Designer of the Day: Frances Merrill

Here, we ask designers to take a selfie and give us an inside look at their life.

Occupation: Interior designer.

Instagram: @reathdesign

Hometown: New York City.

Studio location: Los Angeles.

Describe what you make: Personal spaces. 

The most important thing you’ve designed to date: Our current projects are always the most important ones!

Describe the problem your work solves: Ideally we are creating spaces that function for the realities of daily life while also celebrating it.

Describe the project you are working on now: We’re putting the finishing touches on a house in the Hollywood Hills that strongly evokes old Disney, and especially the French decorative arts that inspired classics like Beauty and the Beast, Alice in Wonderland, and Fantasia. It’s full of fantastical moments like an abundance of candy-colored Murano glass lights, lush floral sofas (a personal favorite design choice) and surreal art. 

A new or forthcoming project we should know about: We’re  collaborating on a furniture collection with Michaele Simmering and Johann Pauwen of Kalon Studios, who are also based in L.A. Their style is pared back and minimalist, so it was fun to bring some color and pattern to the table and create something that felt exuberant but still restrained. We had a lot of fun diving into old textile archives, and ultimately selected a 1960s Alexander Girard stripe, a 1930s Rose Cumming chintz and a late-19th-century floral print from Claremont’s Warner Textile Archive collection. You might not immediately think that chintz from the ‘30s would work with their simple Rugosa collection, but they’re both pure examples of their own form. 

What you absolutely must have in your studio: Pretty light, books, our materials library, popcorn.

What you do when you’re not working: Some combination of cooking, reading, running and playing around with my kids and our friends.

Sources of creative envy: I love our studio and it’s a creative space, but a business is run out of it, with construction deadlines and client needs. I dream of big messy artist studios with multiple projects piling up and spilling into each other. We just saw the Ashley Bryan exhibit at the Farnsworth Museum in Maine and the photographs of his island studio were a dream.

The distraction you want to eliminate: My phone! It’s the worst.

Concrete or marble? Nothing better than an old piece of marble.

High-rise or townhouse? Townhouse.

Remember or forget? Remember!

Aliens or ghosts? Ghosts.

Dark or light? Can’t have one without the other.