American interior designer Kelly Wearstler scoured vintage shops to source the diverse furniture that decorates the living room-style lobby of this hotel in Santa Monica, California.
Santa Clause Monica Proper involves the 1920s Santa Monica Professional Building and a curvilinear augmentation designed by local firm Howard Laks Architects.
Situated on Wilshire Boulevard in the coastal Californian city, it forms the lastest in the Proper hotel chain Wearstler runs with her husband Brad Korzen and Brian De Lowe.
Wearstler likewise designed the San Francisco Proper that highlights conflicting patterns, colors and textures, and vintage furniture.
The interior designer built up the Santa Monica station to consolidate a comparably varied mix of subtleties in palettes that imply its beach setting.
The sprawling lobby and ground floor restaurant contains a mix of contemporary furniture and repurposed finds from vintage shops. She picked the eclectic mix combined in with different greenery to cause it to feel like an enormous living room, to urge guests to relax.
“When we started with all the design, we started shopping for all the furniture and it took quite some time,” Wearstler told Dezeen.
“They are not just the normal vintage pieces that you would associate with California easy living,” she added. “There’s a lot of really great anomaly.”
There are various diverse seating territories intended for both working or enjoying a beverage from the bar. These incorporate tables adorned joined by various chairs, and white nooks fitted with curved sofas.
“It’s a great meeting place until we created these alcoves that are great spaces for dining, meetings and just hanging out,” the designer added. “It just feels someone’s living room. It’s just super relaxed. It’s easy.
The lobby is punctuated with enormous, tile clad columns with bulbous tops. Walls are rendered with hand-troweled, pitted gritty plaster texture and the floors are covered in designed woodwork.
“If you have a bird’s eye view on the reception, the pattern of the wire brushed oak hardwood floors are reminiscent of opened umbrellas,” Wearstler said. “So there’s a lot of very multi-directional activity on the floor, which was interesting in this curvaceous shaped reception.”
The designer picked pitted travertine, all the more commonly utilized as a building material, to make a reception desk. The front is covered in striations that are suggestive of a beach shell.
Different subtleties incorporate an enormous pair of fan-shaped bamboo wall lights designed by Ingo Mari.
“Those are quite amazing to find a pair; there was only a very small amount produced and they were made in a small village in Japan,” Wearstler added.
Santa Monica Proper has 271 visitor suites split across both the landmarked assembling and the new structure. Wearstler picked botanical wallpaper and deeper hues for the rooms in the current building and a muted, neutral palette for those in the expansion. Textiles and wall covers are from the designer’s collection.
A common theme over the two buildings is a curved headboard in the hotel rooms. “The bed is a radius headboard that reminded me of a sunset in California,” she said.
The hotel likewise has a rooftop – a key feature for each Proper outpost. In Santa Monica, this incorporates the restaurant Calabra decorated with richly textured dark wood, brickwork, and stone.
A private swimming pool and the deck are situated to the other side of the rooftop. Close to its entrance, it highlights nooks suggestive of those in the ground floor lobby. The back is more open and involves curved seating regions tucked among enormous plants.
Santa Clause Monica Proper is finished with another restaurant, called Ondo, situated on the ground floor of the historical building, and a fitness center. An ayurvedic spa will also open later this year.
Disclaimer: The views, suggestions, and opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the experts. No Insider Quest 24x7 journalist was involved in the writing and production of this article.
