KUD Development Palm Desert

On the Home Front: Winter 2020

With Room & Board creating a temporary outpost in Palm Springs, the modern furnishings retailer has elevated the very notion of a pop-up store.

Lisa Marie Hart Current Digital, Home & Design

KUD Development Palm Desert
A former preschool building in Palm Desert was a vintage diamond in the rough for business owner Troy Kudlac.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAN CHAVKIN
Popping Up With a Collaboration

When Room & Board opened a temporary outpost last October on North Palm Canyon Drive, the modern furnishings retailer elevated the very notion of a pop-up store. Spreading across 2,700 square feet, the voluminous white showroom expresses itself with countless swatches, complimentary design services, and highlights from Room & Board’s vast collections. It remains open through 2020.

The pop-up also features the collaboration between Room & Board and Cambria: the Pren collection, a versatile series of mixed-medium furniture. The wood craftsmanship by Room & Board meets Cambria’s sleek natural quartz surfaces in pieces with an easy, midcentury sensibility. All are available with domestically sourced solid Midwestern walnut or Appalachian white oak bases and one-centimeter Cambria quartz tops finished with rounded corners in three best-selling designs: Brittanicca, Brittanicca Gold, and Mersey. As with all Cambria products, the surfaces are nonabsorbent, scratch- and stain-resistant, and maintenance-free. Those design services may prove essential for those overwhelmed by choice.

RoomandBoardfurniture

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY ROOM&BOARD AND CAMBRIA

History Buffed

A former preschool building in Palm Desert was a vintage diamond in the rough for business owner Troy Kudlac. His companies KUD Development and KUD Properties had outgrown their spaces when Kudlac found the empty glass-and-brick front building designed in 1955 by architect Walter S. White. Despite managing ongoing projects of modernist and Desert Eichler homes in several cities, Kudlac oversaw the construction himself and restored it per the original plans he found in the University of California, Santa Barbara archives.

“The spaces were carpeted, but the plans said ‘colored concrete floor,’ so we pulled it up and found the floors were a pretty emerald green,” he notes. “They needed a few repairs, but now they’re fairly indestructible.” Kudlac replaced a double service entrance once used by Valley Lumber into a roll-up garage door to provide a fresh-air setting for the office  staff in fine weather. He also cut the building in half and leased adjacent showroom space to one of his clients, Stonehouse, who specializes in stone and tile.

Now, he is pushing ahead on a new Desert Eichler development in Palm Springs, projects in Palm Desert and Joshua Tree, and an Eichler in Reno, Nevada. “We’re thinking about expanding to other midcentury-modernish towns like Boise and Austin,” he says. Just as he relocated years ago from a cramped Palm Springs office to the new historic digs, “We’re going to where opportunity takes us.”

Uptown Girl

Fashion and textile designer Candice Held has made her way around town with her first boutique at The Shops at 1345 followed by a second on El Paseo. For 2020, she may have found her forever home, concentrating her brand into one sophisticated flagship location in the Uptown Design District. The newly installed custom interior is as compelling as her drapey, skin-kissing dresses.

Custom graphic LVT (Luxury Vinyl Tile) in collaboration with Armstrong Flooring plays off two of her own wallpaper designs in a palette of blue, black, and white, punctuated by retro metallics. Vintage furniture designed by Steve Chase and Charles Hollis Jones complements  upholstery in her new tiger print on velvet. Held designs her collections in her Palm Springs studio. Joining her silk scarf dresses, new kimonos, and men’s cotton shirts are select home décor items that include printed pillows and a hand-poured soy wax candle in her new signature scent, Poolside Breeze.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY CANDICE HELD

When Irish Paint Brushes Are Smiling

Who knew there was such a thing as designer paint manufactured in Ireland? Indeed, there is, and Dunn-Edwards in Palm Springs locally carries the full line. Available in 144 colors, Curator is the designer brand for General Paints Group, a family-run company established in 1953. Curator hails from the scenic County Kildare, known for its world-renowned horse racing scene. The brand debuted in the United States in 2019 and recently expanded to the West Coast. Each hue tells a tale of living, working, and creating in Ireland. The Curator team traveled coast to coast meeting with ceramicists and painters, jewelers, and fashion designers to blend their ultra-premium, water-based paint.

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY CURATOR

To create the 144 colors that comprise Curator water-based paints, Irish craftspeople, artists, and designers provided feedback that influenced the collection. The stories behind each color are their own, representing counties across Ireland. Curator recently expanded to the United States. In Palm Springs, Dunn-Edwards stocks the line.

Made in five finishes, the paint colors are in tune with the country’s artisan culture. A leather goods maker inspired Chestnut Grain; a lampshade designer inspired Scalloped Silk. And a milliner’s signature soft pink inspired Day At The Races, for the hats and headpieces often worn by race-going ladies not far from Curator’s home base.