Have you ever stared at your bedroom dresser and thought “hey dresser, you know what you are missing? Vintage porcelain legs.” Listen. I was going through my “body part” phase. I live in a state of phase, after phase, after phase, and having this blog amplifies it because I see my own house all over the place. Which makes me want to try something different much faster than most of you. It forces me to take risks and be weird, and then I find myself in Pomona splurging on some Art Deco stocking/pantyhose department store display pieces.

A couple of months ago I had a rather interesting kitchen design challenge, with a capital C. I was hired by LG to promote their new Black Stainless Steel series at an editors event in New York – that wasn’t the challenging part. The challenging part came later (keep reading). The ask: Design a kitchen on Pinterest then, weeks later, install said kitchen in one day/night in an event space, in New York (with lots of help from a strong design/build team). It was insane, and was full of fixable bumps and exciting problems to solve.

Design plans get presented, accepted, and edited, but rarely outright rejected. But it happens. So instead of throwing away a perfectly good design, I figured we’d blog about it so maybe one of you could use it. You all know this house above, right? It belongs to my friend Ian who now shares it with his fiance (a good friend), and soon to be son.

The thing that I love most about this house is also the thing that has caused me the most stress (and damage, and money), up until just recently: The beautiful west facing California sunlight. It made the house unbearably hot in the afternoon (almost year round), and it bleached out all furniture, textiles and wood in a very bad, sad way . . . until I met LLumar.