Giving 'blue whale' a new look.

Pacific Design Center's new president, Andy Wolf, is navigating a new course by mixing fashion and furniture and inviting in the public

Able to verbally parry New York City-style but smooth as custard when wanting to charm, is Andrew "Andy" Wolf, new president of the resplendent but struggling Pacific Design Center.

"You can't talk about vacancy rates right now, we are the midst of a change," declares Wolf, 44, dismissing a reporter's question. "We are shifting over the Green Building to fashion (and moving current tenants to the Blue Building). The Blue Building is 95 percent leased when the switch is done."

The PDC is the one of the architectural conversation pieces of Los Angeles, its large buildings, blue and green, dominating the West Hollywood landscape.

The 950,000-square-foot Blue Building, often called the "Blue Whale," was constructed in 1975, and the 500,000-square-foot Green Building was added in the heady days of 1988.

Until Wolf's appointment to his post last year, the PDC exclusively was a furnishings showroom, and geared to the trade. Decorators, designers, architects and others converged upon the PDC to purchase upscale beds, tables, lamps, wallcoverings, floorings and other goods, for homes, restaurants, institutions and hotels. Most showrooms were not open to ordinary shoppers.

The 1990s Southland recession ripped hard through the PDC, shuttering showrooms, and deep-freezing plans to add a third "Red Building" to the complex.

Hammered by vacancies and deadbeat tenants, PDC owner Catellus Corp. managed to renegotiate the mortgage on the complex in 1993. "We were never in bankruptcy, never anything happened like that. I don't know where that rumor comes from," asserts Wolf. "We were fine then, we are fine now."

Wolf's bold and controversial counterattack against recession includes opening up the PDC to the hoi-polloi, and convert the Green Building into an apparel showroom. (Wolf does not call the Green Building the "Center Green" as it was titled by PDC officials. "It is all the PDC," he says, when discussing the two buildings, blue and green.)

Two flanks of Wolf's march: Open a new restaurant-bar, "Fusion at PDC," as a central watering hole, and increase ties to the region's other creative communities, in fashion or Hollywood.

"The restaurant, Fusion at PDC, will allow people to meet and talk, after a show or a seminar here. It will be a great equalizer," says Wolf. "It will help create a sense of community."

Not all of Wolf's plans sit well with the PDC crowd; some prefer dealing with the trade, and others wonder if the PDC will lose its identity as a furniture showroom.

"Sure, cover your body and walls in one stop," jokes one showroom manager. "Maybe I'll design a line of lingerie lamps."

Wolf, who pumps iron at Gold's Gym in Hollywood, has no doubts about moving into women's apparel.

"It's the right thing to do, it's absolutely L.A.," he contends, defending his move into fashion. "We are related industries (fashion and furnishings). We are a fashion capital and a design capital, and it makes sense for the two to spin off each other. If we don't do something to promote fashion and design here, we are going to lose it all to Las Vegas."

Wolf is targeting upscale women's apparel manufacturers, and says letters of intent have been signed for 183,000 square feet of space.

The other controversy brewing at PDC and in the furnishings world is the evolution in the 1990s of the PDC into a consumer showroom. In something of a high-wire act, Wolf is trying to draw in new shoppers, but maintain the high-end, elite feel of the PDC.

Playing both sides against the middle, Wolf has added a "concierge" service to the PDC. In this way, ordinary shoppers are encouraged to first sign up with a licensed decorator, who will lead them through the showrooms, and "talk the talk" to showroom managers.

It is the kind of bold move that inspires Wolf's lawyer, Ronald Garber of the Beverly Hills law firm Richman, Lawrence, Mann, Greene, Arbiter & Chizever, to call Wolf a rare "visionary" who some day will be running a Hollywood studio.

"He has a tremendous background. I'd say in three to five years you'll see him running a studio. He's that kind of guy," says Garber.

Wolf laughs when asked which studio he will run. A native of New Haven, Conn., he was almost literally born to the furniture business, to a family which manufactured cabinetry. A career in the woodworking world, however, was not to be.

"My family wouldn't allow me to go into the business," Wolf maintains. "They told me to study, to study something unrelated to furniture."

Wolf attended Trinity College in Connecticut, and then earned a law degree from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. That led to five years of practice for a large law firm in New York City.

Ultimately, however, the practice of law led Wolf into the arts. "The mayor of New Haven appointed me to a commission on cultural affairs. I realized then I wanted to be in the arts, in the management side of the business."

That led Wolf back to the ivied halls, this time to Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, for a master's in administration.

Bristling with academic degrees, Wolf next landed a job with the United Nations, helping to organize and publicize the UN "Earth Day" held in 1992 in Rio De Janeiro.

The halfhearted U.S. participation in that event (some say the U.S. badly botched matters) led Wolf to personally rebuke a U.S. president.

"I waited in line an hour to tell Bush (then-President George Bush) that I couldn't wait to vote to evict him in the fall," recalls Wolf. "He handled it pretty well."

When not reading the riot act to national chief executives, Wolf is an avid reader of biographies, John Grisham novels and, for daily fare, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.

In addition to working out at Gold's Gym (Wolf says the weight lifters there do not intimidate him, because he has an escort platoon of designers who are also members of the health club), Wolf also likes to cycle on weekends.

Travel is another obsession, and Wolf once traveled across East Africa by balloon, at a typical height of 100 feet.

"It was an interesting trip; I ended up teaching New Yorker-ese to the international crowd" - including scatological imprecations, Wolf recalls.

Back in West Hollywood, Wolf says that the region needs to start asserting itself as a design and financial center, and win back business that has gone elsewhere.

"It is crazy that people are now holding major apparel shows in Las Vegas, instead of here. How has that happened? We have got to start to go after business, and sell the many, many attributes we have," says Wolf. "I hope that by keeping the PDC on the world map, I will be doing my part for that."

RELATED ARTICLE: Andrew "Andy" Wolf

Native of: New Haven, Conn. Resident of: Hollywood Age: 44 Education: B.A. from Trinity College, LL.D. from Georgetown University, M.P.A., Harvard University