“Don’t bite me, baby!” Thomas Schoos is playfully dipping his finger into one of the koi ponds in his Polynesian-influenced studio garden. “Aren’t they cute? This is like bathwater,” he coos as the giant orange fishes swish around and hide under a wooden walkway over the water.
This hidden Shangri-La off Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood serves as a place of creative inspiration and think tank for Schoos and his employees, along with a venue party space filled with hidden nooks and crannies where you want to get lost in the bamboo brush. This is definitely not your average work space, with its giant taxidermy leopard in a glass case and a large-scale endangered species painting of an ostrich greeting you from behind the Balinese wooden doorway. Serene Buddha statues are dotted throughout the grounds along with a flourishing peyote plant near the bar. In Schoos’ “den” there is an African-American male statue clad in silver and gold with layers of South African water amber beads that looks worthy of a National Geographic exhibition. “These are the rarest in the world! Some are really old and some are new, but they are insanely beautiful,” says Schoos. At that moment, two stunning hyacinth blue macaws named Molly and Rio come into view, stealing the limelight from the chunky beads. The creatures are sitting on the shoulders of their caretaker, or “bird walker,” who just popped out from behind the carefully choreographed foliage. German-born Schoos is teeming with palpable enthusiasm that juts out from behind his stylish horn-rimmed glasses. “At night, it’s like la-la-land,” he says. “Everything is all lit up, and all of the fireplaces are on.”
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