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industry insider | Jan 15, 2025 |
Amid wildfire devastation, LA’s design community comes together

The shocking thing was how fast it happened. It was 6:15 p.m. on Tuesday, January 7, when a fire broke out in the San Gabriel Mountains, a range that cradles Los Angeles from the north. At 6:33, designer Jeanne Chung was in her Pasadena showroom when she got a call from her son—he had seen flames in the foothills where her parents live. Chung rushed there to evacuate them.

“We were out of there by 7:45, and by midnight, their backyard was on fire,” she recalls. “It just came out of nowhere, and it moved so quickly. Thankfully, the house was saved.”

Not everyone was as lucky. Interior designer, Realtor and shop owner Sasha Darling had a home in Altadena, a neighborhood just north of Pasadena, closer to the mountains. Darling was having lunch with friends when they got news of a fire advancing elsewhere in the city—she rushed home to find winds whipping through her neighborhood “like a tornado or a hurricane.”

“I kept expecting the power to shut off, but it never did. At 7 p.m. I got a text from my neighbor saying, ‘Go outside, there’s a fire,’” says Darling. “I wasn’t even under evacuation orders yet, but I didn’t wait.”

After a harrowing drive to a rental property she owns in Joshua Tree—branches flying through the air, a stoplight toppled over on the freeway—Darling was safe. Her house didn’t make it. “It was full of beautiful things,” she says. “I didn’t take any of them. I just left.”

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The wildfires that raged through L.A. last week—and continue to burn even now—have carved an indiscriminate path of destruction. At least 25 lives have been lost. By some estimates, 12,000 structures have been damaged, and tens of thousands of acres have burned—numbers that will likely increase in the days ahead. The disaster has affected people from all backgrounds, at all income levels, in all professions, including the design trade.

The locations of two of the major fires—one in the upscale coastal neighborhood of the Pacific Palisades, the other centered around Altadena—are home to many designers and members of the broader industry who have lost their homes, studios or both. Amber Lewis’s shop in the Palisades is gone. David John Dick of Disc Interiors lost his home. Kelli Lamb, the editor of Rue, lost hers in the Eaton fire that engulfed Altadena. Sales reps, contractors and makers have been displaced. Everybody knows somebody who is coping with the unique grief of losing a home and the chaos of figuring out what comes next.

“The list of industry people seems to keep getting longer,” says Jobst Blachy, the owner of Quintus Home, a Los Angeles–based furniture brand and multiline showroom. Over the past weekend, Blachy organized a GoFundMe page to drive cash donations to designers and architects affected by the fires—thus far he’s collected over $56,000 to benefit at least 24 designers, though new names come in every day.

The impact of the fires, says Blachy, has taken on many forms. Some haven’t outright lost their homes, but the damage from smoke and fallen ash will require the equivalent of a gut renovation. Designers who lost their studios face unique challenges. “We had a firm come in, and they had lost their office and their entire materials library,” he says. “They had dozens of projects in the works, and they were talking about having to start over from scratch.”

And though the interior design profession may conjure up ideas about wealth and privilege in the public imagination, the truth—as Business of Home readers know—is that not every designer has the resources to absorb the economic shock of losing a home or office. In California, where insurers have increasingly pulled back on or canceled coverage precisely because of the risks associated with wildfires, some homeowners are not adequately covered, if at all.

“Not everyone is insured, not everyone knows if they can afford to rebuild,” says Thomas Lavin, who has multiline showrooms in Los Angeles and Laguna Niguel. “It’s completely unstable; people have no idea what they’re going to do. Designers all work so hard and have a vision and a passion for the interior space, so people save so much money and spend it on their home, and it becomes their dream. And now it’s lost. How do you wrap your head around that?”

The ferocity of the fires’ destructive force has been matched in intensity by the outpouring of goodwill from the design community. Last week, as thousands fled their homes, designers opened theirs to friends and strangers, while using their social platforms to direct attention to nonprofits and GoFundMe pages alike. Brands of all stripes chipped in, offering everything from free mattresses to design consultations.

This week, the response to the fire seems to have cohered around collecting product for those who will soon need it to rebuild their lives. There’s no doubt that the industry is uniquely situated to respond to a tragedy in which thousands lost their homes and everything in them. The challenge is figuring out a way to parcel out aid on a timeline that makes sense for victims.

“Right now, we’re still in the emergency phase, where people need a place to live, they need clothes,” says Chung. “People were evacuating with the clothes on their backs, maybe some jewelry—if they didn’t bring it, they don’t have it. … I think in a few months, when people think about rebuilding, that’s when those of us in the industry can really pitch in.”

Tamara Kaye-Honey, founder of the L.A. design collective House of Honey, has quickly spun up an initiative called The Soft Landing Project, an effort to collect new and gently used home goods from the design industry for those affected by the fire. (Designer Adam Hunter launched a similar program, LA Can Do; Joe Lucas of the Harbinger showroom merged his efforts with House of Honey’s.) Crucially, Kaye-Honey has access to a warehouse in downtown Los Angeles to store the pieces until they’re needed.

“Our design studio is just 5 miles from the Altadena community that we hold so dear. The home where I raised my children and started my design business was lost in the fire,” says Kaye-Honey, who sprung into action the morning after the fires first ravaged the city. “It was clear that a lot of help was needed, [so] we created an Eaton Canyon resource center in our design studio, which was quickly filled with generous donations.”

Once word got out, offers of help came from all over the country. Jaimee Rose, an Arizona-based designer, began organizing a truckload of furniture to send to the Golden State. Brands, ranging from Christopher Farr and Woven to Chasing Paper and Industry West, started chipping in. Regional magazine California Home+Design got involved to help spread the word and organize distribution and logistics.

“The support from the design industry, not just in California but across the country, has been astounding,” says Kaye-Honey. “At this point I know we have around 2,000 items to give, but the list is growing.” She’s planning on holding “shop days” for evacuees to come pick up free furnishings to set up their new homes when the time is right.

In the meantime, there are new threats to fend off. Darling says that many of her Altadena neighbors have already been contacted by predatory developers looking to buy property on the cheap from homeowners in crisis mode. She’s been working the phones, trying to urge calm and perspective.

“There’s this immediate panic reaction. If you don’t know anything about real estate, you [might] think no one’s going to want a piece of property in a burned-down, dead neighborhood,” she says. “In two to five years, when the neighborhood is back up, there’s going to be a whole new town, and it’s going to be very sought-after.”

Lurking beyond the immediate crisis is a more complicated challenge for the L.A. design industry. The fires have come during an already difficult period, as the past few years have seen the post-Covid slump mix with a local mansion tax, a writer’s strike in Hollywood, and a general stagnation in entertainment. Business has been, in a word, soft.

Though attention has been rightly focused on the threat to human life and the scale of the tragedy, there’s an understanding that, in the short term, the fires will make business even softer. Projects will be canceled, orders will be put on hold, and L.A. designers will feel the effect. All told, the disaster is projected to be one of the most expensive fires—if not the most expensive—in U.S. history. Some estimates peg the cost at more than $250 billion.

But down the line, there’s a silver lining: Designers will have a role to play in the rebuilding. Though the scale of destruction has been astounding, among sources reached by BOH, there is very little doubt that places like the Palisades and Altadena will rise again. “We may end up getting back to business sooner rather than later,” says Blachy. “I was speaking to one designer who had five or six clients who lost homes in the fire, and they’ve all already reached out to her about rebuilding.”

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