Home Improvement : Architecture: After 19 designers and $1.2 million in remodeling, the official mayoral residence is a shrine to style.

Well, of course it’s fabulous.

With its tastefully appointed bedrooms and classic artwork, the restored Getty House is, by all accounts, to die for.

A tribute to Los Angeles’ sense of style, they called it. A city treasure on the order of New York’s Gracie Mansion or Washington’s Blair House.

But Mayor Richard Riordan, who opened the Hancock Park mayoral residence to the public Thursday, still doesn’t plan to live there. He’ll stick with his own Brentwood digs for now, thank you very much.

It took 19 designers and $1.2 million in private funds, plus another million or so in donated parts and union labor, to turn what was at best a fixer-upper opportunity into a tres chic two-bedroom (expandable to four) home. The whole operation was led by civic volunteer and First Girlfriend Nancy Daly, who couldn’t help but describe Getty’s charms to a visitor with the word “fabulous” and a wave of her hand.

Once home to John Barrymore and, most recently, former Mayor Tom Bradley, the 74-year-old English Tudor house tucked into palm-studded Irving Boulevard underwent a yearlong reconstruction and appears to have come through with flying, albeit carefully coordinated, colors.

Sitting on a plush suede chair in the upstairs room designated as his Getty House office, Riordan said he plans to use the three-story home for public events and offer it to visiting dignitaries who need to sleep over.

He acknowledged that the city is not hard-pressed for places to hold official functions, but said the house is preferable because it represents the city and its history.

“It’s like a museum,” he said.

As such, the house is open for free tours. House visitors will need tickets, however, which are available at Ticketmaster.

Daly, who was named chairwoman of the Getty House Restoration Foundation when Riordan created it in 1993, said she hopes to open the house for children’s events.

Bradley, who dropped by Thursday to marvel at the home improvements in his former residence, said it would have been habitable for “quite some time” after he left.

But when spruce-it-up-minded designers first descended on the house--a 1976 gift to the city--they said they discovered it had not only fallen into disrepair but had become what in Los Angeles is unacceptable: it was out of style.

“It was tired,” Daly said.

“There was avocado green paint everywhere and the house was really in the ‘60s or ‘70s,” recalled Polly Kroeger, executive director of the restoration.

No more.

Sure, the designers kept the good stuff: a grandfather clock, the silver and a few dining room pieces. The rest, at least from the perspective of fashion, had to go.

In streamed the fashionable: the antiques, the Tibetan rug, the French chandelier. Designers solicited vendors for most of the other items.

The City Council also chipped in $122,000 to help with the restoration. The Federal Emergency Management Agency offered another $121,000 for earthquake repairs to the chimney and other areas. Officials from President Clinton to Gov. Pete Wilson sent letters to applaud the reopening.

From the leather chairs in the wine cellar, which was hidden by a secret door during Prohibition, to the attic, which is now a gym with its own juice bar, the house is now in many ways a monument to style, its designers say.

Classic artwork, some of which had languished in city basements since the 1930s, now adorns the walls of the offices and the bedrooms. Black-and-white photographs from various periods of city history line the stairways.

In the gym, illuminated by a row of skylights, posters recall the 1984 Summer Olympic Games and a shelf offers baseball caps from every Los Angeles sports franchise except the Clippers. In the mirrored his-and-hers master bathrooms, a copy of “A Turning Point,” a treatise on science and society, waits atop the toilet. In the kitchen, a slate and marble floor leads past an array of appliances to a meat locker. Out back, a garden stretches toward a fountain at the rear of the one-acre property.

Daly, who visited with New York Mayor and Mrs. Rudolph Giuliani to inspect the upkeep of Gracie Mansion, said she is determined to keep things this way. She said the city will pay for maintenance at the house, and the foundation will try to raise $100,000 per year to cover the costs of the Getty House staff. She said the designers will come back periodically to check on their individual rooms.