ellen’s Design Challenge. 

But his most recent project reflected a shift. Faire du Vert—the indoor-outdoor antique showroom he opened with rare plant specialist Paul Anderson in 2023—moves away from the atmosphere of traditional high-end galleries and toward something more open, intuitive, and approachable. Stepping inside feels less like entering a showroom and more like an invitation inside the home of a lifelong collector with excellent taste. 

Antique furniture sits easily alongside functional objects with artistic flourishes and sculptural greenery, all arranged with an effortlessness that belies its precision—a Pierre Jeanneret daybed paired with a Jacques Adnet table lamp, and a Hans J. Wegner Valet Chair. Just around the corner, two large David Cressey planters stand on display. It is here, seated on a Kaare Klint couch from 1930s, Fong speaks with me about his path into design, his evolving philosophy, and what continues to hold his attention. 

Raised between Manhattan and upstate New York, Fong first moved to Los Angeles to pursue an Art History degree at Cal State LA, and never left. He started his career in fashion, working as a buyer, stylist, and designer for Maxfield, Ron Herman, and other international brands before cofounding the artisanal unisex collection, Chatav Ectabit, with Sandy Dalal in 2004. 

Growing up in the aftermath of mid-century design, Fong absorbed the beautiful flourishes around him, whether in an airport or a hospital lobby, whether on an Arne Jacobsen sofa or an Eames chair. As he puts it, “I had always had kind of an affinity for design in the way that I think a person might have an armchair interest in flowers or birds…I found environments very stimulating.” 

The sensitivity eventually sharpened into a skill set as he refined his collecting while still working in fashion. He traces the shift from fashion to interior design back to a moment of clarity about where and how he wanted to start building. “There was a point in my career, when I was working in fashion, where I had the sort of opportunity to move and live and work overseas,” he remembers. “At that moment, I actually had this vision of what it could be like to maybe create something here in Los Angeles. I think it was the first time in my life I ever had a clear vision of what I thought a future could be.”

Matt Blacke Inc. and Galerie Half established Fong as a defining tastemaker within a certain rarefied tier of design. However, Faire du Vert feels like a deliberate turn in a different, more open direction. The new space embraces contrast over cohesion, mixing eras, materials, and sensibilities into compositions that resist easy categorization but feel instinctively right. 

When asked what gives a space a soul, rather than just signaling affluence, Fong compares it to what makes fashion icons special. “I think authenticity is important,” he says. “If you think about the people we admire for their style, it’s not the people who just have deep pockets. The style icons of my generation—whether it was JFK Jr., Carolyn Bessette, Anna Piaggi, or Diane Keaton—were always a mixture of things. Maybe something branded, maybe something vintage, maybe a hand-me-down. But it was always cool and interesting.”

That emphasis on authenticity carries over to the realities of his industry. By nature, interior design caters to a clientele with significant spending power. But Fong is increasingly selective about the kind of environment he wants to help create. “In that world of wild financial freedom, there’s this constant propensity for people with money to build bubbles. And I think there’s kind of good bubbles and bad bubbles,” he says, “Sometimes, uber wealthy people don’t live in a way where they don’t necessarily really consider what goes on in the rest of the world. I think that’s not a healthy kind of entropy at all.” 

Instead, he’s drawn to clients whose lives remain connected to something beyond themselves and their wealth. He explains, “I’ve learned how to help the people I really mean to help, but also now understand better who it is I can’t really help, and I really like working with people who do some good in the world. People who contribute, and don’t use their privilege to shut themselves off.”​

Discussing Galerie Half—the antiques emporium which he co-founded with antiques dealer Cameron Smith in 2009 and has become one of the most in-demand showrooms for celebrities and wealthy Los Angeles homeowners—Fong’s reflections balance pride with critique.“I love Galerie Half, and am very proud of what we all created there,” he says. “But I think in a lot of ways, maybe in the way that I always think of Galerie Half like a child celebrity who just kept going and going. If you’re not taught the right lessons when you’re a kid, you can kind of become a little bit of a monster.”

At Faire du Vert, that tension resolves into a more open-minded, yet still decadent space. Antique pieces sit outdoors on gravel, exposed to the same light and air as the beat-up cars in the autoshop across the street, where power drills whirl as cars whizz by on the street. The effect is subtle but striking: objects typically associated with exclusivity are returned to the real world, where their beauty feels less precious and more alive. 

“I like the idea of a little bit more high and low and things being accessible, also just things being fun and welcoming,” Fong says. “I thought the best way to do that was to explore a space that served indoors and outdoors, which is also the way we live in California.”​

That accessible philosophy extends to how he thinks about living with the things we choose. “It’s always nice to design around something you love, and I would rather have one thing I really loved than a room full of stuff I just kind of liked,” he says. “Taking one’s time and being patient is really important. Impatience is kind of the devil.”

Photographed by Selah Tennberg

Styled by Michael Washington

Written by Oliver Heffron

Grooming: Tim Dueñas

DP: Oren Buchler

Flaunt Film Editor: Daniel Quintero 

Location: Faire Du Vert