Since I don’t have many friends who’ve won an Olympic medal, the first thing I do when I get to Gus Kenworthy ’s apartment in West Hollywood is ask where he keeps his hardware. The professional skier leads me to an antique trophy case tucked in a foyer between the living room and the dining area. Inside are animal fossils, skulls he picked up on desert hikes, a carved ostrich egg, and, finally, hidden on the bottom shelf, a silver medal for ski slopestyle at the 2014 Winter Olympics .

Why is it hidden under a ram head? And where are all the other honors from Kenworthy’s 12-year career? “I don’t want a shrine to myself, so I gave all the other trophies to my high school,” he says with a shrug. “I only kept this one because friends ask to see it all the time.” (Guilty as charged.) In an extra bedroom, which seems to be used primarily as ski equipment storage, I dug up a framed print of his Nike ad, and the 2015 cover of ESPN magazine in which he came out of the closet and became one of the first openly gay American athletes at the Olympics.

Kenworthy, 29, was born in Chelmsford, England, and grew up in Telluride, Colorado. He’s a two-time Olympian, “hopefully about to be a three-time Olympian,” he says with a smile, referring to the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, and a five-time X-Games medalist. For most of his career, he lived in Colorado during ski season and New York in the off-season. However, in 2018, after fielding inbound requests for hosting gigs and acting offers from Hollywood (he made a splash in the ninth season of American Horror Story ), he decided to make the move to L.A.

Designer Orlando Soria used playful elements like the Dirk Vander Kooij Chubby Chairs and Park Studio light fixture in the dining room to reflect Kenworthy’s youthful, fun energy.

“I looked at this place online, and the day I flew in for the GLAAD Awards I went to see it and fell in love. I put in an offer on the spot,” he says of the three-bedroom apartment with two roof terraces he shares with Birdie, a Jindo mix that he adopted in Korea during the 2018 Olympics. “It’s a pretty quirky apartment with tons of weird angles and varying ceiling heights, which I found charming. There was nothing on the rooftop, but the [real estate agent] said the building approved plans to build a custom roof deck. I climbed a ladder and was blown away by the unobstructed views from downtown to Hollywood and all the way to Century City and beyond to the ocean. That sold me.”

Gus tapped Orlando Soria to help him navigate the ins and outs of remodeling in California and to design the finished space. Coincidentally, Orlando had lived in a very similar space at one point so he knew how to handle its quirks. Soria and Kenworthy worked together to create a chic and playful bachelor pad. “When you meet Gus, he’s inherently kind of mischievous,” Soria says. “He’s not afraid of things just being bold, so it was really fun to figure out how to do that in a way that was also sophisticated.”

The renovation, which took nearly a year, included built-in window benches, bookcases, crown moldings, and wainscoting in the bedrooms. Kenworthy’s ex-boyfriend, actor Matthew Wilkas , applied a hand-scraped plaster treatment to the walls. His favorite feature came unexpectedly: “There’s a little window behind the kitchen sink that looks out to an egress well. At first, I thought it was so strange to look out at a wall, but I ended up painting the well a pretty gray-blue and placed an eight-foot cactus [there]. It has become a fabulous focal point.”

Kenworthy brought the Ralph Lauren bed and the John Derian sofa from New York, and the nightstands are from Lawson-Fenning in L.A. The two Knoll chairs in the living room Soria sourced on 1stDibs , and the Cloud chandelier is from Apparatus Studios . Kenworthy collects work from the LGBTQ+ artist community, which Soria used as a starting point for conceiving the overall look of the space. Approaching the collection was all about “figuring out where we’re going to do a large gallery wall, where we’re going to have some room to breathe,” he says. Soria placed an oil painting of flowers and a graphite text study by Denver-based artists Shawn Huckins and Joel Swanson , respectively, in the living room, and an oil painting of two men canoodling by Mark Beard in the master bedroom. Kenworthy has an original Tom of Finland sketch, as well as several works by Andy Warhol, including drawings and a Polaroid of Dolly Parton.

For Soria, it was all about simplifying the space. The sleek fireplace you see now was once fully tiled and disjointed from the rest of the room.

Despite growing up on the snow, Kenworthy has settled comfortably into the sun. “My favorite room in the house is the lower level roof terrace. There are planters surrounding the whole perimeter of the space and comfortable seating around a fire pit table, as well as a designated dining area,” he says. However, soon he’ll be back on the slopes. “We’re less than a year and a half away from the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing and I’m feeling good about it,” he says.

Though the project balanced two very busy schedules (Soria was pitching and shooting a TV show and writing a book; Kenworthy was acting and modeling) and was not without the occasional hiccup, the final product is a source of pride for both Kenworthy and Soria. And in the midst of it all the two kept their cool. “He really went through it,” Soria says with a laugh, “and I’ve never had a more patient and understanding client.”