There’s something pretty surreal about knowing that a piece of furniture you designed could be sitting in someone’s home in Paris, Dubai, Shanghai, or Beverly Hills, and you’ll probably never know about it.

In 2023, Modern Principles, the furniture collection I designed in collaboration with Caracole, made its debut. Three years later, it’s still selling, still expanding, and has a Pinnacle Award to its name.

I’d been buying Caracole furniture for my clients for years when Roger Turnbow, who was then the company’s Executive Vice President, reached out and asked if I’d ever considered designing furniture.

I was blown away. I already loved the brand and knew the quality of their furniture.

But also, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? Designing is literally my hobby.

Most of my day is spent solving problems. Budgets, contractors, deadlines, clients, and a thousand things that have absolutely nothing to do with sitting around being creative.

When I’m home, however, there’s nothing I love more than getting extremely stoned and designing absolutely whatever the fuck I want.

Drawing, Photoshop, Illustrator, mood boards, Google SketchUp. I can lose entire evenings doing it. SketchUp is basically The Sims for adults with expensive taste.

And if you’ve never played The Sims, you’re a loser. I’m sorry.

Caracole is a global luxury furniture company with distribution throughout Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America. You can even find their furniture through retailers like Bloomingdale’s and Neiman Marcus.

I was getting the opportunity to design furniture that could end up practically anywhere.

The collection became Modern Principles, and I worked closely with Roger and Christopher Sandomenico, Caracole’s senior designer.

Christopher is one of the most talented artists I’ve ever worked with. The man could DRAW.

I could sit across from him describing a chair, and within thirty seconds, he’d have it sketched out with perfect proportions, perspective, and architectural details. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to finish my sentence.

The Unity dining chair was inspired by the silhouettes of Frank Lloyd Wright’s furniture. I’ve always loved how architectural his work was, even when he was designing something as simple as a chair.

For the Movement sofa, I was looking at Vladimir Kagan and those incredible sculptural curves. There’s something so sexy about furniture that feels almost like a piece of art.

Christopher actually took the concept behind my Unity dining chair and translated it into a bed. I thought that was genius. He understood the architectural language of the chair and could see how it might work as something completely different.

I learned so much from working with him and Roger. I knew how I wanted furniture to look, but they understood how to turn those ideas into products that could actually be manufactured.

In 2023, Modern Principles won the Pinnacle Award for Major Collections.

Now, I realize most of you probably have absolutely no idea what that means.

The Pinnacle Awards, presented by the International Society of Furniture Designers, are among the highest honors in residential furniture design. And we won for an entire collection, not just one piece.

It’s a BIG fucking deal.

Unfortunately, the furniture industry isn’t exactly the sexiest industry in the world, so nobody outside of it knows what the fuck a Pinnacle Award is.

It’s not like winning an Oscar. Nobody’s asking who you’re wearing.

But within the industry, it’s a huge honor. The award recognized Christopher Sandomenico, Thor Tabor, and me, and I was incredibly proud.

I’ll also never forget when Caracole’s parent company, Markor, asked me to give a master class to their team in Asia so they could understand the collection and how to sell it.

I logged onto Zoom from Los Angeles, and there were SO MANY PEOPLE.

I’m sitting there talking about furniture, and what felt like an entire country was watching me.

It was so weird.

But perhaps the most satisfying part is that the collection is still selling more than three years later.

Here’s something you might not know about furniture. Companies introduce new collections at market constantly, and if they don’t sell, they’re discontinued. Nobody cares how fabulous you think your chair is if nobody’s buying it.

And trust me, every designer thinks their chair is fabulous.

Caracole has introduced additional colorways of our bed and nightstands, and the Unity dining chair has been such a consistent bestseller that they’ve introduced bar and counter stools.

The fact that they’re still expanding a collection we designed in 2023 is incredibly satisfying.

I think about Frank Lloyd Wright and Vladimir Kagan, whose furniture people are still obsessing over decades later. I’m obviously not comparing myself to them, but I’ve always admired furniture that doesn’t need to be new to be desirable.

I’m grateful Roger made that phone call, and that I got to work with Christopher and the Caracole team on something I’m still so proud of.

I guess the real compliment isn’t winning an award. It’s not getting discontinued.

Let’s get into it.

01. Louis Venturelli’s Artwork

Louis Venturelli is an old friend of Anthony’s from New York, and I’ve become such a fan of his work. His paintings are contemporary, graphic, and incredibly sophisticated without being too serious about themselves.

We recently incorporated one of his pieces into a client’s dining room in Brentwood, and I love how it looks against all the warm wood and soft upholstery.

I imagine the person who collects Lou’s work has a fabulous art collection, a very good architect, and absolutely no interest in explaining either to you. The kind of person who buys a painting because they love it, not because it matches the sofa.

Which, frankly, is exactly how art should be bought.

02. This Sculptural Bronze Candelabra

I sourced this bronze candelabra for BĀZĀR, and I think it might be one of my favorite finds.

It’s twisted, irregular, slightly sinister, and looks like it was pulled out of some eccentric European aristocrat’s estate sale.

I imagine it sitting on a massive dining table in a crumbling Italian palazzo, surrounded by antique silver, half-empty wine glasses, and a family that hasn’t spoken to each other since 1987 over an inheritance dispute.

Naturally, I had to have it.

03. Lo & Co’s Mixed Metal Hardware

Can we please talk about how good this new mixed metal hardware from Lo & Co is?

I’ve always loved mixing metals. The idea that every piece of hardware in a room needs to match has never made sense to me. And these pieces are such a beautiful example of why.

The combination of warm brass and polished chrome feels like jewelry for cabinetry. It’s refined but has just enough contrast to make something as simple as opening a drawer feel special.

Hardware is one of those things people tend to underestimate. You can spend a fortune on beautiful cabinetry, but if you choose boring hardware, you’re missing an opportunity.

04. Leather Backgammon Set

I sourced this leather backgammon set for BĀZĀR, and I have a confession to make.

Despite being Persian, I have absolutely no idea how to play backgammon. Not a clue. Which is frankly embarrassing considering I grew up surrounded by people who treat it like an Olympic sport.

But I do know a fabulous backgammon set when I see one.

The black and cognac leather is so chic. I picture it sitting on the coffee table of a very wealthy man in the South of France who spends his afternoons playing backgammon, drinking espresso, and making questionable financial decisions.

Meanwhile, I’ll probably just leave mine open on a coffee table and hope nobody asks me to play.

05. Kith Ivy | New York City

I was in New York last week meeting with a new architectural millwork workshop for one of our projects. This particular home is extremely millwork-heavy, so finding the right team is a big deal. I’m very particular about craftsmanship, and when a project calls for this level of detail, I want to know exactly who’s making it.

The workshop was responsible for the entire Kith Ivy buildout in New York, so Chris, the owner, invited my team and me to lunch and a tour.

And wow.

The attention to detail is insane. Beautiful woodwork, incredible finishes, and the kind of execution that makes you stop and inspect everything up close. I was looking at the millwork the way most people look at art.

But the club itself? Fabulous.

Beautiful interiors, a Giorgio Armani fitness center and spa, and an Erewhon bar. Yes, an EREWHON bar. In New York.

It’s basically what happens when someone decides that having a private club isn’t quite exclusive enough and asks, “But what if we could also get a $22 smoothie?”

Only in New York.

That’s it for this week. Five very different obsessions, but I suppose they all have something in common: I love when people put real thought into what they’re creating. Whether it’s a painting, a cabinet pull, or an entire private club, I can always tell when someone genuinely gives a damn about the details.

Until next week!

I can make almost anything look expensive.

But making something look expensive and making something feel personal are two very different things.

Give me a beautiful room, a generous budget, and access to the best furniture in the world, and of course I can make something gorgeous.

But give me a client whose taste is completely different from mine, whose ideas occasionally make me question my sanity, and whose personality doesn’t fit neatly into any particular aesthetic?

Now I’m interested.

Because that’s when being a designer becomes something much more complicated than having good taste.

Of course my clients hire me for my taste. They’ve seen my work. They trust my eye, my instincts, and my ability to make things beautiful. I’d be an idiot to pretend otherwise.

But having good taste is only part of the job. The harder part is knowing how to apply it to someone whose life looks nothing like yours.

There are designers whose work you can recognize immediately. The same palette, the same furniture, the same aesthetic, regardless of who’s living there.

And some clients want exactly that. They fall in love with a designer’s look and want a version of it for themselves.

I understand the appeal.

But I’ve never been interested in designing the same house ten times.

Every client comes with a different personality, a different history, and a different idea of what home should feel like. I find that far more interesting than repeating an aesthetic.

A SIGNATURE TECHNIQUE, NOT A SIGNATURE STYLE

I’ve spent years developing a very particular approach to interiors.

I love mixing things that aren’t necessarily supposed to go together. Different periods, different materials, different personalities. I like a room that has a little tension, something unexpected, something that makes you look twice.

There’s always a certain level of sophistication I want to achieve, regardless of the aesthetic. And I know when to push something further and when to leave it alone.

Those instincts are consistent throughout my work.

The results aren’t.

And that’s intentional.

You can recognize my work in the decisions, even when the rooms look completely different.

I don’t need to put the same sofa in every living room or use the same marble in every bathroom to remind people who designed the house. Trust me, I know I designed it.

My signature is in how I put things together.

And the interesting part is figuring out how to use that technique to create something that feels completely personal to someone else.

LEARNING TO THINK LIKE SOMEONE ELSE

When I start working with a client, I’m paying attention to much more than what they tell me they like.

I want to understand how they live. What they grew up around. What makes them comfortable. What they collect. What they find beautiful. What they absolutely cannot stand.

And I pay particular attention to the contradictions.

Someone might tell me they want a formal home, but everything about the way they live suggests they need somewhere they can put their feet up.

Someone else might insist they want minimalism while holding on to a lifetime of objects they can’t imagine parting with.

That’s where things get interesting.

Because people don’t always know how to articulate what they want. Sometimes they don’t even know what they want until they see it.

And my job is to figure that out.

I have to understand someone well enough to start making decisions from their perspective.

Sometimes I find myself defending something I would never put in my own house. Other times I’m trying to convince a client that the thing they’ve hated for the last three meetings is actually the best idea we’ve had.

And occasionally, they’re right and I’m wrong.

Occasionally.

Neither is about giving up my taste.

Both require it.

And knowing when to do which is something you learn through experience.

GOOD TASTE ISN’T ENOUGH

You can have an incredible eye and still struggle to design for someone else.

Because putting together a beautiful room and creating a beautiful home for a particular person are two very different things.

I’ve seen rooms where every individual piece is gorgeous, but the whole thing feels strangely impersonal.

Beautiful furniture. Expensive finishes. Perfectly styled shelves.

And absolutely no indication of who lives there.

I think that’s where people sometimes confuse decorating with designing.

Decorating is about putting things together beautifully. And there’s real talent in that.

But the kind of design I’m talking about requires another layer of understanding.

Why does that piece of art belong in this house? Why does this room need to feel formal while the next should feel completely relaxed? Why does something that might look strange in another home feel absolutely right in this one?

Those are the questions that interest me.

A house can be beautifully decorated and still feel like it belongs to nobody in particular.

THE EGO OF A DESIGNER

I have an ego. I’m an interior designer. It practically comes with the business license.

And I have very strong opinions about what looks good.

But I’ve learned that having conviction doesn’t mean every decision needs to be about me.

People hire us because they trust our judgment. They expect us to push them, challenge them, and sometimes tell them that an idea they love is terrible.

But you also have to know when to get out of your own way.

There are things I love that aren’t right for every client. There are things I might initially dismiss that turn out to be exactly what a particular home needs.

Being able to recognize that doesn’t make me less confident in my taste.

If anything, it makes me more confident.

I don’t need every project to look the same to prove that I designed it.

And frankly, I think creating two completely different homes that are equally beautiful is a much more interesting challenge than creating the same beautiful home twice.

THE HOUSE SHOULD STILL BELONG TO YOU

I love a home that tells you something about the people living in it.

The unexpected art. The collections. The strange little obsessions. The things that might not make sense to anyone else but mean everything to the person who owns them.

Those are usually my favorite parts.

And sometimes the challenge is figuring out how to incorporate those things without making the room feel like a storage unit.

That’s where my taste comes in.

I can take someone’s instincts, their possessions, their ideas, and give them a sense of order and beauty without losing what made them interesting in the first place.

And when it works, the result feels natural.

Like the house couldn’t possibly belong to anyone else.

That’s what I want.

I want to be able to look at two completely different projects and know that both represent the people living there, while still feeling proud of every decision I made.

Because my taste is in both of them.

My technique is in both of them.

But the people are different. So the homes should be too.

I don’t have a signature style. I have a signature technique.

And if I’ve done my job correctly, you’ll recognize my taste without ever confusing the house for mine.

I’m a complete fucking dork when it comes to history.

In high school, I was always in AP History. I loved it. It was basically story time. I’d sit there listening to fascinating stories and let my imagination take me there.

Math, on the other hand, was a fucking disaster.

I was always in the stupid people math class.

Now, as a first-generation Iranian Jew working in design, there’s a particular part of design history that fascinates me: the Jewish men and women who helped shape it.

Not just because they were Jewish, but because of what they accomplished, what they stood for, and how they honored where they came from.

And some of those names might surprise you.

Starting with Frank Gehry.

FRANK GEHRY

BEFORE THERE WAS GEHRY, THERE WAS GOLDBERG.

Yes. Goldberg.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Frank Gehry’s work was impossible to ignore. The Walt Disney Concert Hall downtown, the binoculars building in Venice. His architecture is practically part of the city’s personality.

If you grew up here, you know LA has never been particularly interested in looking like anywhere else. Which is probably why Gehry’s work makes so much sense here.

But here’s something that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as his buildings.

He was born Frank Owen Goldberg to a Jewish family in Toronto.

Gehry changed his surname in the 1950s, partly because of the antisemitism he’d experienced. He’d even been excluded from an architectural fraternity at USC because he was Jewish.

Now imagine telling those fraternity members that the Jewish kid they rejected would become one of the most celebrated architects in history.

I’d pay good money to see their faces.

Decades later, Gehry became involved in plans for the World’s Jewish Museum in Tel Aviv, a project dedicated to celebrating Jewish achievement and contributions to civilization.

A man who once felt pressure to change his Jewish surname was now helping envision a museum celebrating Jewish accomplishment.

The world knows Frank Gehry.

I think more people should know Frank Goldberg.

JONATHAN ADLER

MAKING JUDAISM A LITTLE MORE FABULOUS.

I don’t think people realize just how much influence Jonathan Adler had on interiors in the mid-2000s.

I remember when the Parker Palm Springs opened in 2004, and suddenly everyone wanted their house to look like it.

The colors, the patterns, the vintage furniture, the completely unapologetic mix of styles. It was glamorous, a little eccentric, and nothing like the overly serious interiors that were everywhere else.

Everyone wanted a colorful geometric rug, a ceramic vase with a face on it, and a living room that looked like a boutique hotel in Palm Springs.

Honestly, I understood the obsession.

More than twenty years later, the Parker is still iconic.

Jonathan made decorating fun again. I think our industry could use a little more of that today.

He also brought Jewish traditions into contemporary design.

Jonathan grew up attending Hebrew school, and his family helped establish a synagogue in New Jersey.

Today, his collections include menorahs, mezuzahs, and Seder plates.

And not the kind that look like they’ve been sitting in your grandmother’s china cabinet since 1962.

Although I’d probably love those too.

In 2009, his work was featured in Reinventing Ritual, an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York exploring how contemporary designers reinterpret Jewish traditions.

He doesn’t treat Jewish design like something that belongs exclusively in a synagogue or museum. He’s made it part of contemporary life, without losing any of the humor or personality that made him famous.

ISAAC MIZRAHI

THE STAR OF DAVID GOES TO FASHION WEEK.

If you grew up watching fashion in the 1990s, you know Isaac Mizrahi.

The supermodels, the runway shows, the documentary Unzipped. Isaac was one of those designers who made fashion feel like entertainment, and he had the personality to match.

But here’s something I absolutely love about him.

Isaac grew up in a Syrian Jewish family in Brooklyn, surrounded by Sephardic traditions (like me).

And in 1991, he sent Linda Evangelista down the runway wearing an oversized Star of David belt.

Yes. Linda fucking Evangelista.

At a time when crosses were everywhere in fashion, Isaac decided the Star of David deserved its moment too.

And he wasn’t subtle about it.

The belt was a bold, oversized Star of David worn at the waist, turning a symbol of Jewish identity into a fashion statement.

Not hidden under a shirt. Not tucked away on a necklace.

Right there on the runway.

The original belt is now part of the Jewish Museum’s collection in New York.

I mean, how fucking fabulous is that?

A Syrian Jewish kid from Brooklyn grows up to become one of America’s most recognizable fashion designers, and puts a Star of David on the runway.

That’s the kind of design history I love.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE

FROM KRISTALLNACHT TO AMERICAN MODERNISM.

If Ruth Adler Schnee’s name doesn’t ring a bell, her work probably will.

Born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt in 1923, she grew up surrounded by art. Her mother had studied at the Bauhaus, and Paul Klee was a family friend.

Not exactly your average childhood.

Then, in November 1938, came Kristallnacht.

Ruth was fifteen when Nazi violence reached her family’s home. They eventually escaped Germany and settled in Detroit.

At a time when American interiors were still incredibly conservative, she was designing textiles that looked like they belonged fifty years in the future.

Bold geometric patterns, unexpected color combinations, and graphic compositions that were anything but conventional.

Her work became associated with architects including Eero Saarinen and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Remember, this was an era when women were rarely given the same recognition as their male counterparts.

What I particularly love about her work is that it still looks relevant today. You could put one of her textiles in a contemporary interior, and it wouldn’t look remotely dated.

A teenage Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany went on to help define the look of American modernism.

MORE THAN WHAT WE CREATE.

My grandfather was imprisoned in Iran. Other members of my family experienced persecution. So when I read stories like these, I understand that Jewish history is about much more than survival.

It’s also about what people went on to create.

And as a Jewish designer, I love knowing that some of the people who shaped our industry were also helping carry that history forward.

This week’s five are a mix of things I’ve been collecting, discovering, and finding excuses to incorporate into my projects. Clearly, I have a shopping problem, but at least I’ve managed to turn it into a career.

01. BUSINESS & PLEASURE CO. TOWELS

I love Business & Pleasure Co. I’ve been using their outdoor furniture in a lot of my projects lately, and they just get it.

The colors, the patterns, the proportions. Everything has this wonderful nostalgic quality without feeling like it belongs in your grandmother’s backyard. Although, depending on your grandmother, that might actually be a compliment.

Recently, I’ve become obsessed with their towels.

They’re giving Palm Beach in the best possible way. Bold stripes, fabulous colors, and the kind of unapologetic preppiness that makes me want to spend an afternoon at The Breakers pretending I have a standing tennis appointment.

So when I started curating the collection for BĀZĀR at Century Plaza, I knew I wanted to include them. They’ll be available to purchase there.

02. VINTAGE-STYLE LUGGAGE

I’m so sick of seeing the same stainless steel Rimowa suitcase everywhere.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate a good Rimowa. But at this point, walking through an airport feels like attending a convention for aluminum briefcases.

Which is why I’ve become obsessed with vintage-style luggage.

I recently sourced this beautiful cream-colored collection for BĀZĀR, and I’m genuinely excited about it. The leather-look straps, the reinforced corners, the old-fashioned proportions. It has all the charm of antique luggage, except you don’t need two grown men and a chiropractor to get it into your car.

It looks like it belongs to someone whose family has a wing named after them at a museum.

I love the idea of bringing a little glamour back to traveling. We’ve become so obsessed with practicality that everything looks exactly the same.

And while these pieces are completely functional, they have a personality that most modern luggage simply doesn’t.

We’ll be selling the collection at BĀZĀR, and I fully intend to travel with it myself.

03. HALF WORK & CULTUM

I travel constantly for work, and I have a problem with men’s accessories.

Why is it that every bag designed for men is either enormous, looks like something you’d take hiking, or resembles a purse?

I need something small enough to carry my phone, wallet, keys, and cigarettes (yes, I still like to smoke, fuck off) without having to empty my pockets every time I sit down.

And before anyone suggests a handbag, I know I’m gay, but I’m still a boy with a penis.

Which brings me to HALF WORK.

I recently discovered their woven top-grain leather crossbody, and it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for. The proportions are great, the leather is beautiful, and it has that understated quality I always gravitate toward.

I’ve also been loving the high-waisted denim from CULTUM. A higher waist, a relaxed leg, and none of that overly distressed nonsense that makes you look like you’ve been attacked by a lawn mower.

Together, they’re exactly how I like to dress when I’m traveling. Comfortable, considered, and just fashionable enough without looking like I’ve spent three hours getting dressed.

04. VINTAGE MURANO LIGHTING

We recently installed this beautiful vintage Murano sconce in a client’s home, and I had to share it.

Look at those white glass leaves, the delicate ribbing, and the sculptural brass branches. It’s almost botanical, but in that wonderfully theatrical Italian way.

The Italians really knew how to make a light fixture.

What I find fascinating about vintage Murano is how much artistry went into something as ordinary as lighting. These weren’t just fixtures designed to illuminate a room. They were decorative objects in their own right, made by craftsmen who knew exactly how far they could push the material.

I also love that the glass is never completely uniform. Those little variations are what make each piece interesting.

And while some people might think a vintage Murano sconce belongs in an equally traditional interior, I actually prefer the opposite.

Give me one of these against clean architectural lines, contemporary furniture, and beautiful stone.

That contrast is what makes a room interesting.

05. HIVA ALIZADEH

I’ve been wanting to introduce you to the work of Hiva Alizadeh.

He’s an Iranian artist whose work I’ve become completely fascinated with, particularly his use of synthetic hair to create these extraordinary sculptural pieces.

Yes, hair.

I recently purchased the piece pictured here, and I think it’s one of the most fascinating works I’ve acquired in a while.

The colors alone are incredible. Deep crimson, violet, and pale pink, all layered into this almost architectural composition. But what really gets me is the material itself.

Thousands of incredibly fine strands, arranged and manipulated into something that looks like a cross between a painting, a textile, and a sculpture.

I find his work particularly compelling because of its relationship to Persian artistic traditions. The repetition, the intricate patterns, the intensity of the colors. There are elements that feel familiar to me culturally, but the way he interprets them is entirely contemporary.

And as someone who has always been fascinated by the intersection of art, design, and materiality, I find that incredibly exciting.

I also have a monumental suspended piece from his gallery in Milan hanging in the BĀZĀR showroom. It’s one of my favorite things in the entire space, and I can’t wait for people to experience it in person.

What I admire most about Hiva is his ability to take a material that most people would never consider particularly beautiful and turn it into something extraordinary.

I think he’s an artist worth paying attention to.

And if this is your first introduction to his work, you’re welcome.

That’s it for this week. Five things I love, five things worth sharing, and apparently several more reasons I shouldn’t be left alone with a credit card.

Until next Sunday.

And since you’re paying for this subscription, the least I can do is teach you a few tricks that might actually save you some money.

So I’m introducing DESIGN HACKS, a new weekly series exclusively for paid subscribers of Ryan By Design.

The materials I’d substitute. The details I’d never waste money on. The tricks I’ve picked up after designing more bathrooms, kitchens, and living rooms than I can count.

Consider it a peek inside my design brain.

And we’re starting with one of my favorites.

You’ve probably seen those gorgeous steel-framed shower enclosures. Thin black metal grids, beautiful glass panels, the kind of doors that make an ordinary bathroom look like it belongs in a Parisian apartment.

They’re stunning.

They’re also expensive as hell.

Read more

I spent years dreaming about having my own design studio. The beautiful offices, the material library, the talented team, the incredible projects. I had the whole thing planned out in my head long before I could afford any of it.

Of course, the studio I imagined was considerably quieter than the one I ended up with.

On any given morning, there are five conversations happening at once, architectural drawings covering every available surface, someone frantically searching for a discontinued fabric, and me announcing that something we approved yesterday is absolutely disgusting and needs to be changed immediately.

Welcome to my studio.

I started my firm in 2011, and fifteen years later, I’m sitting in the studio I used to dream about. Light oak cabinetry, beautiful stone, brass details, a dark, sexy conference room, and a material library that could keep me entertained for hours.

But my favorite part has become the people who fill it.

Everyone has an opinion around here, and nobody seems particularly concerned about whether I agree with it.

I used to dream about having a studio like this. Now I get to complain about it every day. How lucky am I?

MY KIND OF PLAYGROUND

I’m obsessed with materials. Especially the unusual stuff. Give me a beautifully figured burl wood, a marble with outrageous veining, or an old textile with a little history, and I’ll find somewhere to use it.

I’m incredibly tactile. I need to touch everything, move things around, and see how different finishes react to one another. I don’t care how realistic a rendering is. I’m not approving an entire material palette based on a computer-generated image.

I love combinations that seem a little wrong at first. Something polished against something raw. An antique next to something completely contemporary.

Of course, there’s a fine line between fabulous and fucking hideous. That’s where taste comes in.

And yes, I can spend forty minutes debating two shades of ivory.

They’re different. I promise.

INSPIRATION IS EVERYWHERE.

I’m still obsessed with a good old-fashioned mood board. Fashion, architecture, art, jewelry, vintage furniture, travel. I pull inspiration from practically everywhere.

If all you’re looking at is other people’s interiors, how are you supposed to come up with anything original?

Pinterest is wonderful, but saving beautiful photographs doesn’t make you a designer.

It makes you very good at Pinterest.

I also studied interior architecture, so I’m equally obsessed with the technical side of what we do. Proportions, ceiling details, millwork, lighting. I can spend an embarrassing amount of time discussing the thickness of a countertop.

People sometimes tell me nobody will notice.

I’ll notice.

I LIKE PEOPLE WHO CHALLENGE ME.

I’m sure this will come as an enormous shock, but I have a very strong personality.

And the last thing I want is a studio full of people who agree with everything I say. How fucking boring would that be?

I want opinions. I want disagreements. I want someone to tell me when they think an idea is terrible.

Sophie, for example, has been with me for six years. She’s become one of my best friends, and we’re sooooo similar it’s ridiculous. I affectionately call her my French bitch because she’s probably the only person in the studio who has absolutely no problem talking back to me.

She’s brought so much French influence into the firm, which I love. Although that doesn’t necessarily mean I love every suggestion she makes.

Sometimes she’ll suggest something, and I’ll immediately respond, “EW. That’s disgusting. I would NEVER do that.”

Then a few weeks later, I’ll start rethinking it, quietly go into the design board, and make the exact change she suggested.

And this bitch will put me on the spot IN FRONT OF THE CLIENT.

I mean, can you imagine?

She has two kids, a third on the way, and doesn’t even need to work. But she loves what she does. It’s a passion job for her, and I think that’s important to the culture we’ve created.

Our meetings can get pretty passionate. We debate, disagree, and defend our ideas. I want people who care enough to challenge me.

And sometimes they’re right.

Sometimes.

THE PEOPLE MAKE THE PLACE.

One thing I never expected when I started my firm was how much I’d love watching other people grow.

I was so focused on building my own career that I hadn’t really considered how rewarding it would be to help someone else build theirs.

Now it’s one of my favorite parts of having a studio.

Watching someone who once needed guidance become confident enough to make decisions without me. Seeing their taste develop, their instincts sharpen, and their personalities come through in the work.

And I want to give some love to everyone who makes this place what it is.

Farra, Haley, Kris, Seda, Emin, Katie, Dani, Nora, Celine, Juliana, Fabiana, Roxie, and Sophie.

I hope you all know how much I adore and appreciate you, even when I’m driving you absolutely insane.

We spend so much of our lives together. We laugh, we argue, we celebrate, and we deal with all the ridiculous things that come with running a creative business.

And there’s nothing better than sitting around that conference table, looking at something we’ve created together, and knowing it’s really fucking good.

BACK TO WORK.

I wanted the beautiful studio, the extraordinary projects, the freedom to create, and a team of talented people who shared my obsession with design.

I got all of that.

What I didn’t anticipate was how much I’d come to love the people who would eventually fill it.

I hope they love coming here as much as I do, even on the days when I’m being a complete pain in the ass.

Anyway, I have approximately seventeen things waiting for my approval, a meeting I’m probably late for, and a marble sample somewhere in this office that I’m determined to find.

See you next week,

Ryan

I have a confession.

There are certain buildings in Los Angeles that I am genuinely jealous of people for having experienced.

The Ambassador Hotel is one of them.

Imagine being in Los Angeles in the 1930s. You’ve spent the afternoon by the pool, you’ve had entirely too many cocktails, and now you’re getting dressed for dinner at the Cocoanut Grove.

Downstairs, there’s an orchestra playing beneath enormous palm trees. Joan Crawford might be at the next table. Half of Hollywood is there, and the other half is probably having an affair with someone who is.

And this is all happening inside your hotel.

I mean, are you fucking kidding me?

The Ambassador wasn’t just a place to stay. For decades, it was one of the most exciting addresses in America.

Movie stars lived there. Presidents slept there. The Academy Awards were held there.

And in 1949, Paul R. Williams, one of the greatest architects Los Angeles has ever produced, helped give the place an entirely new look.

The same architect who helped shape the Beverly Hills Hotel.

The same era that gave us that fabulous banana-leaf wallpaper.

And we demolished the Ambassador.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Because before I tell you how Los Angeles managed to destroy one of its greatest hotels, you need to understand just how extraordinary this place was.

A PALACE IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE.

When the Ambassador opened on New Year’s Day in 1921, Wilshire Boulevard looked nothing like it does today.

Much of the surrounding land was still undeveloped. Los Angeles was expanding, Hollywood was becoming the center of the film industry, and suddenly this enormous Mediterranean Revival hotel appeared on nearly 24 acres.

Designed by architect Myron Hunt, the Ambassador had sprawling gardens, terraces, swimming facilities, and the sort of grand public rooms that made you want to put on something fabulous before leaving your suite.

It was essentially a resort in the middle of a growing city.

And what a resort.

Imagine pulling up in a beautiful old car, stepping out beneath the California sunshine, and seeing this enormous hotel surrounded by palm trees and manicured gardens.

You would have thought you’d arrived somewhere along the Mediterranean.

Except you were on Wilshire Boulevard.

And the best part?

You didn’t even have to leave the property to have an extraordinary evening.

THE COCOANUT GROVE. MY GOD.

Now, we need to talk about the Cocoanut Grove.

Because this wasn’t some ordinary hotel nightclub with a piano in the corner and a few upholstered chairs.

This was Hollywood.

The room was filled with enormous artificial palm trees, many reportedly salvaged from the set of Rudolph Valentino’s 1921 film The Sheik.

Which is such an absurdly Hollywood thing to do that I absolutely love it.

Imagine decorating one of the most fashionable nightclubs in America with palm trees from a movie set.

And somehow making it fabulous.

The Cocoanut Grove opened in 1921 and quickly became one of the most celebrated nightclubs in Los Angeles.

There were orchestras, dancing, beautifully dressed women, men in tuxedos, and enough champagne to keep the entire city entertained.

Rudolph Valentino danced there. Joan Crawford was a regular. Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Nat King Cole, and Sammy Davis Jr. all performed there over the years.

And Howard Hughes, who apparently couldn’t resist a glamorous hotel any more than he could resist an airplane, maintained a presence at the Ambassador.

The hotel also hosted six Academy Awards ceremonies.

SIX.

Can you imagine checking into your hotel, getting dressed for dinner, and realizing the Oscars were happening downstairs?

No enormous red-carpet barricades. No celebrity gifting suites. Just Hollywood royalty descending on one of the most glamorous rooms in the city.

And the Cocoanut Grove wasn’t simply somewhere celebrities went to be photographed.

People actually danced.

They drank. They flirted. They stayed out until ridiculous hours.

It was glamorous in a way that feels almost impossible to recreate today.

And I would have given anything to see it.

THE MAN WHO GAVE HOLLYWOOD ITS LOOK.

By the late 1940s, the Ambassador had already lived several extraordinary lives.

But Hollywood was changing, and the hotel needed a new look.

Enter Paul R. Williams.

Now, if you’re interested in architecture and you don’t know who Paul R. Williams is, I strongly suggest you familiarize yourself with his work.

Because the man was a genius.

Williams was one of the most important architects in Los Angeles history, responsible for some of the city’s most beautiful homes and commercial buildings.

And he accomplished all of this as a Black architect working in an industry that was overwhelmingly white.

Think about the extraordinary contradiction of that.

Here was a man designing homes for Hollywood’s wealthiest and most powerful residents while living in a city where racial discrimination was still an accepted part of everyday life.

He helped define the architectural identity of neighborhoods that had historically excluded people who looked like him.

And his work was spectacular.

In 1949, Williams was brought in to redesign the Ambassador, working alongside decorator Don Loper.

The result was a fabulous expression of postwar Hollywood glamour.

Sweeping curves, dramatic architectural details, sculptural furniture, and beautifully considered interiors.

Even the coffee shop was extraordinary.

And I mean extraordinary.

Forget the sad little hotel coffee shops we see today.

The Ambassador’s coffee shop featured sweeping curved counters, upholstered banquettes, and streamlined architectural details that made the entire space feel like something out of a Hollywood film.

You could have been sitting there drinking coffee next to a movie star, surrounded by some of the most beautiful commercial interiors in Los Angeles.

And this was just the fucking coffee shop.

But here’s where the story gets even better.

Around the same time, Williams and Loper were also helping transform another legendary Los Angeles hotel.

The Beverly Hills Hotel.

Yes. The Pink Palace.

And that fabulous banana-leaf wallpaper?

The famous Martinique print was designed for CW Stockwell in 1942 and selected by Don Loper for the Beverly Hills Hotel’s 1949 renovation.

Williams also designed the hotel’s Crescent Wing and helped shape the property’s architectural identity.

So while Williams and Loper were transforming the Ambassador, they were also helping create the visual language of another hotel that would become synonymous with Beverly Hills glamour.

And I find that absolutely fascinating.

Two legendary Los Angeles hotels, shaped by some of the same extraordinary creative minds.

One became an international icon.

The other ended up beneath a wrecking ball.

But we’ll get to that.

WHEN GOING OUT WAS AN OCCASION.

There’s something about this period of Los Angeles history that I find completely irresistible.

People actually dressed for dinner.

Not because someone had imposed a ridiculous dress code, but because going out was an occasion.

You put on your best clothes. You made a reservation. You ordered a cocktail.

And you went somewhere fabulous.

Hotels like the Ambassador understood that the setting was part of the evening.

The room mattered.

The lighting mattered.

The furniture mattered.

And yes, the people sitting at the next table certainly mattered.

As an interior designer, I think about this constantly.

We’ve become so obsessed with making everything tasteful that we’ve forgotten how much fun a room can be.

I love restraint when it’s done beautifully.

But I also love a room that makes you say, “Holy shit.”

The Ambassador had that quality.

It wasn’t trying to look like every other hotel in America.

It was extravagant, romantic, theatrical, and completely comfortable with its own fabulousness.

And frankly, I wish more places were.

THE NIGHT EVERYTHING CHANGED.

Of course, not every chapter of the Ambassador’s history was glamorous.

On June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy had just celebrated his victory in California’s Democratic presidential primary when he was shot in a pantry off the hotel’s ballroom.

He died the following day.

It was one of the darkest moments in American political history.

And it forever changed the way the Ambassador would be remembered.

The hotel continued operating for another two decades, but Los Angeles was changing around it.

Hollywood’s social scene had moved west. New hotels were opening, new neighborhoods were becoming fashionable, and the Ambassador was no longer the center of everything.

By 1989, the hotel had closed.

And there it sat on Wilshire Boulevard.

Empty.

For years.

Imagine driving past a property that had once hosted the Academy Awards, welcomed presidents, and entertained the biggest stars in Hollywood, only to see it sitting abandoned.

I can’t think of anything more depressing.

Well, actually, I can.

What happened next.

LOS ANGELES, WHAT THE FUCK WERE WE THINKING?

In 2005, demolition began.

After years of preservation battles, the decision had been made to replace the Ambassador with a public school campus.

And before anyone gets upset, let me make something very clear.

I believe in public education. I believe in building schools. And I believe the children of Los Angeles deserve beautiful places to learn.

But are we seriously supposed to believe there was absolutely no way to preserve one of the most historically significant hotels in America while creating a school?

Not even part of it?

The Ambassador had survived the Great Depression, World War II, the golden age of Hollywood, and nearly the entire twentieth century.

It had welcomed presidents, movie stars, musicians, and generations of Angelenos.

And somehow, in the twenty-first century, we decided it was no longer worth saving.

Today, the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools occupy the property. Certain architectural elements and references to the original hotel were incorporated into the campus.

Which is better than nothing, I suppose.

But it’s not the Ambassador.

And it never will be.

THE HOTEL I WISH I COULD CHECK INTO.

I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and I have a particular affection for the city’s old hotels.

The Beverly Hills Hotel. The Bel-Air. The Chateau Marmont.

Places that have been around long enough to accumulate stories.

And that’s what makes the Ambassador so heartbreaking.

Because I can still go to the Beverly Hills Hotel.

I can sit in the Polo Lounge, order a drink, admire the banana-leaf wallpaper, and walk through spaces that Paul R. Williams helped shape.

I can experience a small piece of the Los Angeles that existed long before I was born.

But I’ll never be able to do that at the Ambassador.

And God, I wish I could.

Imagine if someone had restored it.

The original architecture, the gardens, the public rooms, the Cocoanut Grove.

Imagine what an extraordinary hotel that would be today.

People would fly to Los Angeles just to stay there.

Designers would obsess over the interiors. Hollywood would throw parties in the ballroom. The Cocoanut Grove would probably be one of the hardest reservations in town.

And I would absolutely be there.

Probably sitting at the bar, ordering a martini, and wondering which movie star had occupied my seat eighty years earlier.

Instead, we have photographs.

Beautiful photographs, certainly.

But photographs nonetheless.

And here’s what I find particularly ridiculous.

We now spend millions of dollars designing new hotels to look like the glamorous old hotels we demolished.

We fill them with vintage furniture, reproduce historic wallpapers, and hire designers to recreate an atmosphere that places like the Ambassador had naturally.

We’re literally trying to buy back the glamour we threw away.

And the irony is almost too much.

Because you can build another luxury hotel.

You can recreate a ballroom.

You can even reproduce the wallpaper.

But you can’t rebuild the Ambassador.

And you sure as hell can’t recreate the magic of a place that was there when Hollywood became Hollywood.

I have expensive taste and very little self-control when it comes to beautiful things. Neither of these qualities is particularly helpful when you’re an interior designer.

So I’m making a series out of it. Five things that have my attention at any given moment: what I’m buying, where I’m going, and what I’m still trying to justify. Materials, objects, places. Whatever the current fixation happens to be.

Anyway, here are five things I’m currently losing my mind over.

01. FLOWERS THAT LOOK LIKE THEY NEED THERAPY.

Planning my wedding has made me realize I have very strong opinions about flowers. Shocking, I know.

I’ve become completely obsessed with sculptural arrangements that barely resemble flowers at all. Twisted stems, strange proportions, dramatic silhouettes. The more architectural and slightly unhinged, the better.

I’m talking about arrangements that look like they belong in a 1970s Italian villa owned by a woman who’s had four husbands and definitely killed one of them.

I don’t want a sweet little bouquet. I want something that makes people slightly uncomfortable.

Preferably in a very expensive vase.

02. BURGUNDY TRAVERTINE.

I know. Another stone obsession. Groundbreaking.

But there’s something about burgundy travertine that makes me absolutely insane.

The deep reds, the movement, the almost chocolate-colored veining. It’s rich without being precious and dramatic without screaming for attention.

It feels like something you’d find in the bathroom of a very wealthy Italian man who hasn’t redecorated since 1976.

Which, frankly, is exactly the aesthetic I’m after.

I want it on walls, floors, furniture. I want an entire bathroom wrapped in it.

03. TERRACOTTA POTS THAT LOOK LIKE THEY’VE SURVIVED SEVERAL WARS.

I’m particularly obsessed with old terracotta planters with thick, rolled rims.

And when I say old, I mean OLD.

I want moss. I want mineral deposits. I want stains that nobody can explain.

The kind of planter that’s been sitting in the courtyard of an Italian palazzo since 1840 and has witnessed at least three family scandals.

Put a perfectly clipped boxwood in one of these and I’m done.

It’s the contrast that gets me. Something meticulously maintained sitting inside something beautifully deteriorated.

Unfortunately, the more destroyed these pots look, the more expensive they tend to be.

Naturally.

04. ARMSTRONG GARDEN CENTERS IN SANTA MONICA.

Which brings me to the enabler supplying the boxwoods for those battered old pots.

Anthony and I go plant shopping the way other couples go to dinner.

And Armstrong has become one of our favorite places to spend an afternoon.

They have an incredible selection of plants, topiaries, and all the things that make me suddenly forget how much outdoor space we actually have.

A perfectly shaped topiary does something to me that I can’t explain, and frankly, I don’t think I need to.

Anthony is usually the voice of reason.

Unfortunately for him, I don’t particularly enjoy listening to reason when there’s a beautiful plant involved.

05. MY NEW JACQUES MARIE MAGE SUNGLASSES.

I have a sunglasses problem.

I’ve accepted it. Anthony has accepted it.

I just bought a pair of Jacques Marie Mage Devaux sunglasses, and they’re fucking fantastic.

They’re bold, slightly oversized, and look like something an old Hollywood mogul would wear.

They’re the kind of sunglasses that make you want to buy a vintage Porsche, smoke a cigarette, and develop a complicated relationship with a European heiress.

That’s the first five. I’ll be back with more.

What are you currently obsessed with? Tell me in the comments. I want specifics.

I’m going to say something that might piss a few people off.

Your house isn’t boring because you can’t afford beautiful things. It’s boring because you’re terrified of making a decision somebody else might not approve of.

And I see it all the time.

Someone falls in love with an outrageous piece of furniture, then spends twenty minutes talking themselves out of it.

Is it too much? Will I get tired of it? What if it goes out of style?

Who gives a fuck?

When did we start needing permission to buy a chair?

I’ve walked into multimillion-dollar homes with all the personality of a dental office.

Beautiful marble. Expensive furniture. Perfectly coordinated fabrics. Not a single interesting decision in sight.

Everything is tasteful. Everything is appropriate. Everything is completely forgettable.

We’ve become so afraid of having bad taste that we’ve forgotten how to have any personality.

And there’s a difference between having taste and having style.

Taste is discernment. Style is instinct.

Taste is knowing why something is beautiful, why certain proportions work, why one material feels extraordinary and another feels cheap. It’s something you develop through knowledge, exposure, and experience.

But style? That’s something much more personal.

It’s how you take everything you’ve seen, everywhere you’ve been, everyone you’ve loved, and everything you’ve experienced, and turn it into something unmistakably yours.

Maybe instinct is just memory.

Taste tells you whether something is beautiful. Style tells you whether it belongs in your world.

You can admire a beautiful room without wanting to live in it. You can recognize an extraordinary piece of furniture without wanting to own it.

And you can fall completely in love with something that isn’t particularly beautiful by conventional standards.

Your style should feel like you. Not somebody you’re trying to impress.

It’s the ridiculous chair you fell in love with in Paris. The painting your friends don’t understand. The color that reminds you of your childhood home.

Sometimes it’s the strange little object your grandmother gave you that doesn’t match a single thing in your house.

Maybe it’s beautiful. Maybe it’s hideous. That’s beside the point.

Because something doesn’t have to be beautiful to be worth keeping.

There’s a piano in my house that my parents gave me when I was young. I spent eleven years learning to play it. And although I’ve spent my career surrounded by extraordinary furniture and objects, that piano means more to me than almost anything I own. Not because it’s the most beautiful thing in the room, but because it’s part of my life. No designer could have chosen it for me. No amount of money could replace what it means.

Maybe that’s why our style changes as we get older. Not because we suddenly learn what’s beautiful, but because we’ve lived long enough to understand why certain things matter to us.

And that’s also why I find it so depressing when people decorate their homes to look exactly like somebody else’s.

We have more access to beautiful interiors than ever before, yet somehow everyone seems to want the same curved sofa, the same travertine coffee table, and the same perfectly arranged stack of books.

People aren’t decorating anymore. They’re recreating photographs.

And sometimes I wonder whether people actually want the house, or whether they just want to be the kind of person they imagine lives in it.

Maybe you don’t actually love that perfectly curated living room. Maybe you love what you think it represents. Wealth. Sophistication. Success. Good taste.

Of course you’re going to be inspired by other people’s homes. I am too. Just don’t confuse being inspired with copying.

You can buy the same furniture, use the same fabrics, and paint the walls the exact same color.

But you can’t buy somebody else’s memories.

And listen, I understand how difficult this can get when everything becomes a trend.

I’m a designer. I’m painfully aware that practically everything has trends. Furniture, fashion, architecture, cars. Even fucking vegetables.

Everyone drives a Range Rover. Does that make it a bad car? Of course not. It’s a great car. There’s a reason people want one.

And remember when nobody gave a shit about kale? Now you can’t order a salad without someone throwing a handful of it in there.

But kale didn’t change. We did.

That’s how trends work. The thing stays the same. Our opinion of it changes.

Sometimes something becomes popular because it’s genuinely beautiful, useful, or well designed. Other times, we convince ourselves we love something simply because everybody else does.

The question isn’t whether something is trendy. It’s whether you’d still love it if nobody else did.

Because there’s nothing wrong with having the same sofa as a thousand other people. There’s something wrong with buying it just because a thousand other people have it.

And while we’re at it, can we please talk about resale value?

You’re spending $10 million on a house and decorating it for someone who might buy it fifteen years from now?

That’s insane.

Of course, real estate is an investment. But your home is also where your life happens. Shouldn’t it reflect the person actually living there?

I love mixing things that shouldn’t necessarily work together. Something antique beside something contemporary. Something incredibly expensive next to something you found at a flea market.

That’s always been the foundation of my design philosophy. Raw meets refined.

I’ve never understood why people think everything needs to match. Give me an antique chair next to a contemporary sofa. Something polished beside something completely imperfect. That’s where things get interesting.

And sometimes the most interesting object in a room is the one that doesn’t belong there.

At least not according to anyone else’s rules.

I’m not suggesting you abandon proportion, balance, or good design. Those things matter enormously.

But I am suggesting that you stop being so afraid of having bad taste that you end up having no taste at all.

And maybe that’s the part people struggle with most. Having your own style means accepting that someone else might think you have terrible taste. It means being comfortable with the possibility that the things you love won’t make sense to everybody. But isn’t that what makes them yours?

When I think about the most memorable homes I’ve ever visited, I rarely remember whether the sofa was expensive or the marble was imported.

I remember the unexpected objects. The strange combinations. The things that made me curious about the people who lived there.

I’d rather walk into a house with terrible taste and a whole lot of personality than another perfectly decorated house with absolutely nothing to say.

So buy the ridiculous chair. Hang the painting nobody understands. Keep the strange little thing your grandmother gave you.

And if somebody doesn’t like it?

They don’t have to fucking live there.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Mexico was always part of my life.

I grew up going to Mexico. The food, the music, the culture, the men. I love all of it.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my Anthony more than anything in the world. But before him, let’s just say I had a type.

And then there’s Selena…

When I was little, my nanny was her biggest fan. She played Selena’s music constantly, and I became completely obsessed. My parents have hundreds of home videos of me singing her Spanish songs, putting on elaborate performances with my sister as if we were global Spanish pop stars.

And yet, despite growing up visiting Mexico, somehow I had never been to San Miguel de Allende.

That changed when Anthony’s younger sister decided to get married there.

I knew San Miguel was beautiful. I’d seen the photographs, the colorful buildings, the cobblestone streets, the famous pink church. But I wasn’t prepared for what I found.

What fascinated me most wasn’t how beautiful it was.

It was how wealthy it must have once been.

You can tell when a city was built with money. Even when the buildings are falling apart, the proportions give it away. The enormous wooden doors, the carved stone façades, the soaring ceilings, the courtyards hidden behind thick walls that haven’t been properly maintained in decades.

San Miguel has all of it.

And I was right.

During the 18th century, San Miguel was part of one of the wealthiest regions in the Spanish Empire. Enormous fortunes were being made from the silver mines of nearby Guanajuato, and the merchants and landowners who benefited from that prosperity were building residences that rivaled European palaces.

These weren’t ordinary homes. Behind those enormous carved doors were private courtyards, fountains, grand staircases, and rooms with ceilings so high you can only imagine how impressive they must have been when the houses were first completed.

What I find extraordinary is that you can still recognize that grandeur today, even in buildings that are practically falling apart.

Then the money disappeared.

Wars, political upheaval, and economic decline left much of the city frozen in time. The great houses remained, but the fortunes that had built them were gone.

And perhaps that’s what makes San Miguel so extraordinary today.

Unlike places that were demolished and rebuilt as their economies evolved, San Miguel escaped much of the modernization that transformed other Mexican cities.

Its decline inadvertently became its preservation.

By the 1930s, an American named Stirling Dickinson arrived and saw what so many others had overlooked.

Dickinson wasn’t a billionaire developer or a hotelier. He was an artist and writer who fell in love with the city’s architecture and atmosphere. He helped establish San Miguel as an international arts destination, attracting American students, painters, and intellectuals.

The Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros would later teach here, bringing some of the country’s revolutionary artistic energy into a town that had once been a symbol of prosperity.

And get this! One of the artists who eventually made San Miguel his home was Pedro Friedeberg, the fucking brilliant Mexican surrealist behind the iconic Hand Chair, which I’ve used in my own projects.

I’ve always loved his work, but I had no idea how he ended up in Mexico.

Friedeberg was born in Florence in 1936 to German-Jewish parents who fled Europe to escape Nazi persecution. His family found refuge in Mexico, where he grew up and eventually became one of the country’s most celebrated artists.

What’s wild is that I had just written about the Jewish architects who fled Europe and helped shape Tel Aviv’s White City.

And here was another Jewish artist whose life had been redirected by the same persecution, only this time his family ended up in Mexico.

It’s extraordinary to think about how much art, architecture, and design around the world has been shaped by Jewish families who were simply trying to survive.

Meanwhile, San Miguel was becoming fashionable all over again.

The artists came first. Then the expatriates. Then the money.

Almost a century later, wealthy Americans and Mexicans are spending fortunes restoring the same colonial houses that were built hundreds of years ago.

Former private residences have become boutique hotels. Forgotten courtyards are now some of the most beautiful restaurants in Mexico. Behind weathered façades are homes that would look perfectly at home in the pages of AD.

And yet, walk a few streets away, and you’ll find buildings that look as though nobody has touched them in a hundred years.

That’s what I find so fascinating about San Miguel.

It hasn’t been polished into perfection. There are still cracks in the walls, faded paint, uneven stone streets, and buildings waiting for someone to fall in love with them again.

And then there was the wedding.

Anthony’s younger sister chose Tres Raíces, a vineyard between San Miguel de Allende and Dolores Hidalgo, surrounded by the rolling hills of Guanajuato.

I had no idea this part of Mexico had such a beautiful wine region, let alone a winery with architecture this interesting.

Designed by Mexican architect Ángel Omar Cedillo Martínez, Tres Raíces has these extraordinary architectural forms, natural stone, and decorative details inspired by the region’s traditional ceramics.

What I loved most was that it didn’t try to imitate some romanticized version of Tuscany. It was contemporary Mexican architecture that belonged to its landscape.

It was another unexpected side of a country I thought I knew so well.

As a designer, I find San Miguel far more compelling than a city where everything has been restored to within an inch of its life.

Because beautiful architecture doesn’t stop being beautiful when it gets old.

In fact, sometimes age is what makes it extraordinary.

San Miguel was built by wealth, preserved by poverty, and rediscovered by wealth.

And somehow, you can see all three chapters just by walking down the street.

“Nobody needs to know that you’re Jewish.”

She wasn’t joking. She was genuinely terrified.

Until middle school, I spent most Saturdays going to synagogue with my grandfather, followed by Shabbat lunch at my grandparents’ house. My mother’s parents were observant Jews. My father’s side was much more Reform. Somewhere between the two, being Jewish felt as natural to me as being American.

But my grandmother hated the idea of me walking outside wearing my kippah.

Think about how absurd that sounds.

A little Jewish boy in Beverly Hills, California, being told to hide the fact that he was Jewish.

I thought she was being dramatic. This was Beverly Hills, for God’s sake. What exactly was she afraid of?

She passed away a year after my bar mitzvah. I was too young to appreciate what she was telling me.

More than twenty years later, I’m beginning to understand.

APPARENTLY, EVEN GRIEF IS POLITICAL NOW.

Yesterday marked three years since October 7, 2023.

I posted something on Instagram commemorating the people murdered that day.

That’s it.

And almost immediately, the comments started.

“Genocide.”

“Genocide.”

“Genocide.”

Are you fucking kidding me?

Apparently, in 2026, you can’t remember murdered Jews without submitting a dissertation on Middle Eastern geopolitics.

I’m an interior designer. I spend my days explaining why Calacatta Viola and Calacatta Monet are not interchangeable and why a sofa that’s two inches too deep can ruin an entire room. I didn’t realize commemorating October 7 meant defending the foreign policy of a country I don’t even live in.

Let’s remember what actually happened.

Hamas terrorists murdered civilians in their homes, slaughtered people at a music festival, kidnapped children and elderly people, and committed horrific acts of violence, including sexual violence.

These were ordinary people going about their lives.

And somehow, simply remembering them has become controversial.

When did compassion become so conditional?

THE STORIES THEY BROUGHT FROM IRAN.

I’m a first-generation American. My parents came here from Iran after the Islamic Revolution.

My grandfather grew up being called “Jude.”

Jew.

Not exactly a term of endearment.

During the revolution, he was imprisoned and tortured. Thankfully, he was eventually released.

My aunt’s father wasn’t so fortunate.

He was imprisoned and killed. His wife was told to collect his body. She had to pay to have her own husband’s remains released to her.

Imagine that.

These are the stories I grew up hearing. And they’re only a few of them.

My family didn’t sugarcoat what happened or pretend leaving Iran had been some spontaneous adventure in search of the American dream.

But growing up in Beverly Hills, you start believing those stories belong to another universe.

I went to school, took piano lessons, obsessed over design, and dreamed about my future.

I wasn’t thinking about persecution.

That’s the extraordinary privilege of being born in America. You inherit the stories without having to live them.

Or at least, that’s what I believed.

And suddenly, my grandmother’s warning doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous.

JEWISH FEAR DIDN’T BEGIN ON OCTOBER 7.

Jewish people are extraordinarily sensitive to the possibility of being annihilated again.

I realize that might sound dramatic.

But we’re talking about centuries of persecution, expulsions, massacres, and the systematic murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.

For many Jewish families, this isn’t distant history. It’s something passed down at the dinner table.

And the Holocaust wasn’t the beginning.

When people wonder why October 7 shook Israel so profoundly, I wish they understood that this fear didn’t begin that morning.

For many, it awakened something that had never entirely disappeared.

The fear of becoming defenseless again.

The fear that the world might watch.

The fear that “never again” might be a promise nobody could guarantee.

And I think that’s what gets lost in so many conversations about Israel.

People are quick to debate borders, governments, military operations, and who has the greater claim to a piece of land. But how often do they stop to consider the history that makes Jewish survival such an emotional subject?

I’m not suggesting that history excuses every decision made by the Israeli government. Of course it doesn’t.

You can criticize Netanyahu. You can advocate for Palestinian rights. You can question Israel’s military decisions.

But Jewish history, Jewish attachment to Israel, and Jewish fears about survival are part of this story too.

And understanding those fears doesn’t mean endorsing every military response.

Just as criticizing those responses doesn’t mean dismissing the fears.

Both things can be true.

What I find particularly frustrating is how little room there seems to be for that kind of nuance anymore.

We’ve become so determined to see everything in black and white that we’ve forgotten how complicated human suffering actually is.

WHEN DID EMPATHY BECOME A COMPETITION?

I think social media has done something genuinely disturbing to our ability to empathize.

We’ve become so obsessed with being on the correct side of an argument that we’ve forgotten how to recognize another person’s pain.

A Palestinian mother who has lost her child deserves compassion.

An Israeli mother who has lost hers deserves compassion.

Neither should have to pass a political purity test before being allowed to grieve.

What bothers me isn’t that people disagree with me.

I can handle disagreement.

It’s that people seem incapable of recognizing a memorial for what it is.

If your first instinct when you see someone mourning murdered Jews is to jump into their comments screaming about genocide, maybe ask yourself what the fuck you’re actually accomplishing.

Because underneath my frustration, there’s something else.

Sadness.

I’m 34 years old, living in the country my parents came to for a better life, and I’m beginning to understand a fear my grandmother carried long before I was born.

MY GRANDMOTHER KNEW SOMETHING I DIDN’T.

I keep thinking about that little boy walking home from synagogue in Beverly Hills.

The one whose grandmother was terrified of him wearing his kippah outside.

I thought she was being dramatic.

I thought the world had moved on.

And in many ways, it has.

I’ve built a life my grandparents could only have dreamed of. I’ve been able to live openly, love openly, pursue my ambitions, and speak my mind.

And I refuse to let fear take that away.

But I understand something now that I couldn’t possibly have understood as a child.

My grandmother knew how quickly the world could change.

How something as ordinary as being recognized as Jewish could suddenly become dangerous.

And she wanted to protect me.

I wish she were still here.

I wish I could tell her that I finally understand.

But I’d also tell her something else.

I still wear my Judaism proudly.

And I have no intention of hiding who I am.

My grandmother survived a world that taught her to hide her Judaism.

I grew up in a world that promised me I wouldn’t have to.

Lately, I’ve been wondering which one of us understood the world better.

And I think, finally, I know.

Subscribe

I grew up going to Israel.

It’s been a while since I’ve been back, but Israel was never somewhere abstract to me. We have a huge family there. Several of my grandmother’s sisters live there, a few of my grandfather’s brothers lived there, and a few years ago my sister moved there too.

So going to Israel meant family.

A lot of family.

And, as a kid, a lot of time spent in apartments I absolutely did not want to be in.

Some of my mom’s aunts are religious and keep Shabbat, and I remember sitting for what felt like an eternity in these old white apartment buildings in Tel Aviv, unable to use my phone, staring at the balcony, wondering when we could leave.

I hated it.

Which is hilarious to me now.

Because those buildings I found so boring are the reason I’m writing this.

They were everywhere in Tel Aviv. White façades. Flat roofs. Long balconies. Rounded corners. Simple windows.

Nothing particularly grand. Nothing screaming for your attention.

And I think that’s exactly why I never paid attention to them.

When you see something everywhere, you assume it’s ordinary.

I had no idea I was looking at one of the greatest concentrations of Modernist architecture in the world.

Roughly 4,000 buildings.

Four thousand.

And once you understand how they got there, you’ll never look at them the same way again.

Because this story starts nowhere near Tel Aviv.

It starts in Germany.

Fourteen Years That Changed Design

The Bauhaus opened in Germany in 1919 under Walter Gropius.

And the basic idea was pretty radical for the time: why does everything need so much shit on it?

Enough ornament.

Enough decoration for the sake of decoration.

What if the way something worked could actually be part of what made it beautiful?

Suddenly you had these incredibly clean buildings, tubular steel furniture, simple lighting, typography, textiles—an entirely new visual language.

Look at a Marcel Breuer chair today and it still looks modern.

Now imagine seeing one a hundred years ago.

That’s how ahead of its time this was.

And then the Nazis came to power.

They hated the Bauhaus.

It was progressive, international, experimental—basically everything their vision of Germany was not. Many people connected to that world were Jewish; others were politically opposed to the Nazis.

By 1933, the Bauhaus was gone.

Fourteen years.

That’s all it lasted.

Which is insane when you consider how much of the world still looks like it.

But here’s where the story gets interesting.

The Nazis could close the school.

They couldn’t make everyone forget what they had learned there.

So everyone scattered.

And the ideas scattered with them.

Now We Need to Talk About Palestine

Because this all happened before Israel existed.

And the history of the word Palestine itself goes back much further than the conflict we associate it with today.

The Romans had controlled Judaea for centuries. In 70 CE, after a major Jewish revolt, Roman forces destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple.

If you’ve ever been to Rome and seen the Arch of Titus—the relief of Roman soldiers carrying away the menorah—that’s what you’re looking at.

About sixty years later, the Jews revolted against Rome again.

Rome crushed them.

Judaea was devastated. Jews were killed, enslaved and displaced, and Emperor Hadrian barred Jews from Jerusalem.

Around this period, Judaea became part of a Roman province called Syria Palaestina.

The name Palaestina was connected to the ancient name for Philistia and the Philistines.

Yes.

David and Goliath.

Those Philistines.

The name survived in different forms for centuries.

Eventually the Ottoman Empire controlled the region. Then World War I happened, the Ottomans lost, Britain took over, and the territory became British Mandatory Palestine.

So when we get to the 1920s and 1930s, there is no State of Israel yet.

There is no independent Palestinian state.

There are Arab communities, Jewish communities and British rule.

And the terminology sounds strange to modern ears because Palestinian could be used geographically then for Jews too.

The Palestine Post was founded in Jerusalem in 1932 as a Jewish newspaper.

Today it’s The Jerusalem Post.

So when I say Jewish architects were arriving in Palestine, there’s no hidden political statement in that sentence.

That’s literally what the place was called.

And Jews weren’t suddenly arriving because Hitler showed up either.

Jewish communities had lived there for centuries, and beginning in the late nineteenth century, waves of Jewish immigrants had already been coming from Europe, driven by persecution and by Zionism—the movement to establish a Jewish national home in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland.

Tel Aviv itself had been founded by Jews in 1909.

Then Hitler comes to power.

And suddenly the question of where Jews could go became a matter of survival.

For many of them, Palestine wasn’t some random place on a map.

There was already a Jewish community there.

There was Tel Aviv.

There was somewhere to go.

And Tel Aviv needed to build.

And Guess Who Was Arriving?

Architects.

Really fucking good ones.

Now, the neat version of this story would be that Hitler closed the Bauhaus, all the Jewish architects packed their bags, moved to Tel Aviv and built the White City.

That would make my job writing this much easier.

It’s also not true.

Some of the architects who shaped Tel Aviv had studied at the Bauhaus.

Some were refugees from Nazi Europe.

Some had already moved to Palestine before Hitler ever came to power.

And many of the architects responsible for the White City never studied at the Bauhaus at all. They had trained elsewhere in Europe and were influenced by the broader Modernist movement—the International Style, Le Corbusier, Erich Mendelsohn and everything else happening in European architecture at the time.

Arieh Sharon is one of the great direct connections.

He actually went from Palestine to Germany to study at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the 1920s, then returned to Tel Aviv before Hitler came to power.

So no, Tel Aviv isn’t literally 4,000 Bauhaus buildings.

It’s something more interesting.

All of these people, educations, ideas and circumstances collided in this tiny young city on the Mediterranean at exactly the moment it needed to build.

And suddenly Tel Aviv became one giant Modernist experiment.

Except There Was One Problem

Germany is not Tel Aviv.

It’s fucking hot.

And this is the part I love as a designer.

Because you can bring an idea from Europe, but if it doesn’t work where you put it, who cares how beautiful it is?

Those big expanses of glass that looked incredible in northern Europe suddenly had to deal with Mediterranean sun.

So the architecture changed.

Windows became more protected.

Balconies became deeper.

Those gorgeous horizontal balconies created shade.

Buildings were designed to catch breezes.

Flat roofs became usable.

The pale facades helped with the heat.

And suddenly the balconies I spent my childhood staring at because I was bored out of my mind make complete sense to me.

They weren’t just balconies.

They were solving something.

That’s good design.

You take an idea from somewhere else and make it belong where you are.

You don’t copy it.

You translate it.

Same language.

Different accent.

This Is the Part That Gets Me

Forget the architecture for a second.

Imagine being one of these people.

You’re a Jewish architect in Europe.

You’ve gone to school. You’ve studied this radical new movement. Maybe you’re building a career. Maybe you’re just starting one.

Then a bunch of fucking psychopaths take over your country and decide you don’t belong there anymore.

So you leave.

Maybe you leave your apartment.

Your furniture.

Your drawings.

Your friends.

Maybe your family.

Whatever you can take, you take.

And you arrive on the Mediterranean.

Tel Aviv is barely a city.

People are pouring in. Apartments need to be built. Streets are taking shape. Everyone is figuring out what this place is going to become.

And you know how to build.

That’s the part that gets me.

These architects weren’t thinking about UNESCO.

They weren’t thinking about architectural historians.

They certainly weren’t thinking that almost a century later some designer in Los Angeles was going to sit down and write about them.

They were rebuilding their fucking lives.

And while rebuilding their lives, they helped build a city.

There is something deeply Jewish about that to me.

You’re told you don’t belong somewhere.

Fine.

You leave.

And you take the things nobody can confiscate from you.

What you know.

What you’ve learned.

Your traditions.

Your ideas.

And you build again.

I Get It Now

In 2003, UNESCO designated the White City of Tel Aviv a World Heritage Site.

That’s great.

But that’s not why these buildings mean something to me now.

They mean something because they became ordinary.

People raised children in them.

They cooked Shabbat dinner in them.

They hung laundry off those beautiful balconies.

Somebody inevitably enclosed one of those balconies and completely ruined it.

Someone installed horrible tile.

Someone put in an ugly kitchen.

Life happened.

And somehow that makes the architecture more extraordinary to me, not less.

Because I was one of those kids sitting inside it thinking it was nothing special.

I think back to those apartments now.

The white walls.

The windows.

The balconies.

I get them.

And maybe that’s part of getting older as a designer.

You realize that some of the things you overlooked were actually teaching you something the entire time.

I live and work in Los Angeles, another place where European Modernism arrived, basically got sunburned, and turned into something completely different.

Maybe that’s why I understand Tel Aviv better now.

But there’s something else underneath these buildings that has nothing to do with style.

They are evidence of what people carry with them when everything else gets taken away.

The Nazis could close a school.

They could take someone’s house.

They could force someone out of their country.

But they couldn’t take what was in their head.

Those ideas crossed the border with them.

And on the Mediterranean, some of those ideas became buildings.

The same buildings I spent my childhood overlooking.

I used to see white apartment blocks.

Now I see evidence of survival.

Buildings don’t cross borders.

People do.

And they bring their ideas with them.

Los Angeles has a funny relationship with memory.

We are a city built on the promise that you can come here, become someone else, tear everything up and start again.

New house.

New restaurant.

New hotel.

New face.

New everything.

Reinvention is practically our civic religion.

And I love that about this city.

But Los Angeles became so obsessed with becoming the next version of itself that we stopped protecting the versions that came before.

We tear down the houses. We tear down the hotels. We tear down the restaurants and theaters and weird little buildings that make absolutely no sense anywhere else in the world except here.

Then we replace them with another glass box, put some white oak inside, add a travertine coffee table and wonder why everything suddenly feels the same.

There is this thing people love to say about Los Angeles:

We have no history.

Bullshit.

Los Angeles has incredible history.

We just have a terrible habit of tearing it down.

Which is why I’ve been thinking so much about one building on Sunset Boulevard.

The Standard.

If you lived in LA during a certain era, I probably don’t even have to explain that hotel to you.

The upside-down sign.

The blue Astroturf.

The pool.

That glowing green glass box behind the front desk with a person casually lying inside it.

And then there was Mmhmmm, the tiny, dark nightclub hidden behind the kitchen of The Standard.

Yes, it was actually called Mmhmmm.

And on Saturday nights, Mmhmmm became Giorgio’s.

God, Giorgio’s.

Bryan Rabin’s Saturday-night disco felt like stepping into another version of Los Angeles—dark, glamorous, sexy, a little decadent and completely free. You were surrounded by this strange mix of people that somehow only made sense in LA.

It was glamorous.

It was weird.

It was inclusive.

It was a little ridiculous.

And it was fun.

Really fucking fun.

Nobody was trying to recreate Paris. Nobody was trying to make it feel like New York. Nobody was importing somebody else’s idea of sophistication.

It was ours.

And that’s what makes seeing the building come back to life so emotional for me.

Not because I need Los Angeles to recreate those nights exactly as they were.

I don’t.

That’s not what preservation is.

I love that I can remember Mmhmmm at The Standard. I love that I can remember Giorgio’s. Those places belong to a particular version of Los Angeles—and a particular version of me.

And now that building is coming back to life.

Not The Standard exactly. That chapter is over.

The building is beginning its next chapter as PUBLIC West Hollywood.

It has been restored and reimagined.

The pool is coming back to life.

Even Giorgio’s—the place where I made some of those memories—is coming back.

But what makes me emotional isn’t really Giorgio’s.

It isn’t the pool.

It’s that the building is still there.

Because it very easily could not have been.

Someone Gave a Shit

The story of that building didn’t begin with The Standard.

Built in the early 1960s as the Thunderbird Inn, it was designed by architect Herbert Kameon as a Midcentury motor hotel. Decades later, André Balazs transformed it into the first Standard, which opened in 1999 and became something completely different for another generation.

Same building.

Different people.

Different music.

Different clothes.

Different drugs.

Different Los Angeles.

Still standing.

When The Standard closed in 2021, the building suddenly became vulnerable.

And in Los Angeles, we all know what “vulnerable” can mean.

A developer.

A fence.

A rendering.

And six months later, another piece of the city is fucking gone.

But this time, something different happened.

People gave a shit early enough.

Save Iconic Architecture, or SIA Projects, moved to protect the building before there was even an announced demolition plan. Working with preservation activist Steven Luftman, the organization pursued its nomination as a West Hollywood cultural resource, raised money for the landmarking effort and helped make the case for why this seemingly familiar building on Sunset deserved to survive.

In 2022, it was officially designated a West Hollywood Cultural Resource.

And one of the people behind that effort was SIA’s co-founder:

Jaime Rummerfield.

Which is where this story becomes very personal for me.

Because long before Jaime helped save a building that holds some of my memories of Los Angeles, she helped shape the way I see this city—and design itself.

Before Instagram, There Was Jaime

I was obsessed with Jaime Rummerfield and Ron Woodson before I ever met them.

You have to understand that I discovered design in a completely different world.

There was no Instagram.

There was no Pinterest.

Design wasn’t this infinite stream of rooms arriving on your phone every three seconds.

If you loved interiors, you hunted for them.

I lived through magazines, design blogs.

I devoured them.

I studied rooms.

I remembered names.

I would see Jaime and Ron’s work and photographs of the two of them over and over again, and I became completely fascinated.

They were glamorous.

They were successful.

They were doing exactly what I somehow already knew I wanted to do with my life.

I was fifteen.

I was closeted.

I thought they were married and I remember looking at the two of them and thinking:

Oh my God. Perfect. I can stay in the closet, marry a woman and become an interior designer.

Problem solved!

But, obviously, they weren’t married.

Ron was gay.

And Jaime was married to a very heterosexual man.

So that fantasy went to shit pretty quickly.

But my obsession with working for them didn’t.

I found their email address and wrote to them.

I basically begged.

I told them I would do anything.

Sharpen pencils.

Serve coffee.

Clean toilets.

I genuinely did not care.

I just had to be in that room.

And somehow, they said yes.

My mom used to drop me off at their office after school because I was so young I didn’t even have a driver’s license.

And that internship turned into 5.5 years.

I continued working for them throughout high school and college.

And I watched everything.

Especially Jaime.

I watched how she put things together.

I watched what she noticed.

I watched what she rejected.

I watched how she understood glamour without making it precious.

How she mixed periods.

How she respected architecture.

How she could find something strange and see beauty in it before everybody else did.

She taught me taste.

And taste is almost impossible to teach.

But more than that, Jaime taught me how to see.

She taught me that the strange thing was often more interesting than the perfect thing.

That old and new could make each other more interesting.

That glamour didn’t require everything to be pristine.

That a room could have tension.

That history and modernity could sit beside each other.

And that architecture wasn’t simply the shell we put all our pretty shit inside.

A building had a life before you arrived.

It had a personality.

It had memories.

Being a designer didn’t always mean walking into a room and screaming:

LOOK WHAT I DID.

Sometimes the most sophisticated thing you could do was recognize what was already extraordinary and have enough confidence not to fuck it up.

I didn’t understand it at fifteen, but so much of what I believe about design today began there.

The contradiction.

The tension.

The old beside the new.

The raw beside the refined.

Before you decide what should change, you better understand what deserves to remain.

Over the years, without either of us ever really naming it, Jaime became much more than the person who gave me my first job.

Calling her my first boss doesn’t come close.

Calling her my mentor doesn’t really do it either.

There are certain people who enter your life so early that eventually you can’t completely separate who you became from what they gave you.

Jaime is one of those people for me.

Almost twenty years later, she’s still one of the first people I want to call when something incredible happens.

Her opinion still matters to me, including when I don’t particularly want to hear it.

She knew me when I was a closeted fifteen-year-old kid with no driver’s license and this completely insane certainty that somehow, some way, I was going to make a life in design.

And she watched the whole fucking thing happen.

She watched me figure out who I was.

She watched me become a designer.

She watched me find my own voice.

And through all of it, she has remained one of the constants in my life.

Brilliant.

Glamorous.

Opinionated.

Hilarious.

Completely herself.

There aren’t many people in your life who knew you before the résumé.

Before the press.

Before the clients.

Before anybody gave a shit.

Jaime knew the kid.

And she’s still here for the man he became.

That means more to me than I probably tell her.

Which is why I don’t think it’s remotely surprising that Jaime became someone fighting to preserve Los Angeles.

She didn’t suddenly wake up one morning and decide old buildings were important.

This is who she has always been.

She notices things other people walk past.

She recognizes character before somebody tells her it’s valuable.

She understands that something doesn’t become important the moment everybody else decides it’s important.

Sometimes you have to see it first.

That instinct eventually became something bigger.

With SIA Projects, Jaime took the eye she had spent her life developing and turned it toward the city itself.

And when The Standard closed, she saw what could be lost.

So she gave a shit before everyone else realized they should.

She fought for it.

And now, years later, the building is still here.

The woman who taught me how to see became one of the people making sure Los Angeles doesn’t lose the things worth seeing.

Fuck, am I proud of her.

This City Changed Architecture

And here’s the part that really drives me crazy when people say Los Angeles has no history.

They have no fucking idea what they’re talking about.

Los Angeles wasn’t simply a city where Midcentury Modern architecture became fashionable.

Los Angeles was one of the great laboratories of Modernism.

Think about what existed here in the middle of the twentieth century.

Land.

Sunshine.

A booming postwar population.

New materials and construction techniques.

An expanding freeway system.

A culture built around the automobile.

A climate that allowed architects to almost erase the boundary between inside and outside.

And, maybe most importantly, a city young enough to let people experiment.

The result was extraordinary.

Neutra.

Schindler.

Lautner.

Eames.

Pierre Koenig.

Paul R. Williams.

Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Case Study House program.

Southern California became a place where architects could ask a radical question:

How should modern people actually live?

And then they fucking answered it.

Glass walls disappearing into hillsides.

Post-and-beam structures.

Living rooms opening onto swimming pools.

Deep overhangs.

Courtyards.

Sunlight everywhere.

Cars pulling underneath houses that seemed to float above the landscape.

Architecture responding not simply to how people lived, but to how people wanted to live.

And it wasn’t only the masterpieces.

That’s the part we forget.

It was the motels.

The coffee shops.

The gas stations.

The apartment buildings.

The restaurants.

The weird commercial buildings along Sunset and La Cienega that nobody thought twice about until somebody threatened to tear them down.

All of it created a visual language.

And then Hollywood did something incredibly powerful with that language.

It exported it.

Those houses appeared in movies.

Those pools appeared in photographs.

Palm trees, convertibles, glass walls and endless sunshine became shorthand for an entirely new way of life.

Modernism stopped being simply architecture.

It became California.

It became possibility.

It became freedom.

It became this fantasy that you could open a wall, walk outside barefoot in February and somehow live differently here than anywhere else.

Midcentury wasn’t just an aesthetic Los Angeles adopted. Los Angeles helped invent the fantasy of modern living.

We made Modernism casual.

We made it sexy.

We made it indoor-outdoor.

We made it cinematic.

And then the rest of the world started dreaming about living here.

That’s culture.

That’s history.

No, we’re not Rome.

Who gives a shit?

Our history doesn’t have to be 500 years old to deserve protection.

In some ways, the fact that so much of what defined modern Los Angeles emerged from such an intense, concentrated period of experimentation makes what remains even more precious.

Every time we lose one of these buildings, we aren’t simply losing an old structure.

We’re deleting another sentence from the story of how Los Angeles became Los Angeles.

And yes, not every old building needs to be saved.

Some old buildings are shit.

Tear those down.

Preservation shouldn’t mean turning Los Angeles into a museum.

Cities have to evolve.

Buildings have to change.

New architecture deserves the chance to become history too.

But somewhere along the way, we confused reinvention with erasure.

They are not the same thing.

A woman I had never met showed up at my office crying.

That’s probably where I should start.

She owns a rug gallery in Los Angeles. Her business had been included, along with mine and several others, in an Instagram boycott campaign.

I had basically ignored the whole thing.

She couldn’t.

She came to my office because she didn’t know what to do.

And I haven’t really stopped thinking about that.

But let me back up.

There is a very weird side to having a public life that I don’t talk about very often.

And before this gets too serious, some of it is fucking hilarious.

I bought a sofa from Eternity Modern.

A perfectly normal thing to do.

Someone saw it online and apparently decided there was a furniture crime to solve. They tagged Pierre Paulin’s account asking if the sofa was theirs, and suddenly I’m getting messages asking me where I bought it.

Eternity Modern.

I bought the sofa from Eternity Modern.

I promise there is no international furniture conspiracy happening in Beverly Hills.

People do this kind of shit all the time.

They investigate a room.

They investigate something I bought.

They decide they know who really designed something.

They decide they know what I meant by something I said.

And now, my personal favorite, people have started saying my Substack articles are too good for me to be writing them myself.

I actually love that one.

Like, thank you?

But there’s another side of this that isn’t funny.

I’ve opened my phone and read:

“I wish Hitler killed all of you.”

I’ve read:

“I’d love to skin you alive in front of your mom.”

I’ve received both.

Someone actually sat somewhere, typed those words to another human being, and pressed send.

What the fuck do you even do with that?

I usually screenshot it.

Send it to a friend.

Make some comment about people being insane.

And then I go back to work.

That’s what I’ve gotten very good at doing.

Going back to work.

But there’s something I’ve been thinking about lately that I don’t think I’ve ever really said out loud.

I think being Jewish publicly has changed for me.

I’ve always been Jewish.

Very Jewish.

Persian Jewish. Loud family. Traditions. Food. Israel. Holidays. All of it.

But being Jewish and being Jewish out loud are two different things.

And lately, being Jewish out loud can feel like you’re supposed to come with a disclaimer.

I’m Jewish, but—

I love Israel, but—

I’m worried about antisemitism, but—

Before you’re allowed to say how something made you feel, you’re expected to establish that you have the correct politics.

That you condemn the correct people.

That you’ve acknowledged everyone else’s pain before you’re allowed to talk about your own.

I’m fucking tired of the disclaimer.

And maybe being gay has something to do with why this bothers me so much.

I came out at 21.

I know what a closet feels like.

I know what it feels like to edit yourself depending on who is around.

I know the strange calculations you make about which version of yourself is going to make everyone else the most comfortable.

And I know how fucking good it feels when you finally stop doing it.

I already came out once.

I’m not going back into another closet because being openly Jewish suddenly makes people uncomfortable.

And yes, Israel is part of this.

I love Israel.

There. I said it without a “but.”

That sentence does not tell you everything I believe about the Israeli government.

Just like telling you I love America doesn’t tell you who I voted for or whether I supported every American president, every war, every policy or every terrible thing this country has ever done.

Why would it?

I can love Israel.

I can believe deeply in its existence.

I can have family there.

I can feel connected to it because I am Jewish.

I can disagree with its government.

I can look at the suffering of innocent Palestinians and feel absolutely devastated by it.

I can want safety and dignity for them too.

I don’t know why we’ve decided those things are contradictions.

They aren’t to me.

And I think that’s part of what scares me about where we are right now.

Because criticism of Israel is not antisemitism.

It isn’t.

Criticize the Israeli government.

Protest a war.

Fight for Palestinians.

Disagree with Zionism.

Disagree with me.

That is not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the moments when “Zionist” starts doing some very suspicious work in a sentence.

When an American Jew becomes personally responsible for a government thousands of miles away.

When I find myself being targeted here in Los Angeles over what someone believes about Israel.

When someone says they wish Hitler had killed all of us and somehow we are still supposed to pretend we’re having a conversation about Middle Eastern policy.

At a certain point, come the fuck on.

Sometimes “Zionist” means Zionist.

And sometimes you know exactly what someone means.

Which brings me back to that woman who showed up at my office.

This happened last year.

I didn’t write about it then.

Honestly, I didn’t really have a place to.

Instagram wasn’t where I wanted to have this conversation, and this Substack didn’t exist yet.

Rosa Beltran, the owner of Clad Home on Melrose, publicly posted my personal account and called me “one of the most vocal and hateful racists” she had encountered in our industry.

She posted my Eichholtz Los Angeles business account too, called me an “ultra-right-wing-Zionist,” and told her followers, “Never spend your money here.”

She saved the posts to an Instagram Highlight titled “BOYCOTT!”

When I saw my name, I ignored it.

Honestly, I rolled my eyes.

I thought: don’t give this oxygen.

Don’t engage.

Don’t become part of some stupid Instagram fight.

I had clients calling. Projects happening. A business to run.

I had shit to do.

So I looked the other way.

Then other business owners who had been included started contacting me.

Some told me that clients who followed Rosa had stopped working with them afterward.

And then one day that woman walked into my office.

I’m not going to name her or her gallery here. She came to me in a really vulnerable moment, and that part of her story isn’t mine to make public.

She was crying.

She introduced herself and told me she owned a rug gallery. She told me she had lost clients after Rosa’s posts and asked me what I thought she should do.

And I remember looking at her and realizing that while I had been able to dismiss the whole thing as Instagram bullshit, she hadn’t.

She was scared.

This was her livelihood.

This was real to her.

I felt terrible.

So I gave her business a shout-out. I told people to go visit her showroom.

It wasn’t some heroic act.

It was an Instagram Story.

But I wanted her to know somebody saw her.

And maybe I needed to remind myself of that too.

The whole thing forced me to confront something about myself that I didn’t particularly like.

I had looked away.

Growing up Jewish, you learn about the Holocaust and eventually you ask the same question everyone asks.

How?

How the fuck did that happen?

How did people watch their neighbors being singled out?

How did people watch Jewish businesses being targeted?

How did people watch things get worse and worse and just continue with their lives?

For most of my life, I think I imagined looking away as a conscious decision.

Like someone witnesses something horrible, understands exactly what is happening, and decides:

I don’t care.

But I’m starting to understand that looking away probably doesn’t feel like that at all.

It feels like:

I don’t want to get involved.

I don’t want the drama.

Someone else will say something.

This isn’t my problem.

I have work tomorrow.

It feels reasonable.

It feels mature.

Sometimes it probably even feels like the right thing to do.

Until one day you realize you were looking away.

Now, because this is the internet and someone will intentionally misunderstand me:

No. An Instagram boycott is not the Holocaust.

Los Angeles is not Nazi Germany.

Someone criticizing Israel is not a Nazi.

That is not what I am saying.

What I am saying is that if the only lesson I learned from Jewish history is to recognize antisemitism once it reaches Auschwitz, then what the fuck did I learn?

Surely the lesson has to begin earlier than that.

With language.

With isolation.

With deciding certain people deserve different rules.

With the small things everyone finds a reason not to make a big deal about.

My family understands how quickly the world around you can change.

My parents left Iran after the Revolution.

I grew up hearing stories that made history feel less like something that happened to other people a very long time ago and more like something that could walk right through your front door.

Maybe that is why all of this hits a nerve in me.

Or maybe I’m just done pretending it doesn’t.

For years, I thought confidence meant not caring what anybody thought about you.

I used to love saying that.

I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks.

It sounds great.

It’s also not true.

I care.

Of course I fucking care.

I’m a human being.

Someone tells you they want to skin you alive in front of your mother and you’re supposed to be what? Too successful to have feelings?

Sometimes I laugh at the comments.

Sometimes I genuinely don’t care.

Sometimes I send them to my friends and we make fun of them.

And sometimes the shit people say hurts.

Both can be true.

Actually, I’m realizing that a lot of things can be true at the same time.

I can be confident and sensitive.

I can be American and love Israel.

I can care about Israelis and Palestinians.

I can be gay and Jewish and not want either identity turned into somebody else’s political argument.

I can have a good life and still tell you when something hurts me.

And maybe most importantly, I can speak about antisemitism without first proving to you that I deserve to.

That last one took me a while.

Maybe that’s what this article is really about.

How easy it is to start editing yourself.

One little edit at a time.

Don’t post that.

Don’t say that.

Don’t mention Israel.

Don’t call it antisemitism.

Don’t name the person.

Don’t make people uncomfortable.

Don’t make yourself a target.

But I’m not interested in giving you a version of myself that has been sanded down until nobody can possibly object to it.

I spent too much of my life figuring out who I am for that.

I’m gay.

I’m Jewish.

I love Israel.

I care deeply about innocent Palestinians.

I don’t know why any of those sentences are supposed to contradict one another.

They don’t to me.

Someone will probably read this and tell me I’m playing the victim.

Someone else will call me a Zionist as though they’ve uncovered a secret.

Someone will disagree with me.

That’s okay.

And apparently at least one person will think I couldn’t possibly have written any of it.

Fine.

I spent too much of my life learning how to be comfortable with who I am to start negotiating it now.

Oh, and yes.

I wrote this one too.

I grew up in Los Angeles, so Century Plaza has always just been there.

If you grew up here too, you know what I mean. There are certain buildings you don’t really discover. They’re part of the geography of your childhood. You drive past them a thousand times before you ever stop to wonder who designed them, why they’re shaped the way they are, or what Los Angeles looked like when someone first imagined them.

Century Plaza is one of those places.

And I didn’t really start thinking about it until I started working there.

Last year, I designed the Eichholtz Los Angeles branded residences at Park Elm, the two residential towers that now rise behind the Fairmont Century Plaza as part of the larger Century Plaza complex. I started spending a lot of time on the property—walking through the hotel, going back and forth to the residence, watching the spaces around the fountain slowly change.

And eventually I’m like, wait... Something is happening here.

Not in the annoying real-estate-development way where someone puts three restaurants and an Erewhon next to a condo building and announces they’ve created a neighborhood.

Something more interesting.

But to understand why, you have to understand what Century Plaza was in the first place.

The Los Angeles We Grew Up With

If you grew up in LA in the ’90s, you remember the old Century City Mall.

Not the enormous, polished Westfield it is today. The old outdoor mall. The movie theater. Walking around with your parents. That very specific version of Los Angeles that didn’t seem particularly special at the time because it was simply where we grew up.

And then there was the submarine.

DIVE!

I used to beg my dad to take me there.

I can still remember being a kid and seeing that enormous yellow submarine sticking out of the mall and thinking it was the coolest fucking thing in the world. But honestly, I was almost as excited about the elevator. It felt like getting into a rocket ship.

That’s what I remember about that version of Century City. Everything felt a little larger than life.

You weren’t just going to lunch. You were getting inside a submarine.

You weren’t just taking an elevator. You were launching into space.

You went to the movies and came back outside into the California sun.

And none of it felt particularly unusual because we were kids and this was Los Angeles. Of course Steven Spielberg had a submarine restaurant at the mall.

Only later do you realize how completely insane that sentence is.

DIVE! opened in 1994. Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg were behind it, and the whole thing was an 11,000-square-foot fantasy built around submarine sandwiches and simulated underwater dives. The lights would change, alarms would sound, and suddenly your family dinner was apparently descending to the bottom of the ocean.

It lasted only a few years.

But ask a certain generation of people who grew up in Los Angeles about DIVE! and watch what happens to their face.

They remember.

That’s what I love about cities. The places that become part of us aren’t necessarily the places we’re told are significant.

They’re where your dad took you because you wouldn’t stop asking.

They’re where you saw movies with your friends.

They’re the restaurant you thought would exist forever, the ridiculous yellow submarine you can somehow still picture perfectly thirty years later.

And while I was busy staring at that submarine, around the corner was this enormous curved building that I barely thought twice about.

It was just the Century Plaza Hotel.

I had absolutely no idea I was looking at one of the most important pieces of modern architecture in Los Angeles.

The Building Everyone Knows and Nobody Talks About

The Century Plaza Hotel opened on June 1, 1966.

Which means that, somehow perfectly for this story, Century Plaza turns 60 this year.

It was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, one of the most important American architects of the twentieth century and the architect who would later design the original World Trade Center in New York.

And once you know that, you can’t really look at Century Plaza the same way again.

That enormous sweeping crescent wasn’t some developer deciding a curved hotel would photograph well from a drone. It was part of a much larger idea about what Los Angeles could become.

Century City itself was created on land that had been part of the 20th Century Fox backlot. In 1961, roughly 180 acres were purchased and envisioned as what its developers called a “city within a city.”

Think about how ambitious that was.

This was Los Angeles looking at the future and saying: we’re going to build another center.

And Yamasaki’s Century Plaza was going to sit at the heart of it.

The hotel opened with 750 rooms and technology that sounded practically science fiction at the time—color televisions in every room, built-in radios, electric blankets, central heating and air. It was marketed as the “World’s Most Beautiful Hotel.”

But what interests me more than the gadgets is the urban idea behind it.

Century Plaza wasn’t conceived simply as a building you drove up to, slept in and left.

Yamasaki designed the hotel in relationship to a plaza. The original plans included retail, outdoor dining and places to sit. The architecture was supposed to create social life around it.

The plaza mattered.

Over the decades, much of that disappeared.

And now, sixty years later, they’re putting it back.

Maybe We Didn’t Need a New Idea

The area behind the restored Fairmont is now being called the Century Plaza Promenade, and the idea is for it to become something of a town square.

I love that because Los Angeles has a complicated relationship with town squares.

We’re very good at private space.

We have extraordinary houses behind hedges. Private clubs. Hotels. Restaurants. Malls. Valet stands.

We’re less consistent at creating beautiful places where you can just…be.

Somewhere you can have lunch, walk into a gallery, sit outside, run into someone you know, stay for a drink and realize you’ve been there for four hours.

We’re a city famous for driving somewhere in order to walk around once we arrive.

And maybe that’s why I’ve become slightly obsessed with watching the Promenade take shape.

They’re changing the paving and lighting. There are plans for sculpture, outdoor programming and galleries spilling into the public space. Restaurants are beginning to fill the curved storefronts around the fountain.

And the restaurant lineup isn’t exactly fucking around.

KYU is there. Sushi Noz—the New York omakase restaurant—is coming. Estiatorio Milos has been announced. Wally’s is part of the mix. There are additional restaurant, gallery, retail and wellness concepts filling in around them.

Above all of it you have Park Elm and the Fairmont residences. In the middle, you have a 60-year-old hotel that has hosted presidents, movie stars, the Grammys, the Emmys and enough Hollywood history to fill another article entirely.

Suddenly, what could have been a collection of very expensive individual things starts behaving like one place.

That’s the part I’m interested in.

Can You Actually Create a Neighborhood?

Developers love the word destination.

Every new project is a destination.

Put in a fountain: destination.

Add a celebrity chef: destination.

Install some landscaping and a sculpture large enough to require its own building permit: DESTINATION.

But you can’t actually declare a place interesting.

People have to decide that for you.

And that’s the gamble at Century Plaza.

I’ve gotten to know Jordana and her family through my time at Century Plaza, and honestly, Jordana has become one of my favorite people ever. She’s fabulous. She’s smart. She has incredible energy. And, maybe most importantly for a project like this, she actually gives a shit.

You can tell when someone is simply trying to fill square footage.

This isn’t that.

Jordana is incredibly particular about what belongs here and what doesn’t. She’s thinking about the restaurants, the galleries, the retail, the wellness, the programming—not as separate leases, but as pieces of one place.

And I think that’s why Century Plaza is starting to feel different.

There is a point of view behind it.

I’ve spent my entire career arguing that expensive things alone don’t make a great room. You can fill a house with the best furniture in the world and still end up with absolutely nothing to say.

I think neighborhoods work the same way.

A great hotel next to a mediocre restaurant next to a random chain next to an empty storefront is still just real estate.

But when the pieces begin speaking to one another, something changes.

You stay at the Fairmont.

You live at Park Elm.

You come downstairs for dinner.

You walk across the plaza.

You see an exhibition.

You meet someone for a drink.

You buy something you weren’t planning to buy.

You stay.

That last part may be the most important.

Great places make you stay.

And Then I Accidentally Became Part of It

After months of working at Park Elm and watching all of this develop, my relationship with Century Plaza changed again.

This year, I partnered with Fairmont Century Plaza on a year-long BĀZĀR pop-up overlooking the Promenade.

BĀZĀR is my rotating collection of furniture, objects, art and things I love. It isn’t intended to function like a conventional furniture showroom, and I’m deliberately not building it around an online store.

You have to come.

That suddenly feels very appropriate for where it is.

Because the entire experiment happening at Century Plaza depends on the same idea:

Will people still come somewhere simply because it’s worth being there?

I think they will.

But I’m also fascinated to find out.

Sixty Years Later

The more I’ve learned about Century Plaza, the more I keep coming back to the same thought.

Maybe this isn’t actually a reinvention.

Maybe it’s a restoration of an idea.

In 1966, Century City was imagined as a city within a city. Yamasaki put this extraordinary curved hotel at its center and designed public space around it with shopping, dining and places for people to gather.

Then Los Angeles changed.

Century City changed.

The mall changed.

DIVE! came and went. Thank God there are photographs because otherwise explaining to someone that Steven Spielberg once built a giant yellow submarine around the corner from Century Plaza sounds like something I hallucinated.

And now we’re here again.

Different architecture surrounds it. Different people live there. The hotel has been restored. Park Elm rises behind it. The restaurants are different. The stores are different.

But the fundamental idea is strangely familiar.

A hotel.

Homes.

Restaurants.

Shops.

Art.

A fountain.

People walking between them.

A place to sit.

Maybe the most interesting thing happening at Century Plaza isn’t that Los Angeles has come up with some revolutionary new idea for how we should live.

Maybe it’s that we’ve finally remembered a very old one.

Sometimes you have to grow up before you realize the places you grew up around were important.

And sometimes a city has to do the same.

I’m really fucking sensitive.

The people who know me well are probably laughing because this isn’t exactly breaking news. But I don’t think it’s the part of myself I show very often publicly.

I feel everything. Deeply. I feel when someone’s energy is off. I feel rejection probably more than I should. I feel other people’s excitement. I feel beauty. I feel music. I feel a room before I can always explain what’s wrong with it. I can walk into a space and know almost immediately whether something feels right.

And yes, sometimes it’s exhausting.

For a long time, I thought sensitivity was something I needed to get better at controlling. Toughen up. Don’t take things personally. Stop overthinking. Care less.

I’ve gotten some version of that advice my entire life.

I don’t really believe it anymore.

Because the older I get, the more I realize that the part of me that can be hurt deeply is the exact same part of me that can love deeply. The part that makes me sensitive to criticism is also sensitive to beauty. The part of me that notices the smallest shift in someone I love is the same part that notices when a chair is two inches too far to the left.

You don’t get to keep one and turn off the other.

And I don’t think I would want to anymore.

This is where I’m probably going to lose some of you.

I believe in manifestation.

Actually, let me correct that.

I’ve believed in manifestation for most of my life.

When I was in high school, I read The Secret. I watched the movie. And I didn’t casually think, Oh, that’s interesting.

I fucking lived by it.

I believed that if I could see something clearly enough, believe it was possible, and almost feel what it would be like before I had it, I could somehow bring myself closer to it.

And apparently I was doing this even before I knew what to call it.

Recently, my cousin was accidentally sent a YouTube video of me from ninth grade.

At Beverly Hills High School, we had a broadcasting class that ran KBEV, the local Beverly Hills television channel. For our final, my friends and I had to create and produce a show for the channel.

Naturally, we made a late-night talk show.

And naturally, I was one of the guests.

This thing was being broadcast to an audience consisting primarily of our friends, their parents, and probably a handful of grandparents who accidentally stumbled onto the channel. We were being stupid. We were kids.

Years later, KBEV uploaded the episode to YouTube with a caption about “famous interior designer Ryan Saghian” when he was in high school.

I was mortified.

I begged them to take it down.

Because absolutely nobody needs permanent access to footage of themselves in ninth grade.

But everyone else was focused on something I had completely forgotten.

In the video, I apparently talk about myself as though I’m already an internationally known interior designer.

Not that I wanted to become one.

I was one.

Which is objectively insane.

But people kept saying to me, “Do you realize you literally described your life?”

And it made me start thinking about all the other times I had done exactly that.

When I was young and first interning for Ron Woodson and Jaime Rummerfield, they had this amazing showroom on La Cienega. It felt like a townhouse. The showroom was downstairs and their design studio was upstairs.

I remember thinking, Oh my God. This is the dream.

One day I wanted a showroom in the design district with my studio upstairs.

Today, I walk into my own Dutch townhouse in the design district, through my showroom downstairs, and upstairs to my studio.

Hello.

I could give you other examples.

Things I pictured so specifically that when they eventually happened, I almost forgot there had ever been a time when they weren’t real.

And this is where manifestation gets complicated for me.

Because I don’t believe I sat around thinking really positive thoughts and God dropped a career in my lap.

I worked my ass off.

I started working in this industry ridiculously young. I sacrificed things. I got rejected. I embarrassed myself. I made mistakes. I knocked on doors. I took opportunities and created others when nobody was offering them.

Luck mattered.

Access mattered.

Other people believing in me mattered.

Timing mattered.

So did failure.

But I also can’t ignore the fact that I could see so much of it before I had any evidence that it was going to happen.

Maybe manifestation isn’t magic.

Maybe it’s allowing yourself to believe in something so completely that you start making decisions from the perspective of the person you believe you’re becoming.

Maybe saying something before it’s true changes the way you move through the world until, one day, it is.

I don’t know.

And I’m actually okay not knowing.

Because my relationship with all of this changed as I got older.

After my first real heartbreak in college, I started reading very different books.

The Untethered Soul.

The Power of Now.

A Return to Love.

I went looking for answers because I was heartbroken, and somewhere in there my understanding of what I was looking for started changing.

The Secret had taught me to focus on what I wanted.

These books started asking me why I needed what I wanted in order to be okay.

That fucked with me.

Because I’m ambitious. I’ve always been ambitious. I like dreaming about what’s next. I like setting impossible goals and then figuring out how to make them less impossible.

I don’t think that part of me is going anywhere.

But there is a danger in spending your entire life imagining the next version of it.

The next project.

The next accomplishment.

The next recognition.

The next number.

The next thing that will finally make you feel like you’ve arrived.

You can get incredibly good at creating your future and completely miss your present.

And maybe that’s the part of manifestation nobody talks about enough.

At some point, you have to recognize when you’re standing inside something you used to ask for.

I’m still learning how to do that.

And then there’s God.

I almost wrote “the universe” here.

It feels safer.

More modern. Less loaded.

But it also wouldn’t be honest.

I believe in God.

I’m not interested in telling anyone else what they should believe. I’m certainly not qualified to explain God to anybody.

I can only tell you what I’ve come to believe for myself.

Everything I’ve read, experienced and felt keeps bringing me back to the same idea: love.

That beneath all the shit we accumulate around ourselves—the fear, ego, ambition, insecurity, status, resentment, success, failure—love is the thing that feels most real to me.

And this is where creativity enters the picture.

I believe there is something spiritual about creating.

Maybe that sounds ridiculous coming from someone who spends a significant amount of his life thinking about sofas and marble, but I mean it.

God creates.

And we create.

Not in the same way, obviously. I’m not comparing selecting a sofa to creating the universe. Calm down.

But I do think there is something profound about taking something that exists only inside you and giving it form in the world.

A room.

A painting.

A song.

A meal.

A garden.

A company.

A family.

A sentence.

Something wasn’t there before, and then because you felt something strongly enough to make it, now it is.

I think that’s extraordinary.

And I don’t think creativity belongs only to people who call themselves creatives.

I think we are all creating constantly.

Our homes. Our relationships. Our work. The way people feel around us. The lives we build.

Maybe doing what you genuinely love is one way of participating in that act of creation.

Maybe that’s why it feels so different when something is made from love rather than fear.

You can feel it.

At least I can.

Maybe that’s the sensitive part of me again.

The thing I spent years thinking I needed to toughen up might actually be the thing connecting all of this.

Sensitivity allows me to feel.

Feeling allows me to imagine.

Imagination allows me to create.

Creation allows me to express love.

And somewhere in that chain, I experience God.

I know how gay that sounds.

Trust me.

This is significantly more uncomfortable for me to write than telling you that I hate your vessel sink.

But maybe that’s why I wanted to write it.

I’ve spent a lot of my life learning how to be confident. How to walk into rooms like I belong there. How to defend an idea. How to hear no and keep going. How to have an opinion and stand behind it.

Strength is easy for me to show you.

Sensitivity is harder.

I have never been one of those people who dreamed about their wedding.

Not secretly. Not when I was younger. Not even in that vague someday way.

I never imagined what I would wear, what song would be playing, what the flowers would look like, or how I would walk down an aisle. I didn’t have some fantasy venue filed away in the back of my mind.

Honestly, the whole idea has always made me a little uncomfortable.

I don’t even like when my friends order me a birthday cake at a restaurant.

The second I see a waiter walking toward the table with a candle and everyone starts looking at me, I want to crawl underneath it.

Which probably sounds strange coming from me.

My name is on my company. My face is on my Instagram. I speak on panels. I put my work out into the world constantly. And now I write a newsletter where I apparently tell strangers exactly what I think about everything.

I can be incredibly open.

And I’m also incredibly shy.

Both things are true.

There’s a part of me that’s much more insecure than I probably appear from the outside. Attention I can control doesn’t scare me. Put me on a stage to talk about design and I’m fine. I know why I’m there. I know what I have to say.

Read more

Hollywood Regency was having a full-blown resurrection. We wanted lacquer. Brass. Pattern. Color. Chinoiserie. Sculptural furniture. Rooms weren’t embarrassed to look decorated.

Kelly’s Viceroy in Santa Monica had opened a few years earlier and it was basically design school required reading. Everybody knew those rooms. The black and white. The apple green. The mirrored surfaces. That very specific mix of old-school glamour and something completely new.

Everybody wanted their house to look like the Viceroy.

And then there was Woodson & Rummerfield, who became my mentors.

At the time, they were finishing Christina Aguilera’s house, the former Osborne residence in Beverly Hills. I had watched that house on their show, so getting to see what they did with it in real life was kind of surreal.

It was a fucking wonderland.

Not because it was simply over the top, but because it was completely committed to an idea. Every room had an identity. Every decision felt like a decision. You might have loved all of it, hated some of it, or wondered what the hell was happening in certain rooms, but you weren’t going to forget it.

That was the design world I came into.

And then, naturally, we got sick of it.

That’s what design does. The pendulum swings.

Hollywood Regency became oversaturated. Glamour became a formula. We had enough lacquer and brass to last several lifetimes and suddenly everyone wanted the opposite.

And honestly, I understood it.

I wanted the opposite too.

The rooms got quieter. The finishes got chalkier. Things that were shiny became matte. Things that were new needed to look old. Suddenly everyone knew what wabi-sabi meant.

Or at least pretended to.

And some incredible design came out of that shift. I still love it. Give me beautiful plaster, an incredible piece of stone, something primitive next to something refined, and I’m happy.

But then something weird happened.

What started as a rejection of a formula became another formula.

You know the house I’m talking about before I even describe it.

White oak.

Travertine.

Plaster.

Bouclé.

A Pierre Jeanneret chair.

An enormous olive tree that somehow survives indoors despite receiving absolutely no sunlight.

One strange little vintage stool that nobody is allowed to sit on.

And a kitchen so perfectly empty that apparently these people don’t own a toaster.

It’s beautiful.

That’s the problem.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of it. In fact, I use half of it. Probably more than half.

But somewhere along the way, we all agreed that these things meant taste.

And once something becomes shorthand for taste, we stop asking ourselves whether we actually like it.

Taste gets dangerous when everyone agrees on it.

Which, in retrospect, makes the Viceroy example kind of funny.

Twenty years ago everybody wanted their house to look like the same house too.

It was just a different house.

The difference now is how quickly it happens.

We see everything.

Every house. Every hotel. Every restaurant in Paris. Every new chair at Milan Design Week. Every designer’s latest project. Every celebrity kitchen. Every fucking powder room.

And we’re saving all of it.

So is the client.

Twenty years ago, a client might have come to you with a folder ripped out of magazines. Now they can arrive with 600 saved images, and somehow 500 of them are the same room.

And designers aren’t immune to it either.

We’re looking at the same things.

The algorithm has essentially created the largest mood board in human history, and we’re all standing around it pretending we found the references independently.

Then add luxury real estate.

If you’re building a $30 million house to sell to someone you haven’t met yet, of course you’re not going to give them a purple lacquered dining room.

You’re going to make it beautiful enough to feel expensive and neutral enough that nobody hates it.

Which makes complete sense.

Until everybody does it.

And suddenly the house designed for everyone starts to look like the house designed for no one.

I think that’s where good taste can become a trap.

Because once we know what the “right” choices are, making them becomes incredibly easy.

The right stone. The right vintage chair. The right shade of plaster. The right lamp.

Nothing is wrong.

But nothing is really at risk either.

The safest version of good taste is usually the least interesting one.

And before somebody comes for me, this is not an argument for maximalism.

I don’t want every room screaming at me.

Some rooms need to shut the fuck up.

I love whispering wealth. I love interiors where you don’t immediately understand why they’re expensive. Where the luxury is in the proportion, the material, the craftsmanship, the things you notice ten minutes after you walk in.

Quiet can be incredibly sexy.

But quiet isn’t the same thing as anonymous.

A whisper can still have an accent.

Maybe that’s what I miss about the interiors that made me want to become a designer.

Not the lacquer.

Not Hollywood Regency.

Not the excess.

The conviction.

The willingness to make a choice that wasn’t already validated by 80,000 saves.

Because ultimately I don’t care whether a house is beige or burgundy, minimal or layered, whispering or screaming.

I just want to know whose house I’m in.

Not everyone should hire one.

And I don’t mean because of money. I don’t mean because your house isn’t big enough, or because you don’t own enough expensive furniture, or because you haven’t reached some imaginary level of life where you suddenly qualify for an interior designer.

I mean some people simply shouldn’t hire one.

I’ve been doing this for almost twenty years, and one of the biggest misconceptions about interior design is that you hire a designer to help you execute what you already know you want.

Sometimes, that’s exactly what you should hire someone for.

If you already have a very clear vision and what you really need is someone to help refine it, source it, and bring it to life, you may be looking for a design consultant rather than a full-service interior designer.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, knowing that from the beginning can save everyone a lot of frustration.

But if you’re hiring an interior designer because you fell in love with the way they see things, that’s a very different relationship.

You’re not just hiring a service.

You’re hiring a point of view.

And here’s the part nobody really tells you before you do that:

A point of view that agrees with you about everything isn’t much of a point of view.

The best thing a designer can tell you is no.

I think people underestimate how much of interior design is actually editing.

Yes, we find the beautiful sofa. We select the marble. We obsess over the exact shade of plaster and spend an absolutely insane amount of time deciding whether something should move two inches to the left.

But knowing what to add is only half of it.

Knowing what not to do is often more important.

A great designer can see the mistake before it becomes an expensive one.

We know when the scale is wrong even though technically everything fits. We know when the stone you fell in love with is going to fight with everything around it. We know when the room needs absolutely nothing else even though there’s an empty corner sitting there practically begging you to fuck it up.

And I know how arrogant that can sound.

Trust me, I’m the designer.

I hate that shit too.

But after almost twenty years, something happens.

You stop thinking about every decision.

You start feeling it.

I almost never say “I think.”

My team recently pointed something out about me that I had never noticed myself.

When we’re brainstorming or I’m making a decision, I almost never say:

I think…

I say:

I feel…

I feel like the sofa needs to be bigger.

I feel like we need something old here.

I feel like that stone is fighting the room.

I feel like we’re trying too hard.

I never consciously decided to speak that way. It’s just how design happens in my brain.

Sometimes I know something is wrong before I know why it’s wrong.

Then someone asks me to explain it and I have to stop and reverse-engineer my own fucking brain.

And there is usually an explanation.

Scale. Proportion. Balance. Architecture. The relationship between two materials. Something I learned from a room I designed fifteen years ago that I don’t even consciously remember learning.

But I don’t experience all of that as a calculation anymore.

I experience it as a feeling.

That’s what twenty years of making decisions does.

Knowledge doesn’t disappear.

It becomes instinct.

And instinct is one of the hardest things to explain because you can’t really put it on a proposal.

You can list drawings. Meetings. Sourcing. Procurement. Installations.

You can count the rooms and the pieces of furniture and the number of site visits.

You can’t really write:

Twenty years of knowing when something just feels fucking wrong.

But in some ways, that’s the most valuable thing you’re hiring.

You’re hiring all the decisions that came before yours.

The good ones.

And, maybe more importantly, the bad ones.

Because I’ve fucked it up too.

I’ve ordered the thing that was too big. I’ve fought for something and later realized the client was right. I’ve walked into a room after installation and thought, Fuck. I should have done that differently.

Those moments stay with you.

Eventually all of those successes and mistakes become this strange internal library you’re constantly pulling from without realizing it.

That’s experience.

Not being right all the time.

Knowing more because you’ve been wrong before.

There is a reason you couldn’t design the house yourself.

That sounds bitchier than I mean it.

My clients are some of the most accomplished people I’ve ever met. They run companies, make movies, build businesses, play professional sports, manage fortunes. They are experts in worlds where I would last approximately eleven minutes.

And if I hired one of them to do what they do, the last thing I would want is for them to simply confirm everything I already believed.

I’d want access to everything they know that I don’t.

Interior design should be no different.

You can have phenomenal taste.

You can know exactly what you like.

I actually love that.

But knowing what you like and knowing how to build an entire interior are two completely different things.

A great house is thousands of decisions that depend on one another.

Change the ceiling height and suddenly the chandelier is wrong. Change the stone and the wood that looked incredible beside the original sample dies. Move a doorway six inches and the furniture plan changes. Make the sofa four inches deeper and now the coffee table looks like a postage stamp.

The client sees decisions. The designer sees the relationship between them.

That’s the job.

The Pinterest image is not the plan.

We have access to more beautiful interiors than at any point in history.

That’s incredible.

It’s also completely fucked with our perception of what designing a house actually means.

You can save a kitchen from Paris, a bedroom from Milan, a bathroom from Los Angeles, and a living room from Copenhagen.

Every one of them can be gorgeous.

Put them together and you might have a complete disaster.

Because design isn’t collecting beautiful things.

It’s deciding which beautiful things don’t belong.

Sometimes I’ll love something just as much as the client does and still say no.

I’ve killed pieces I was obsessed with because they weren’t right for the project.

It hurts for about five minutes.

Then the room gets better.

That’s the difference between shopping and designing.

I understand the control thing more than I probably should.

Because I am a fucking control freak.

There. I said it.

Ask anyone who works with me.

And the older I get, the more I realize how difficult it is to hand something important to another person and genuinely allow them to be better at it than you are.

I struggle with it in my own life.

I can hire someone because they’re brilliant and then somehow find myself standing over their shoulder thinking, But what if we did it this way?

It’s ridiculous.

And recognizing that about myself has actually made me understand my clients better.

A home is personal.

Really personal.

It’s your money. Your family. Your routines. Your memories. Your shit.

And then some designer walks into your life and tells you the thing you’ve been dreaming about for six months is wrong.

Of course that’s uncomfortable.

Trust isn’t automatic because you signed a contract.

The designer has to earn it.

But once they do, you have to do something with it.

You have to leave room to be surprised.

This may be the most important advice I can give anyone thinking about hiring a designer.

Don’t hire someone because you love the way they see the world and then spend the entire process making sure they never show you anything you haven’t already seen.

What’s the fucking point?

The rooms I remember aren’t the ones where every decision was safe and immediately agreeable.

They’re the ones where something almost shouldn’t work.

Something is too big.

Something is unexpectedly old.

There’s a color that makes you slightly nervous.

There’s a piece you would have walked straight past in a showroom.

There’s usually one decision where everyone looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.

I kind of love that moment.

Because if everything feels completely comfortable from the beginning, we’re probably not discovering very much.

And the whole reason to hire someone with a point of view is to go somewhere you wouldn’t have gone by yourself.

And yes, sometimes the client is right.

This matters.

Designers have egos.

I certainly do.

We’re paid to have opinions all day long, and if you’re not careful, you can start confusing having an opinion with being right.

They’re not the same thing.

I’ve had clients push back on something I was absolutely convinced about.

And occasionally—painfully, horribly, annoyingly—they were right.

I hate when that happens.

But I respect it.

Because the goal isn’t for you to live in my house.

I already have a house.

And the goal isn’t for me to reproduce the house already sitting inside your head.

The best projects happen somewhere in between.

I bring everything I’ve learned.

You bring everything I could never know about you from a floor plan.

And somewhere in that collision, we make something neither of us could have made alone.

That’s the good shit.

Hire someone you trust enough to disagree with you.

That’s really it.

Look at the work. Ask questions. Understand how they think. Make sure they understand how you live.

And then, once you’ve chosen them, let them do the thing that made you choose them.

Challenge them.

Tell them when something doesn’t feel like you.

Ask why.

But when your designer tells you no, don’t immediately hear:

I don’t care what you want.

Sometimes no means:

I’ve seen where this decision leads, and I don’t think you’re going to like where we end up.

That’s expertise.

You’re not paying someone to be right 100 percent of the time.

Nobody is.

You’re paying for the accumulation of thousands of decisions you’ve never had to make.

You’re paying for someone to see the mistake before it costs you $40,000.

You’re paying for someone to know when the room needs more—and, more importantly, when it needs absolutely fucking nothing.

You’re paying for someone to take everything you love and turn it into something you didn’t know how to ask for.

And if all you really want is someone to confirm every decision you’ve already made?

That’s okay.

Seriously.

You probably just don’t need an interior designer.

Because sometimes the hardest part about hiring an expert is allowing them to be one.