A roundup of the (remarkable) everyday objects that inspire the work LPA produces.

Damon Dusterhoft felt something was missing in his daily meetings.

The LPA Managing Director and his teams would convene to chat about the requisite schedules, people, projects — but what he and some of his colleagues in the Irvine studio really wanted to infuse into their routine conversations was design.

So, he created a meeting for just that. The premise of his Design Share gathering is simple: Everyone brings in an object, and then they discuss the history and design of that object. (Anything is fair game — after all, as the graphic designer Paul Rand once famously said, “Everything is design. Everything!”)

Ultimately, these are some of the raw materials that go into LPA projects.

As Dusterhoft said of his Design Share, “I’ve been blown away by what people have been bringing in — and the stories attached to them. Literally, every time someone comes in, I’m at the edge of my seat. And the ways they connect to the work we’re doing here can be profound.”

Here, we share a bit of that — and will explore the idea at other LPA studios in future issues of Catalyst.

Within Casey Chapin’s home sits a modular shelving unit by Modernist industrial design icon George Nelson (here, Chapin holds a bracket from it). He admires the Midcentury piece not only for its enduring looks, but also its build quality — a philosophy that carries into his personal approach to design.

“The idea of timelessness is trying to make our work transcend whatever the current trends are — trying to find a deeper utility and meaning that’s devoid of just surface-level aesthetics, and really focused on something that’s durable and resilient. Something that has longevity.”

When Air Jordans first came out, Edgar Villa was a 13-year-old who played basketball. Problem was, most basketball shoes were clunky canvas Converses — until the Jordans came along.

“It was just innovative,” he says.

There were air bubbles. The bold color palettes. The way the shoes transcended sport into social circles. Villa estimates he’s had at least 10 pairs of Jordans over the years — and to him, it’s those nuanced details that make the shoes ascend to the next level, just as it is when he’s working on interiors.

“Kind of like the air bubble or the tongue here, it’s just the small things that can make a project.”

On the weekends, Ron Leland plays with old-school wood type used in classical printing. During COVID, he began collecting specimens from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, and started inking them up and making art prints — soon discovering that the process found its way back into his role at LPA.

“The action of unplugging and creating art out of an analog component makes me think differently about problem-solving — and I bring that into the studio on Mondays with a renewed ability to see our corporate communications in a different light.”

Ben Bravo and his family collect cookbooks, and this vintage Betty Crocker tome comes from his mother-in-law. In its information architecture and diagrams, he finds inspiration and parallels to LPA’s design drawing process, as the team works to lay things out in a logical flow and make it all
easy for contractors to read and follow.

“Our drawings are kind of a recipe on how to construct our plans.”

Growing up, Amy DiCosola and her family would pile into a van every summer and drive from Northern California to Flagstaff, Arizona, to visit her great-grandparents. And every year she would get lost staring at this quilt on the bed where she would stay. Her great-grandmother made it from a mosaic of endless scraps — Grandpa’s old tie here, an old skirt there.

DiCosola admires the patience, the detail, how it embodies the idea of sustainable design before sustainability became a thing.

“It just really resonated with me and the work we do here. Every little piece of a project, every little detail — when it gets put into the puzzle of the larger project, it creates this beautiful architecture, this wonderful interior space, just like this quilt does.”

The chair was off limits.

When Nicole Fennell began dating her late husband, Daniel, something in his grandpa’s house immediately caught her eye — the funky vintage Swedish “Parrot” lounge chair designed by Ib Arberg.

Half jokingly, she asked: Who is going to inherit this one day? But Daniel said all offers on the chair had been soundly rejected over the years. Later on, when his grandpa’s health was declining, Daniel decided to buy him a lift chair … at a time when he and Fennell were planning their wedding and didn’t have much money. She wasn’t thrilled.

But Daniel bought him the chair — and when the two got married, Grandpa gifted them the Parrot chair.

“I never complained about the lift chair ever again,” Fennell says with a laugh.

What she loves about it:

“When you think of design, sometimes we’re so strict with the aesthetic. And I think that oftentimes you want that one unique piece to tell a story. And the chair just sort of speaks for itself.”

And finally, the coffee grinder that started it all.

In the first Design Share, Dusterhoft brought his handheld coffee grinder. It’s utterly tactile: a balanced weight, a highly textured grip.

Working in the technical design space, he’s a champion of object quality — yet he recognizes some would say that grinding beans and doing pour-overs is too time-consuming in a world of automatic coffee machines.

“But, I feel like what we do in design takes time. It takes intentionality. It takes a moment. Everything that’s fast isn’t better. Sometimes the experience of doing it is richer.”