TREASURE CHEST

Designer Jesse Kamm’s apartment/atalier is filled with light, life and incredible curiosities

By Marissa Patingrao Cooley

Fashion designer Jesse Kamm’s apartment is a study in unstudied cool. Marked by alabaster walls, hardwood floors, soaring ceilings, and beautiful archways, the sparely decorated 1200-square-foot two-bedroom she shares with her husband Lucas Brower has an appealingly unfussy, unfinished quality. “As a renter, I don’t feel like pouring myself into this place,” explains the Illinois native, who splits her time between LA and Panama, where she and Brower, a sustainable real estate developer, are building a second home. But that’s not to say that the 33- year-old former model,who runs her fledgling clothing label out of the West Hollywood apartment, hasn’t grown attached to the place.

“Lucas and I met in this apartment,” recalls Kamm, “so it has a lot of history for us.” Inherited three years ago from Kamm’s brother-in-law Ned Brower (the drummer for the band Rooney) and his wife Sarah—who had in turn had the place passed down to them years before—the light-bathed two-bedroom “has been in our friend group for over 10 years,” she says.

When Kamm launched her clothing line threeCK years ago, she appropriated what were previously the living and dining rooms as her work studio, where she, Brower, and two part-time interns do everything from screen-printing textiles to handling sales. During the day, Kamm orbits mainly between the dining table, which doubles as a fabric-cutting surface (“I throw a paint bucket under each leg to raise it up, so it doesn’t hurt my back.”), and a rain-rustedCK metal desk—originally an outdoor gardening table salvaged from her sister-in-law’s backyard—where her computer and sewing machine reside.

Much of the rest of the couple’s furniture collection was acquired in a similar catch-as-catch-can way: freebies, roadside finds, flea market purchases, all overhauled with Kamm and Brower’s elbow grease. “I’m a huge fan of ‘50s modernism, but I can’t see myself spending $1000 on a Noguchi or Eames,” says Kamm. “However, that’s what my eye gravitates toward, so I find my own way to pieces with good bones.” The dining room table and chairs, for example, were originally painted shabby-chic-white and emblazoned with rooster and toad images when the couple bought the set at a junk shop for $175. A self-taught furniture rehabber, Kamm says of stripping, staining and reupholstering, “In the end, I feel more connected to a piece when I’ve done work on it.” In fact, she enjoys the process so much that she dreams of one day creating a line of Jesse Kamm Chairs—starting with furniture for her Caribbean beachhouse.

Along with an intrepid group of friends and family, Kamm and her husband are in the process of building an eco-retreat in Panama—a parcel of solar-powered houses fit with rainwater collection systems and composting toilets, with the sea as their front yards. The project is just one example of the couple’s commitment to sustainable living. Exhibit B: They converted their two cars to run on vegetable oil scored at a local Mexican restaurant instead of diesel. Exhibit C: Kamm regularly rides her bicycle to the market, to the movies, to dinner—not merely an anomaly, but practically death-defying in LA’s traffic-clogged streets. One recent afternoon, while pedaling her way to a party wearing high heels and a dress, a random man, stuck by the absurd scene, stuck his head out of his car and shouted: “Hey, lady, are you Danish?”

Exhibit D is Kamm’s work itself: Her breezy tunics, dresses, jackets, and silk tanks—which have shown up on such Hollywood fashion plates as Liz Goldwyn, Marley Shelton and Alison Lohman (who starred in L.A. Bloom, a short film produced by Kamm to showcase her spring ’07 collection)—are also, in a way, part of the designer’s battle against waste. Explains Kamm, ”This idea of mass-produced, throwaway fashion is a thing I really want to combat. I’d like my clothes to be the opposite of that.” With that in mind, each piece is screen-printed by Kamm and sewn by hand. Made in limited editions, and numbered like art, Kamm’s fall collection, dubbed “Into the Bush” is laced with tortoise shell prints, bird track motifs, and interpretations of tree rings.

The same obsession with nature—a reaction to living in LA’s concrete jungle, according to Kamm—trickles into the apartment’s décor. Of the decorative tchotchkes artfully scattered on bookshelves, windowsills, and the coffee table, a majority come from the wild: feathers, conches, sea urchins, dried flowers, bones.

A note about this bric a brac: As haphazard as these items may seem (also on display: a harmonica, a leather-bound atlas, a raccoon mandible), there’s actually no such thing as just a prop in Casa Kamm. In fact, every piece each has its own elaborate five-minute tale—from the road trip to Big Sur that yielded the fully intact vertebral column of a deer, to the couch bought off a drunk guy at the Rose Bowl. Every time Kamm glances at an item in her home, it reminds her of a beloved place, friend or adventure. “These things hold deep meaning for me, and that’s why they’ve made the cut to be here,” she says—a statement that could just as easily apply to one of her breezy tunics or sublime, earth-mama dresses.