PRIVATE LIVES COMMUNE

FOR DETAILS, SEE CREDITS PAGE

don’t be fooled by the California Regency facade of the new Juicy Couture store on Rodeo Drive. The elongated stone niches and reserved limestone facing is not a sensitive restoration of a Gucci or Giorgio boutique. It’s an entirely new construction, an idealized bring-Rodeo-back-to-what-it-used-to-be vision, developed by Commune, the Los Angeles design firm run by partners Pamela Shamshiri, Ramin Shamshiri, Roman Alonso, and Steven Johanknecht. Commune, according to Johanknecht, takes a “holistic approach” to designing diverse projects. One day it may be a Hush Puppies shoe boutique; the next, the interior of the luxurious sex shop Kiki de Montparnasse. “We help clients find their genetic makeup and develop their own language and style,” says Alonso, who is also creative director of L.A.’s Greybull Press. The design collective’s motto: “We are facilitators not dictators.” The group came together in 2002, and in the intervening years has worked with Quiksilver, the Standard Hotels, Barneys New York, and Tod’s, as well as Juicy Couture stores worldwide. “We like clients to have an idea of what they want. Maybe they are unable to get their identity out there into the world,” Alonso says. “We really make them talk to us. We have almost therapy sessions and bring in totemic objects.” And that’s why Commune’s projects have so many different looks. Juicy Couture swings toward rocking Regency manor house, while their new Oliver Peoples store in Malibu was inspired by a gas station. Commune wants to design everything that has to do with a company’s identity: interiors, packaging, logos, stationery, even wallpaper and carpets. “There was a period of retail design we are perhaps reacting against,” says Johanknecht. “When everything got so cleaned up and devoid of personality you didn’t know whose shop you were walking into. We want you to know, in an instant, where you are.

MATT TYRNAUER