our Kickstarter has less than 48 hours to go!!!

It's hard to believe that we're getting ready to wrap up our Kickstarter project! Thank you to everyone who has generously contributed to our project, your support means the world to us!

With less than 48 hours to go, please help us bring it home with a bang, we may have reached our goal, but every little bit still makes such a difference.

Our equipment has arrived safe and sound, but it's really just the beginning! We still have to make sure everything is in perfect working order so that we can get into production. And we still need to finish setting up the shop. There are bound to be bumps in the road! Your generosity and support have helped us lay a pretty strong foundation for the future.

Please keep sharing our project with your friends and family and followers! Every like, share, tweet and favorite has gotten us where we are today! Let's keep this going, we're nearly there!

Best, 
Rosemary+Robin

West Adams

Fridays are our main workday here at RDesignsLA, we spend the day in the studio working on projects, or else out exploring the city. Our Friday a few weeks ago did not start out very well, with a number of unfortunate coffee-related mishaps. But, after we had finally caffeinated ourselves, and Rosemary had begun to dry off, we headed over to the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles. This is an area of the city that we’ve both spent a lot of time in and have not seen much of. Rosemary has been working in the area for almost a year now, but we rarely get to spend any time here just wandering around. We had a great time learning about the neighborhood, how it was built, who has lived here, and how the past hundred and so years have treated it. Here’s a little of what we learned, hopefully you will find it as fascinating as we did.

Fitzgerald House or "Elegant Manor" built 1906 by Joseph Cather Newsom for music store mogul James T. Fitzgerald, 3115 West Adams Blvd.

West Adams is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Angeles and at one time, one of the wealthiest. Situated south west of the downtown core, the area was developed in the late 1880s by Henry Huntington, the successful railroad tycoon and Hulett Merritt, a Pasadena industrialist. Due to the great fortunes of those settling the neighborhood, many architecturally significant buildings were built within this relatively concentrated area of the city including the University of Southern California or USC. West Adams was home to many movie stars, celebrities and notable city figures such as Edward L. Doheny, Hattie McDaniels, Fatty Arbuckle, Busby Berkeley and Louise Beavers. By the early 1900s, the population of Los Angeles was increasing exponentially. This rapid growth allowed for the expansion and development of other urban areas leading the upper class white population to trade in West Adams for Hollywood, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. The slow and steady migration west created an opportunity for the most affluent African American families to settle into the area. Within the next thirty years, West Adams became an important and vibrant center of black wealth and power in Southern California.

Golden State Mutual Life building designed by Paul Revere Williams in 1948, corner of Adams and Western boulevards.

During the late 1940s, the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, then the largest African American-owned business west of the Mississippi commissioned architect and West Adams resident, Paul Williams to build their new headquarters on the corner of Adams and Western boulevards. One of the most important black architects of his generation, Williams designed many private homes in Los Angeles and would go on to design the iconic Jet Theme Building at LAX, the Los Angeles County Courthouse, Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills as well as many other prominent buildings. 

L-R: Poster from Office of War Information. Domestic Operations Branch. News Bureau, 1943, Golden State Mutual Life building model, LAX.

A beautiful moderne structure, the Golden State Mutual Life building opened in 1948 the same year that the Supreme Court invalidated the segregationist covenants on property ownership. West Adams continued to thrive, Joe Louis was a prominent resident, Ray Charles set up his business headquarters and recording studio on Washington Boulevard, the Dunbar Hotel functioned as the hub of Los Angeles black culture and home-away-from-home for Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday and Count Basie among many others.

L-R:The Rockettes at Club Alabama in the Dunbar Hotel (The Black Music History of Los Angeles by Tom Reed), Duke Ellington at the Dunbar Hotel, graduation dinner at the Me Mo Club 42nd and Central in 1940 (photo collection of the LAPL), Shriners Parade on Central Ave. c.1951.

But change was in the air, white flight continued to accelerate, leaving the area with very little political clout and many of the larger single family houses and mansions were subdivided into apartments and rooming houses or else thrown down and replaced with larger multi-unit apartment buildings. Racial integration allowed a great number of African Americans to move into the neighborhood, but at the same time, many began to follow the migration west. Duke Ellington, who had long maintained a suite at the Dunbar, moved to the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood and others followed.

Felix Chevrolet opened in 1922 by Winslow Felix, he was a friend of filmmaker Pat Sullivan, whose animation studio created the Felix the Cat character. The iconic neon sign was erected in 1957 after the dealership moved to it's current location.

The construction of the Harbor and Santa Monica Freeways in the 1950s and 60s dealt the biggest blow to the vitality and prosperity of West Adams. The two freeways bisected the neighborhood, demolishing many of the older, more significant houses and prompted the decline of the black middle class neighborhood as a whole. Throughout this time, well-employed black Angelenos kept moving west and south, pushed out by the freeways, chasing better housing and quality of life. They left for Leimert Park, they left for Baldwin Hills, they left for the Crenshaw district. They left West Adams, a shell of its former self.

L-R:The Four Level Interchange of the Harbor Freeway nearly completed in 1949 (LA Times photo archive, UCLA), The Santa Monica Freeway under construction at LaCienega and Venice 1964, The Santa Monica Freeway under construction looking east from hoover Street 1961, official opening of the eastbound Santa Monica Freeway between the Harbor Freeway and Hoover Street June 21, 1962 (all other images LA Examiner Collection at USC).

Things began to turn around in the early 1980s, the neighborhood’s residents, still largely African American but now Latino and Asian as well, began to find better employment. With the end of the recession in the 1990s, many were able to move from being renters to buying houses in the area and fixing them up. By this time, West Adams had also become popular with artists, designers and young professionals working downtown. Mostly spared from damage during the 1992 riots, West Adams has gone through a series of ups and downs over the past few decades. Due to the abundance of historic architecture and its proximity to USC, the area has flourished lately.

L-R: Johnny's Pastrami 4331 West Adams Blvd. at night, Johnny's Pastrami neon sign during the day, Robin taking photos of the Felix Chevrolet sign.

Our Friday out in the world may not have started off very well, but I think that we ended up having a great time. Although West Adams certainly has its issues and complexities, it’s a beautiful area. The buildings both residential and commercial are fascinating. We were definitely inspired to start on a few projects virtually as soon as we got back to the studio. And it was great to get out of the car and spend some time walking around in a city so geared towards driving. We had a lot of fun discovering new (to us) places to eat and hang out that we will definitely come back to enjoy. The best part of a day like this, is discovering new layers and dimensions both within the neighborhood and within our city.

freeway fridays!

We live in Los Angeles California, where driving is more than a means of transportation, it’s a way of life, a means of survival in an urban landscape surrounded by ribbons of roads, surface streets and freeways. We spend a great deal of our lives figuring out the best way to get from one place to another, traveling between east side and west, driving alone in gridlock and traveling together in the carpool lane.

L-R: Rosemary passing her road test!, driving around Detroit, driving in our first car!

When we first started talking about moving to L.A. after grad school, spending that much time in the car seemed crazy! We were living on campus just outside of Detroit Michigan while we attended Cranbrook Academy of Art. Rosemary had grown up in Montreal, a city with a great public transportation system and so had to sign up for AAA driving lessons while at the same time getting her masters degree. We got our first car at the beginning of our final year at Cranbrook, those first few months of practice drives were a true test of our relationship, we explored the city together, setting out in the car without a plan. It was exciting and nerve-racking! The car soon became our little bubble of space, where we could talk or plan or fight, away from roommates and studio mates. Little did we know how this would prepare us for life in L.A.

L-R: somewhere in Texas during our cross-country road trip, Robin working on our bookshelf in our new apartment, hanging out at the beach

When we arrived here, we had just completed an eight-day drive cross-country. We were exhausted. The next few months were a whirlwind, looking for a place to live, finding jobs, making furniture, trips to Ikea and Home Depot, all while doing the most un-L.A. of things, sharing a single car. We were so excited to explore a new city together, a place that neither of us had ever lived in before, that we hardly noticed the beginning of our transition, we were turning into drivers. In fact, it took us a really long time to come to that realization. We were so overwhelmed that it truly wasn’t until our second year here. Once we had a good working sense of the city, where to find things, how to get around without a GPS, we started to realize how much fun driving could be. Not to say that we don’t still get frustrated when we’re stuck in traffic on the 10 heading east at the end of a long day, or that we’ve accepted how insanely people drive when it rains, but we understand that a good deal of our lives will be spent in the car, and so we now try to use that time more wisely, discussing dinner plans, bills that need to be paid, making phone calls. It’s no surprise then that we have come up with a good number of our design ideas while stuck in traffic somewhere or looking for parking. We are inspired by the roads we travel during our daily commutes, on our way to discover new restaurants, explore new galleries or museums.

L-R: rush hour traffic on the 110 North, Los Angeles from the air, The Californians skit on Saturday Night Live.

One Friday, a few weeks ago, we came up with the idea of Freeway Fridays. We were driving along the 110 Harbor Freeway, on our way to Randy’s Donuts, a donut place that we’d always heard about but never tried, and we were talking about how we explored the city when we first got here and how crazy it was that there was still so much of the city we’d never visited. For full disclosure, we were also talking about how we had favorite freeways (yes, the Californians skit on SNL does hold more than a little truth in it!), and how driving different freeways inform how you experience different parts of the city. 

L-R: intersection of the 110 and the 105 freeways, DTLA  as seen from the 110, Randy's Donuts in Inglewood.

So, here’s the plan, every few weeks, we’re going to choose a freeway that we have or haven’t driven before, and we will explore that part of the city. Check out the built environments of overpasses and underpasses, enjoy the architecture or snack spots or vistas that we find, and take pictures (lots of pictures!) that we’ll post on Instagram or Tumblr as we go. We will venture out into parts of the city we like as well as parts of the city we’ve never been to before. In short, we’re going to see our city with new eyes.  

getting back to work: the year ahead for RDesignsLA

As we get back to work, we have been reflecting on the year that has been and the year to come. 2012 was a pretty crazy year for us. It saw a lot of change, both good and bad. We lost some close friends and family members, we made new friends, changed jobs, and finally started our company RDesignsLA. We're really proud of the road we've traveled in the past year and are equally scared and excited to see what 2013 has in store for us. We hope that you all have a very happy, healthy and peaceful year!

happy holidays from RDesignsLA!

Bekins Storage

There are buildings that become a part of your life. You drive by them or walk by them as you go about your day, traveling to and from work or school or running errands. Some are old, some are new, some imposing, some diminutive. These buildings hover somewhere between fading into the background and rising up to greet you like an old friend.

When we moved to the Koreatown or Mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles a few years ago, we were struck by how present the built environment was around us. A vibrant mix of commercial and residential buildings that shows how this city spread west from the downtown core. A trail of stately 1930s apartment buildings, compact 1940s bungalows, low-slung 1960s complexes, art deco office buildings, condos and strip malls. 

We found the many neon roof signs particularly interesting, some dating back to the early 1920s when the area was abuzz with commercial developers and Hollywood elite. These signs have found their way into our lives and our work in funny ways. In particular, they now live on in our hand printed lino cut cards and bow ties. It's a lot of fun discussing which sign to work on next, it seems like there are fewer and fewer to choose from as the neighborhood slowly evolves. One person's revitalization is another person's loss sometimes. 

We were particularly dismayed when one of our favorite signs, the Bekins Storage sign on the corner of Pico and Crenshaw was suddenly missing one day nearly two weeks ago. 

This is one of those buildings for Rosemary, an old friend she drives by every morning on her way to work and every evening on her way home, often spending a great deal of time waiting to turn northeast on Crenshaw. What was so shocking was how quickly the sign came down, and how much it's absence changed the landscape around it. 

Robin did his best to try and find out what was going on, but to no avail. No one working for Public Storage who now owns the building, was able to answer any of our questions. Just as quickly, the sign was painted white last week, and much to our chagrin, they began installing the new Public Storage sign the day before yesterday. While the new sign mimics the look of the Bekins Storage sign it replaces, something is still just not quite the same. 

Bekins Storage, pre-1933 (Noirish LA skyscraper discussion group)

Up until this point, we had been quite relieved to see that Public Storage had gone out of their way to take care of this beautiful castle-like building that has been around since at least the early 1930s. It's disappointing to see such a neighborhood icon unceremoniously removed after all this time and it will take some getting used to. While we understand that time cannot stand still, we do however find it sad whenever one more part of this city's history disappears.

If you'd like to find out more about this castle of storage, take a look at this article from the L.A. Times from 1989. 

What about you, are there any pieces of your city you wish were still there? Tell us about them, we'd love to hear your stories.

we're now on ETSY!

We have some really exciting news! The RDesignsLA Etsy shop is officially open! We'd like to invite you all to come on over and take a look. Please, let us know what you think! We've been working hard on some new pieces and can't wait for you to see them!

      

While you're there, take some time to look over some of the thousands of other lovely hand made items featured on the site. It's a great way to support small business and you can even keep things local! Etsy is a great community, and we're really happy to be a part of it! 

We also want to add that we've taken the handmade pledge, everything that we're giving our friends and family for the holidays this year is made by hand, either by us or by other small companies. We really believe in supporting small businesses and local over global consumption.

We'll be busy posting more items on Etsy, so check back often! You can also follow this link to our newsletter signup page. Also, please follow us on Twitter where we tweet under the handle @RdesignsLA or like us on Facebook.

Thank you, and happy thanksgiving!

Rosemary+Robin