My fiancé’s dear friend Nancy moved to Joshua Tree, California, several years ago with her long-time love, sculptor and furniture maker Alma Allen. We visited the couple, in their newly built, nearly finished home, this past Christmas, and I immediately fell in love with their modern, bio-regionally designed, green home, which was built to suit the harsh, gorgeous desert climate. Nancy and Alma built the home together over the course of a couple years, with minimal outside help. Here, Nancy tells us about the trials, tribulations, and rewards of living, working, and building with your true love, and how their home has inspired their design sensibilities, future project ideas, and new, rural lifestyle.

Elka: Tell me a little about the process of designing your home.

Nancy: Alma had always wanted to build his own house and thought about the design for years. Joshua Tree provided a perfect climate to incorporate a large courtyard, which had always interested him. The protected outdoor area provides shelter from the wind and creates an area for plants that would be devoured by the local wildlife outside the walls. The design of the house continues to be a work in progress. The layout was changed from the original drawings in many ways while we actually built and we continue to explore possibilities.

E: What were your biggest challenges?
N: Living in a Streamline trailer for two and a half years as we built. The trailer is the polar opposite of the passive solar construction of our house. The trailer is hot when it?s hot and cold when it?s cold. Dealing with the Building Department and local water and power companies for new construction was also challenging. Building codes do not encourage or even allow some aspects of green building. Although you have to pick your battles, we learned to not take no for an answer from the power and water companies, who often give false information.

E: Now that your house is nearly finished, what are you especially pleased with?

N: We are especially pleased with the passive-solar construction of the house. With the large south facing windows (which face directly to Joshua Tree National Park) and more minimal east/west exposure, as well as the thick cement floors with radiant floor heating/cooling and a geo-thermal loop, the house stays cool in the summer and warm in the winter. We?re also delighted with the homemade solar water heater which heats 250 gallons up to 140 degrees in the day and is currently maintaining a temperature of 115 overnight. (If we run the heating all night the temperature does go down as the tank is drained.)

E: Why Joshua Tree?

N: We had a shop for a few years in Los Angeles but grew tired of the daily commute and paying rent for Alma’s studio in downtown LA, our apartment in Silverlake, and our retail space in Venice. Alma and I are both originally from Utah and love the red rock desert. We considered moving to Southern Utah outside of Zion?s National Park, but Las Vegas would be the closest big city and we like our beer and wine. In Joshua Tree we are now only two hours away from Los Angeles, so we can easily have continuity with our work in LA, such as studio visits with Alma?s collectors.

E: What sort of interior features did you consider from both an aesthetic and practical point of view?

N: The fir tongue and groove ceiling. More work in some ways and less in others because it doesn’t require drywall and paint. Once it?s installed it?s done. It also breathes. Due to our very steep driveway, we were required to put in fire sprinklers, which have proven to be very practical for hanging lights!

E: Can you describe your interior design style?
N: Chunky minimal

E: What are your favorite objects in the house?
N: Alma’s sculpture. Fritz & Clara [the dogs]!

E: How about favorite furniture?
N: Alma’s furniture made from salvaged wood! I also love some of the vintage George Nelson cabinets.

E: What’s the hardest part about living here? The most rewarding?
N: The hardest part about living in Joshua Tree is the lack of good food. We miss abundant farmer?s markets and great restaurants, especially sushi…although we have more time and motivation to cook and recently I made my own kimchi! The most rewarding parts are the open spaces, wildlife sightings and the night skies. A giant tortoise tried to walk into our living room this week.

E: What are your needs, business-wise, for this space?
N: The space is comprised of two buildings separated by a large courtyard. The south area is living space and the north building is the wood workshop and sculpture gallery/office. Alma is also building a separate building with a steel frame for stone carving, which will house our solar panels as well as allow for cranes to move heavy materials. Separating the workspace from the living space will hopefully allow us to take advantage of increased tax incentives for solar-powered businesses.

E: What are your future building and renovation plans?
N: We?re going to build an outdoor shower using the solar water heater and the stone carving building.

E: Any advice to folks looking to build or renovate together?
N: Don?t do it… kidding! My advice would be to enjoy the endeavors that go wrong or not as planned as an unexpected opportunity for wabi-sabi - the beauty of imperfection and/or incompleteness. The epoxy that didn?t polish out of the cracks in the cement, the giant tub of permanent black dye that exploded… some of the things that caused tears while in the process turn out to be quite charming in the end.

Isn't it amazing how people who were once celebrities can fade into obscurity? The same thing can be said for celebrity decorators, especially William Pahlmann. Okay, so perhaps he's not an obscure designer, but he does not have the name recognition of Dorothy Draper or Elsie de Wolfe. If this were 1950, we would all be talking about Pahlmann. After all, he was one of the most famous decorators of the 1940s through the 1960s.

Pahlmann, who was educated at Parsons in the late 1920s, first gained notoriety after designing a mirrored bed for the first Mrs. William Paley (this according to Legendary Decorators of the Twentieth Century by Mark Hampton). Getting her seal of approval was the impetus he needed to go onward and upward, eventually landing him the job of head of the decorating and antiques department at Lord and Taylor. Pahlmann became known for his model rooms for the department store- rooms which garnered attention by the press and brought flocks of customers to the store. After a brief hiatus during World War II (serving in the Air Force), Pahlmann returned to New York where he set up his own decorating firm. He even had his own syndicated newspaper column titled "A Matter of Taste".

Pahlmann's interiors after WWII are quite evocative of the post-war era. While Pahlmann was quite capable of designing in the traditional style, much of his work celebrates mid-century modernism. Pahlmann was a champion of modern materials, including rubber flooring and rayon and other synthetic fabrics. The exotic also played a role in his interiors. Artifacts and objects of various cultures and countries mixed freely, lending his rooms a sort of well-traveled look. And let's not overlook Pahlmann's love of color. There was nothing primary about his chosen color schemes. In fact, in his book The Pahlmann Book of Interior Design, he wrote about various color combinations that he had used thus far in his career. These included cerulean, lime, magenta pink and white as well as deep sage, ripe persimmon and French blue.

Pahlmann was so well-regarded in the design world that when a young Albert Hadley first ventured to New York seeking a job as a designer, he sought out a meeting with his design idol. Hadley describes Pahlmann as "a man of great charm with a flamboyant personality and certainly he was not shy about anything."* Pahlmann encouraged Hadley to enroll at Parsons School of Design, just as he had.

While many of Pahlmann's room may seem a bit dated today, don't you think it's worth revisiting the career of this late, great decorator?

(Pahlmann's work is featured in the upcoming Acanthus Press release New York Interior Design, 1935-1985. Another "lost" designer whose work I greatly admire is George Stacey. I'll be writing about him soon!)



A great example of Pahlmann's fearless use of color. This bedroom's colors were inspired by a vineyard.


The mod floor in this living room was rubber! The mix is a bit unexpected: modern furniture with a Victorian sofa and Spanish altar candlesticks mixed with French candle sconces.


This was Pahlmann's own living room. I love the gunmetal gray walls and the robin's egg blue leather chair. According to Mark Hampton, the cabinet is actually a snakeskin Victrola.


I couldn't resist this image of an Empire-style tented room. Pahlmann admired Napoleon and Malmaison- might this have influenced the design scheme of this room?


Pahlmann designed this living room for Mrs. Walter Hoving in 1948. In my opinion, this room is one of Pahlmann's more elegant designs. Much of his later work seemed to be more casual, much in keeping with the times.

(*Hadley quote from Albert Hadley: The Story of America's Preeminent Interior Designer)

Have you ever noticed how Chinese ancestral portraits seem to grace many stylish interiors? Once I spotted them in one interior, it seemed that I started to see them everywhere. Of course, the paintings found in the interiors below were used strictly for decorative purposes, and I can certainly see why. There is something very dignified and regal about these portraits, and they also seem to add a little touch of Eastern exoticism to their surroundings. But what we shouldn't forget is that the purpose of these paintings was anything but decorative.

Ancestral portraits were long an important part of a Chinese culture which revered and worshipped family ancestry. From what I've read, it seems that these paintings were commissioned by family members not just out of respect for their forebears, but also out of fear. A disgruntled ancestor might be tempted to become a ghost and make life difficult for the living. In order to prevent this from happening, and to elicit good will and fortune, the portraits were worshipped by family members either in their homes or at family temples. Ceremonies, which at times included offerings to the ancestors as well as kowtowing, were often performed before these portraits.

So with this in mind, here are a few of the interiors that I have found which display these ancestral portraits. In a way, it seems that even today these portraits still command respect and awe, much as they did centuries ago.

(If any of you are experts on Asian art and wish to add to this, please do so by commenting- I would love to learn more about these portraits.)



Frances Elkins used them in a few of her projects, including one of her most famous: the library of Mr. and Mrs. Kersey Coates Reed. I think the portrait looks smashing against the Hermes goatskin paneled wall.


Jean-Michel Frank tried his hand at stage design in this set from "Les Fleurs des pois". The Chinese portrait rather dominates the set.


Yves Saint Laurent was obviously a fan.


Here are a pair of Chinese ancestral portraits in a contemporary setting- the living room of Liz and Steve Weinstein, decorated by Miles Redd (photo from Elle Decor; photographer Simon Upton)

Image at top: A pair of ancestor portraits, c. 1700-1800. From the collection of the Victoria and Albert

For example there was a pair of traditional drum tables flanking the sofa in the Living Room that he topped with organic tree trunk lamps. Very unexpected, but it gives the space a humorous edge. Instead of the expected Oriental area rug, he uses a goatskin rug to change things up a bit.

In the Family Room, he uses soothing light colors with just one punch of color in the art to expand the smallish space into something that seems much larger. Gorgeous!

For many more photos from the Wick Design Group's portfolio, be sure to check out this post from Desire to Inspire.

I believe I have a new crush!