A Los Angeles designer and collector creates a surreal hangout where taxidermied dogs play chess and Elton John swings by for a chat. DESCRIBING THE BIZARRE, highly imaginative world of Blaine Halvorson is like trying to tell someone about a color they have never seen - nearly impossible. Halvorson, a tall, heavily tattooed 42-year-old whose laid-back demeanor hides an obsessive intensity, is a voracious collector of contemporary art, taxidermy and myriad curiosities, from old dentures and glass eyeballs to detached doll heads and faceless anatomical mannequins. These are meticulously arranged in macabre vignettes at his 4,500-square-foot studio in Culver City, Calif. In one installation, a painting of freshly butchered carcasses serves as the focal point for a herd of taxidermied dogs panting before a refrigerated case of plastic meat. In another, a row of jury chairs from an early-20th-century New York courtroom face a series of nine-foot-high mixed-media renderings of real, and very menacing, mug shots. Halvorson opened the invitation-only space, a sort of dark Disneyland for adults, just three months ago; it has since become a word-of-mouth secret among Hollywood's art-world insiders. "From a safari of taxidermy to humorous pop culture references, morbid guilty pleasures and an obsession with deconstruction, it's been a while since I've seen such a conceptual artistic intention so effectively materialize into a tangible, salable and utterly creative enterprise," says Elton John, who recently stopped by to view the studio. Part of the attraction is seeing a truly incomparable vision realized, and part of it is meeting Halvorson, who, with his artfully worn-in clothing, elaborate tattoos and beard from a bygone era, is like a living art project himself. Originally from Bozeman, Mont., where he still keeps a home - he built it while working for the architect Jonathan Foote, and bought it years later - these days Halvorson has his hand in more creative endeavors than most people tackle in a lifetime: designing clothes, cobbling shoes and binding books, to name a few. His latest project is MadeWorn, a rugged men's clothing line that made its debut earlier this year at Maxfield and is now available by appointment only at his studio. The studiously distressed clothes - ripped, stained, faded, patched, wrinkled, weathered - are handmade in Japan and have been worn by Brad Pitt, Jude Law and Damien Hirst. Amazingly, each replica of, say, a frayed sweatshirt, is "aged" in exactly the same way, with a near-maniacal attention to detail. Halvorson calls the look "homeless chic," but it has more of a rumpled Civil War-era gentleman vibe. Halvorson has just completed his first women's collection as well; the pieces resemble hand-me-downs from a stylish pioneer schoolmarm. This seems apropos, since they are so of a piece with Halvorson's found-object aesthetic that they walk the line between art and fashion. The actress Diane Keaton, who has become a passionate design enthusiast, was impressed enough to call, as Halvorson puts it, "half the staff, the buyer, the owner and her salesperson" at Maxfield to insist that he curate the boutique's windows. "I thought, "Wow! Who is this guy!" " Keaton says. His mind is magnificent and he is out there. Visitors can also order shoes that Halvorson cobbles on the premises, using leather he buys from excavated mines and ghost towns, as well as pigskin purses, bags and totes, on which he tattoos elaborate, filigreed, old-school sailor designs. "I want this place to feel like a throwback to the old artisan way of everything being hand-done," he says. This notion is something of a response to his previous business venture: In 1998, as the co-founder of a company called Junkfood Clothing, Halvorson created vintage-looking T-shirts that were in fact new; to do this, he licensed beloved retro pop culture brands. By 2005, when Delta Apparel bought the company for $20 million (plus an additional sum based on profits), Junkfood had over 80 licenses - "from the N.F.L. to the N.B.A., from Disney to Marvel to Star Wars to DC Comics to every band you can think of musically," Halvorson says. Nowhere is Halvorson's passion for the handcrafted and authentic more evident than on his Montana compound, where Amish rocking chairs made out of willow sit on his porch, and the head of a buffalo he shot on Ted Turner's neighboring ranch has been mounted in his kitchen. In his home state, hunting is a way of life, taxidermy is a common design element and rustic, pioneer-type artifacts never go out of style. What seems mystifyingly weird in Los Angeles suddenly makes sense.