LOTS OF CATCHING UP TO DO!

Hi!  I'm in Carmel this holiday weekend with some girlfriends for our annual getaway.  One of my best friends who I met many years ago on the adventure of our lives traveling around India lives here in a beautiful, old, rambling country house, and it's become our annual tradition along with a few other core besties to set this particular weekend aside, no matter what other craziness is going on in our lives, and take time some down time together.

It doesn't hurt that our incredible hostess is an amazing cook who makes everything by hand and from scratch including her yoghurt, granola, fresh almond milk, hazelnut milk, lavender cookies, polenta lime torte, soups, salads straight from her garden, these farm-to-table meals that you wouldn't believe... the list goes on and on.  It's ridiculous how much she spoils us.

SO ... now that I'm feeling quite relaxed and unwound and well-fed, which is a big change from the frenzied pace of the past few months, I wanted to take this chance you catch up with you a bit!

The store has been open for about 3 weeks, but not until this week has it started to look halfway decent to me.  I'm still holding out on you for the final reveal because we have a few more big shipments on the way and I really want to have all of our beautiful goodies on display before I photograph it.

The upholstery collection is totally dialed in, with a selection of really beautiful sofas and sectionals on display in the store (you can see our upholstery collection online too at www.cladhome.com.)  I'm SO excited to finally have a showroom where people can come to sit and touch and really feel the quality of our upholstery. 

We've had a great response so far, with people especially excited about how flexible we are with customization and how low our prices are.  Sofas are selling and it seems my little business experiment is working!  Bring people high quality, beautiful design at really accessible prices and they will come!

It's taken some time for our collection of homewares and accessories to come in, so for awhile the shelves were looking pretty bare.  I was a tiny bit embarrassed to have people coming in to the store knowing that it wasn't looking the way I envisioned it yet, but it's also our design studio where we work with clients, so we sort of had to be open by default.  Happy to say that now things are starting to fill in nicely. 

Actually speaking of shelves, in the beginning I had a COMPLETE fail with shelving!  I commissioned a bunch of custom made metal and wood plank shelving units that I hated once I saw them installed.  They just weren't "me" at all.  I don't know what I was thinking.  (Please don't judge :) The shelves aren't styled here and we didn't even have any inventory yet to put on them!)

What it taught me is that my bar for the store has to be that I love it enough to put in my own house.  Period.  Anything that doesn't meet that bar will not make me happy to see every day in my store.  It was a valuable "aha!" moment because designing this showroom has actually been really tricky for me!  It's SO different than designing a home. 

Luckily I'd given myself a stern talking to at the very outset of this whole thing and told myself there was bound to be a learning curve with opening my first store and I would make mistakes.  This helped me move on from the shelving mistake.  I then lucked out big time and found an entire collection of vintage brass etagere shelves on Craigslist from an old gift shop on Balboa Island.  They look like something straight out of the Paris flea market.  They're old and have a beautiful patina from the salty island air and they are perfect. 

Aside from all of the new upholstery and pretty special home accessories we're showcasing (if I do say so myself), there are some amazing vintage and refurbished treasures I'm really excited about.  When I'm decorating for myself or for my clients I scour high and low for these one-of-a-kind items that don't come from any big brand name retailers and that I know no one else will have in their homes.  These are the treasures that make a room come to life!  That's probably one of the best parts of opening this store for me, that I now get to buy up all of these treasures because I have a place to put them and I know that people will go crazy for them like I do.

So I scored a big bucket of bamboo furniture upholstered in grubby, 1970s orange fabric ...

And re-did them in this fabulous palm frond print that couldn't be more perfect for summer ...

This campaign desk was a sight for sore eyes before we gave it a new look with glossy, kelly green lacquer ...

I fell in love with this brass sputnik floor lamp at the flea market and now I love it even more in my window display ...

People are going kind of crazy for these softest, most beautiful vintage African indigo throws that we're making into pillows, wall hangings, and upholstery ... one shopper even wants to make a sofa from them, which I can't wait to see finished!

Can you tell I like them a lot?  Remember when I almost named the new store Indigo Home Co?  I had you all voting for your favorite name, and I even bought the web domain ... it was a close call!  I love our name now, but Indigo will always be my jam.

That's the news from Clad Home!  I hope you're doing something lovely this weekend and experiencing peace both within and without.

STORE PROGRESS AND GENERAL CATCHING UP

It's been awhile!  This has been the first hiatus I've ever taken from writing this blog, and it felt weird to me to be so out of touch with you.  The evolution of my business has always been such a personal and organically-grown enterprise.  I think of every single follower, whether here or on any of my social media outlets, as an invaluable participant in helping to build this career and this life that I love.  I'm not one of those Instagramers, for instance, with tens (or hundreds) of thousands of followers (maybe someday...not knocking it!)  In fact I think I just rounded 2500 :) But I know for a fact that each follower came to me because they saw something in my work that they liked.  None are robots or were cajoled, bribed, or paid to "like" me.  And I honestly appreciate keeping it real like that!  It amazes me sometimes that this blog has grown from something entirely unknown in it's infancy to logging 30,000 visitors a month. So thank you for that.  I totally get it that I've experienced the success I have in large part because of YOU.  Thanks for hanging in there with me even when I had to log off for a bit.

These past couple of months it's been literally a matter of not enough hours in the day to physically accomplish all that needed to get done to launch the new Clad Home store and website.  It's all I've been doing.  I don't think I would recognize the inside of my gym, it's been so long, and I'm pretty sure I can't touch my toes anymore.   Any social life (sorry friends!) has totally fallen by the wayside while Melanie and I have been putting in long hours at the store.  We're days away from opening and I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel!

For starters, the signage began going up yesterday, which was ultra exciting.  The main large wall sign above our glass storefront goes up today and I can hardly wait.

I think this is what the store looked like the last time I showed it to you ... a big, raw, empty, light-filled space that, after some renovating, was a vast improvement over the state it was in when we found it.

Around a month ago we moved our office operations into the space and began amassing furniture, art and decor that piled up around us in an insane jumble that we picked our way through in order to get to our desks.  We kept butcher paper on the windows so no one could see our chaos, and spent a couple more weeks toiling over the website (which we'd been working on since last Fall) from dawn 'til well after dusk ... I don't think I had ANY inkling the amount of work and then re-working and re-working necessary to design and launch a halfway decent commerce website.  Even working with a cadre of web designers for months and months on end, which we did, it was just about the most tedious, time consuming thing I've ever done. 

But launch we did, and although it's not yet perfect and we're still working out some technical kinks as well as adding lots more product, I'm proud of what we've achieved with it so far.  We're taking orders and we ship nationwide!  (I won't say it would have never gotten off the ground without the help of Melanie and Marc because that would be laughable it's such a massive understatement.)

I'll be sharing much more with you soon about the whole vision behind my new line of upholstery, my commitment to designing quality goods that are locally made and bringing them to you at a really accessible pricepoint.  Because I'm a firm believer that we should all have access to beautiful, distinctive design at prices we can actually afford.  It's not just a pithy slogan on my website, it really and truly is design for the people!

Along those lines, we've curated quite a collection of artwork for the store all done by local artists and selling at pricepoints from $50 for gorgeously framed photographic prints to $1500 for enormous "statement" paintings, the kind that single-handedly make a room.  I'm extra excited to introduce you to this work, and we'll soon be making some smaller (easily shipped) works available on the website as well!

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Today is a big deal because all our custom lighting is being installed, and lighting transforms a space perhaps more than anything else.  We had some incredible fixtures custom made for us by Park Studio, a local husband and wife team that we're excited to partner with in part because their designs are amazing, and in part because we're psyched to get to showcase more fantastic local LA designers!

I've been scouring the flea markets too and have picked up some awesome vintage lighting that's going to look amazing in my storefront windows.  In case you couldn't tell, mid-century is easily my favorite era for lighting design ...

Also being installed today are some big 10' tall modular shelving units I designed with my metal worker.  I wanted them to be brass toned like this awesome design, but we couldn't get the color quite right at the powdercoaters (and working with solid brass would have been too expensive.)  So I went with matte white powdercoated metal and light-toned natural wood shelves.  I have raw concrete floors and bright white walls like this, so I'm thinking it should look pretty good. 

Oh and the Clad Home write-up in the LA Times that was meant to come out a couple of weeks ago?  The publish date got pushed back, which is actually much better timing for me because it means that the store will be up and running by the time we get that nice dose of publicity.  We pushed ourselves so hard to have the new website up and running in time for the earlier supposed publishing date, and then it didn't happen, but the silver lining is that all our toil was not for naught.  It meant that we could get that immense project off our plates and focus on to the business of opening up shop!

So this is the week that we pull a rabbit out of a hat and turn a crazy jumbled pile of stuff into a beautiful shopping experience, and next week is our "soft" opening.  We'll be staffed and open from that point on, although I'll wait until June or July when I have everything dialed in and looking just the way I want it before throwing our big grand opening soiree.  You'll be the first to know!

xoxo,

HERE WE GO, IT'S MOVING WEEK!

So today we're packing up my little starter design studio and movin' on up in the world to Melrose Ave and our new Clad Home digs!

Our doors won't be open quite yet and believe me there's lots of work to be done to get us to that point, but at least we'll be in!  One step at a time.  It's been overwhelming, nerve wracking, scary and thrilling all at once, but I'm so excited to make this next move!

Thanks for standing by while I get it all off the ground ... you're the best and I mean it.

xoxo,

TAKE FIVE

Taking a birthday breather for the next couple of days in one of my very favorite places to escape to, this wonderful little village of Todos Santos, Mexico.

I discovered it on a surf trip when I was about 19 years old, and it has beckoned me back every few years ever since.

Back next week ... peace out :)

DOUBLE PISCES BIRTHDAY WEEK!

My son was born on my birthday eve, so each year he and I get to celebrate a week-long birthday bonanza.  This past weekend we threw Benicio's "Big 3" party at one of our favorite spots, the antique carousel that sits tucked away up in the trees of Griffith Park.

Being east siders in LA, Griffith Park has always kind of doubled as our back yard.  It's the largest municipal park in the country, and although it sits smack dab in the middle of LA's urban tangle, it somehow has miles of remote hiking trails along ridges and canyons, plenty of wildlife including coyotes and mountain lions (!?), a secret Redwood grove that Benicio and I think is inhabited by fairies, and special destinations like the art deco Griffith Observatory, the Zoo, and this place. 

On Sunday we set up camp (just far enough away to not be driven completely batty by the carousel tunes on repeat) with a couple of teepees, a face painting salon, and lots of balloons of course, and the festivities commenced.  In spite of a rather daunting forecast of rain for the entire weekend, somehow our day looked like this! Winning right from the start.

The gang all traipsed up to the carousel for a thrilling ride (seriously, this is the fastest merry-go-round I've ever been on.  It definitely puts the wind in your hair!)

My little chocolate lover (who definitely takes after his mama in that regard) got his wish...

 

I got my wish too, because it's a pretty amazing day when my former husband and I, together with our families and friends, can all come together to celebrate this little boy whom we all love so much.  That's truly the greatest gift we can give him.  Divorce is never what you plan on, but I know it can sometimes be the right choice, especially when it's about safeguarding a peaceful and loving environment when kids are involved.  Families come in all shapes and sizes, and ours is now this funny little blended mash up, but it works!  And I couldn't ask for anything more.

Happy Birthday my little one!  You are the light of our lives!

xo,