Looking for some designing ideas? In each issue we spotlight what's new, hip and trendy to the desert lifestyle in the Greater Palm Springs area.
Open Studio
photo courtesy of Lewis & Kladder
A globe from exhibiting contemporary artists and professional interior designers Samuel Fleming Lewis and Stephen Kladder.
Climb the stairs to Suite 2 of the Antique Galleries of Palm Springs building and you’ll find a distractingly large, rough-and-tumble view of the mountains. It’s the new backdrop for Lewis & Kladder, the business name of exhibiting contemporary artists and professional interior designers Samuel Fleming Lewis and Stephen Kladder — now contently tucked up in the heart of the Sunny Dunes Antiques District.
When based in San Francisco, they maintained a design studio and separate artists’ space — creating an endless toggle. In Palm Springs, they’re relaxing into a new life, starting with a friendly open door to their creative workshop — a combination art and design studio and gallery.
Lewis is an “old-school draftsman,” craftsman, and award-winning furniture designer whose “Africa Series” bursts in crisp black-and-white graphic prints, some that encircle vintage globes. Kladder’s work spans tall paintings on raw canvas, colorful agaves, and a crowd of faces on functional pieces of furniture and accessories. Together, they share an exacting eye for placement and composition — having made small-space planning their trademark.
“When people buy a second home, they often buy it furnished,” Kladder says. “We give them good design and help make it their space.” Lewis adds, “We want to give them their own version of Palm Springs.”
The Season for Solar
photo by thinkstockphotos.com
Now property owners have another reason to implement a solar system.
Nothing says go solar like 110-degree temps and a swelling power bill. Bring on those panels! While the statewide rebate program has been exhausted for Southern California Edison, the Riverside County Solar Program, administered by locally based Sullivan Solar Power, stretches out to the end of 2015.
Now property owners have another reason to implement a solar system, so to speak, for no money out of pocket and a cash-back incentive of up to $1,500. (That’s on top of the ability to receive the federal tax credit and cover 30 percent of the overall project cost.) The incentive amount drops as capacity is committed, so now is the time to start soaking up that sun.
A Positive Latitude
Type image credit here
Soukie Modern, a fresh SoCal hub for Moroccan home goods, offers a growing range of rugs, blankets, pillows, and poufs.
“There are so many similarities, it’s uncanny,” marvels Kenya Avery Knight in comparing Morocco and Palm Springs. “Between a love for shopping and interior design, the weather and interest in architecture. … Even the Atlas Mountains look like the San Jacinto range — they’re always visible. And we sit at almost the same latitude on the globe.”
Knight, along with Moroccan-native business partner Taib Lotfi, who lives in Marrakech, are co-founders of Soukie Modern, a fresh SoCal hub for Moroccan home goods. Their growing range of rugs, blankets, pillows, and poufs are vintage and hand-crafted in Morocco or repurposed and “co-crafted” here. Items are available online or by appointment in Los Angeles or Palm Springs (Knight’s two homes).
“I believe bringing in the warmth of other cultures makes a home so much more inviting and appealing,” says Knight, who calls their style “Midcentury Moroccan” — an aesthetic merging of two cultures that blends right into the California boho trend.
At the moment, Knight is perfecting a line of butterfly chairs that spread colorful wings made from vibrant Moroccan rugs. An exotic metamorphosis for any desert lounge.