Design Guide

Links to all our exclusive design collections. Scroll down for their stories and shopping ideas.

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Stories and Shopping Ideas

Read the story behind our exclusive collections, their fun names, plus shopping suggestions.

AstroShields

SHIELDING THE ATOMS

This collection was specially designed for glassware. The creative process had to take into account the challenges that a balloon-shaped product poses in realizing a seamless all around design. I started with a row of stars taken from the new branding logo, and in the spirit of representing the fragility of glass, I came up with the idea of surrounding them with shields. As these shapes don't touch each other, it was easier to achieve a virtually seamless, endless pattern. The name is a nod to one of the store's very first design collections, Astroids, made of stars and named after the atomic space age. I've always loved that name and was happy to find a way to revive it somewhat.

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Breeze Blocks

FEEL THE MID-MOD BREEZE

For years, during my many walks through Palm Springs’ most distinctive neighborhoods, I’ve been taking pics and notes of what catches my creative eye. To my surprise, there were many more breeze block styles than I ever imagined. This sparked my curiosity and I began to research and redesign them one by one into a uniform grid. Over time, an impressive selection of blocks emerged. I enhanced it with a few of my own, for a total of 35 different blocks, to make it into an art poster and it later made its way to other products. It's one of the first collections without a personalized name.

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Eclipse

ALIGNMENT OF THE PLANETS

Here's a fun story... In building this store, I had to order samples to make sure colors would come out as expected. Instead of ordering a useless and boring multicolor swatches test product, I worked on a design that would include all of the 50 colors palette that I specially created for my products. A good friend looked at it and said out loud “Wow, it looks like a series of stills taken from a moon eclipse, like in the old days”. And that's how this design and it's name were born!

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FlowerPower

LATE SIXTIES PEACEFUL REVOLUTION

Coming back from a Sunday breakfast with friends while travelling, I was waiting in a subway station and was struck by the beautiful mid-century tile flooring. I took a picture, posted it on Instagram and knew that those orange circles would be a great inspiration for a new collection. The next day, I was already creating different patterns from it. Since I always wanted to tackle a flowery design, either with daisies or lilies from the sixties, the circled shapes quickly turned out as a mix of the two. And that's how Flower Power came to life!

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Hollywood StarDots

PALM SPRINGS MOVIE COLONY

A few years ago, I visited a Nespresso shop that was displaying art creations made from different colored coffee capsules depicting famous people and paintings. It was incredibly well done and so unique. That idea has stuck in my head ever since. Later, I was at the Palm Springs Art Museum to see an Andy Warhol exhibit with the famous quartet of Marilyn Monroe images. The combination of these two ideas is the basis for the design of this collection. I wanted something very simple and graphic, in the midcentury modern style, that would celebrate the golden age of the Movie Colony in Palm Springs. This area is located right next door to me and is great to walk around. It took me two years to come up with the final design but the result is stunning. The name came to me very quickly but only once Marilyn was finally finished. It's a combination of two words: the "Stars" of Hollywood and the "Dots" in the design, which is a pun for the midcentury famous term "Stardust".

LifeSavers

THE GLORIOUS DONUT-SHAPE CANDY

This design is obviously inspired by the famous donut-shape candy invented more than a century ago. That's why I gave it the name LifeSavers. It had been sitting in my design folder for years. After spending weeks on a design for a new product line, I stumbled on this again. Once I was able to figure out how to fill in the negative space (between the donuts) that gives it its dynamic style, it all came together like magic. The name came after days of thinking about it non-stop. One afternoon at the pool, a donut-shape item grabbed my attention: a life saver! Just like the glorious candy...

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LoverLeaf

THE MANY COLORS OF LOVE

A cloverleaf design derived from those funky sixties tiles and wallpapers with psychic neon glow circles in bold colors. Originally named CleverLeaf, an accidental heart shape appeared during the final stage of design. That's what gave it it's full meaning and final name.

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LozAnges

LOS ANGELES MEETS LOZENGES

Remember the chic style of the 1960s Hollywood hotels? Gorgeous lounges, mixed brass and silver chandeliers, low-profile curved sofas, and magnificent fabrics. This is where the inspiration came from for this beautiful mid-century modern pattern of colorful triangles. Los Angeles meets lozenges. I present you the “LozAnges” collection.

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Mid-Mod Star

STARRING OUR LOGO STAR

I had been searching for a few years to launch a self-branded unique collection like most exclusive and luxury brands do. One would immediately think of Louis Vuitton of course with a pattern made of the letters LV. But I did not want to show a name or letters like MCS for Mid-Century Style. I was aiming at something visually distinctive like Burberry and their iconic pattern. With my colorful products, the design had to be very simple and recognizable. It's only when revamping the store's brand with a new logo that this collection was possible. The new shape representing an uppercase M with a star on top was perfect. By twisting it up and down to create a wavy mid-mod pattern, the whole thing became alive. Then when I launched the duffle bags series with the first being the camo style ZipperDee design, I realized this item with its large and multiple panels would be the ideal canvas for a new self-branded collection. And this how Mid-Mod Star was born.

PanAmTrays

FROM AVIATION FOOD TO TV DINNERS

You might not know this but TV Dinners got their eureka moment thanks to the way the airline industry used to serve food in little containers organized on trays. After designing those cute interlacing squares in the same spirit, I thought it would be sweet to honour the golden age of flying.

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Pawzl

YOUR FURRY FRIEND'S PAWTERN

This design came from one of my doodling sessions. About a year later, wanting to launch the first pet products on the store, I was looking for a design that would include a little paw somewhere, as a surprise built into in. A bit like the British book series “Where's Wally?” (“Where’s Waldo” in America). Even though cat and dog paws are similar, they aren't identical. I set out to create a unified icon or pictogram. I came up with a stylized paw design, made up of 5 circles. That's how a geometric pattern idea came about. Then I remembered my earlier doodles with shapes, organized in a grid like a puzzle. With a little fine-tuning, it became the perfect candidate for our little furry darlings. The name was chosen after a fun search for pet puns (there are so many…), and thus Pawzl was born.

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PolaRise

RISE OF THE POLAR STAR

When I was a kid, my grandma always put me in charge of the multiple vintage Christmas decorations. There was this beautiful star on top of the tree, chiseled and sparkling. It was always the very last thing to install, as a special reward. Years later, I'm working on a star-based design rising from the background in 3D, and that's when I realized it reminded me of my childhood's star also called North Star or Polar Star.

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PsychoFlakes

HITCHCOCK PRESENTS SNOWFLAKES

This funky collection honours the singular movie era of Alfred Hitchcock and his unique storytelling and cinematographic style that culminated with Psycho in 1960, mixed with the ubiquitous mid-century snowflake-like star design. The hallucinating color mix of the original collection was inspired by Corn Flakes' marketing mascot "Cornelius" the rooster (Corny), introduced around the same period, in the late 1950s: green, red, orange, yellow. Mix it all together for a flaky-psychedelic design!

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SpaceCadet

SPACE: THE MID-CENTURY FRONTIER

Everyone remembers the fun and futuristic space cartoons of the late mid-century. Up until the 70s, kids of all ages couldn't get enough. Today, the stylish designs of the space age, starting with the launch of Sputnik in 1957, still enjoy a huge popularity. Here's my take on this amazing odyssey.

SpiroBurst

BETWEEN SPIROGRAPH & SUNBURST

As I was trying for a few days to reinvent the designs you can make with the famous Spirograph, which you can't, I found myself in Sunnylands, taking pictures of agave plants and bingo! The perspectively exploding linear pattern just blew up in my design soul. When I got home, I was surprised by the similarity to the Sunburst pattern, such an essential mid-century style. That's when I started playing around with those shapes together and then this feathered rotating wheel appeared. The name was quite easy to figure out and turns out to be so natural and cool!

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StarChips

THE STARSHIP OF STARS & CHIPS

Inspired by the fabulous design illusions of the 1960s with simple geometric shapes that form new designs went they intersect and depending how you look at them. The name is in honor of the USS Enterprise "Starship" from Star Trek.

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Starzl

STARS & PUZZLED SHAPES

This design is the twin pattern of Pawzl. It derived later from its sibling but the original came from doodling sessions. When I wanted to create bandanas as a matching product, I thought that maybe people would also like to wear them independently without "paws". So I tweaked it by replacing them with mid-century modern stars and it became Starzl. The name is a nod to the original Pawzl design.

TearDrops

CALIFORNIA’S GOLDEN TRAILER

From the 1930s through to the mid-century modern era of the 1960s, the travel trailer of choice was the Teardrop model. These glory days have been revived in recent years. It owes its name to its shape: the bubble at the front provided sleeping accommodation for two, while the teardrop at the rear housed an outdoor kitchen hidden beneath the hatch. This clever galley was the initial inspiration for this design to celebrate these wonderful caravans and their kitchenettes. I'd been wanting to launch a collection for the dining room for a long time, and so this teardrop design was created. Where did the spark come from? It was when I stumbled across a video from the 1990s about a gathering of classic teardrop caravans (link below). This was the creative starting point for a table linen collection featuring placemats, cloth napkins and table runners, with the TearDrop design. That video can be found here: https://blogs.chapman.edu/huell-howser-archives/2003/12/31/teardrops-californias-gold-6001-2/

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ZipperDee

SUPER ZIPPING RETRO OVALS

This design looks like a zipper on purpose. Finding a name, however, wasn't so easy. “Zipper” alone felt simple and obvious. Searching for ideas to tweak it, I came across the 1940's Disney song Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, still well known to this day. “Zip-a” and “Zipper” sounded quite the same and it was a nice twist to honour the mid-century era where their first theme park was built. Why just keep the “Dee” you might ask? A nod to Sandra Dee, the Hollywood icon in the late 50's and 60's.

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