Poketo creators' new book highlights creative homes, including this Sea Ranch gem

Have you ever walked into the home of an artist, or a musician or someone with a wildly creative mind and felt overcome with wonderment? How did she think of doing her walls that way? Wow. It never would have occurred to me to turn a corner into a cool meditation space. Who would have thought that a collection of souvenir pins or a stack of books could be made to look like a well planned accent piece?

Creative people don’t necessarily need an interior designer to hold their hand. Their homes and offices and studios are uniquely their own, reflecting not just their personal taste, but really, on a deep level, who they are.

Ted Vadakan and Angie Myung, co-?creators of the hip design stores and galleries called Poketo in Los Angeles, thought it would be fascinating to offer a look inside the homes of highly creative people they have come to know, unpacking what they did within their personal space, and why. They share their discoveries in a new book, “Creative Spaces: People, Homes and Studios to Inspire.”

It is a design book like no other (Chronicle Books.) Most home design books show off the work of professional interior designers and architects, hired to create chic abodes for their clients. But sometimes the result is a showplace that reflects the designers’ aesthetic more than the personality of the owners. Vadakan and Myung took a different approach. The pair paid a call to the homes of 24 creatives - chefs, designers, writers, architects, musicians and entrepreneurs who, as they say in the forward, “strive to live artful, intentional lives.” Their mission? To explore the changing relationship and interaction they have with their personal spaces.

“The book is about how inspiring it is to see the lives, the homes and working spaces of these independent creatives and how they’ve made it work,” Vadakan said.

David Irvin, a creative director and graphic designer, found a dilapidated house in one of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Angeles and created a compound. Behind the historic charm of the main house he built a two story modern house of industrial materials covered in Corten steel. Within is an airy open layout trimmed in seven different types of wood and a mix of contemporary, mid century and vintage pieces. As he explains, at 47 he feels he’s grown into his skin enough to feel OK being weird.

Among the coolest things they came across was a house within the home of Brooklyn artists Terri Chiao and Adam Frezza, who work under the portmanteau Chiaozza.

They live in an industrial loft in Brooklyn and built within it a separate cabin and a treehouse bedroom. These plywood structures, along with other handmade furniture, give the space the feeling of a playground.?They have, said Vadakan and Myung, taken the blank canvas of an open industrial space into their own “miniature village,” where they play with their infant daughter.

“They create wild work. it’s so bright and colorful. It’s just fantastical,” he said of their work and their space, which has kind of a Dr. Seuss quality to it.

Also featured are entrepreneurs Shev Rush and Kevin Lane of The Sea Ranch, where Vadakan and Myung, who live in Mount Washington north of Los Angeles, ?also maintain a second home.

Rush and Lane took over Placewares, the modern design store and gallery in Gualala opened by Lu and Maynard Lyndon in 2005. The shop is in the same spirit as Poketo, which features well designed lifestyle goods aimed at incorporating art into the everyday by making it functional. Both shops also have galleries for original artwork.

The Lyndons started Placewares in New England in the 1970s and built it into a small chain of neighborhood shops centered around the best in modern design. So in taking over the brand, they were assuming stewardship of a legacy. The same is true of the home they chose, a classic early Sea Ranch dwelling designed in 1969 by founding Sea Ranch architect William Turnbull.

The pair, who Vadakan and Myung consider entrepreneurs - they are expanding Placewares with a new location in Palm Springs - personalized the wood and glass dwelling with a very light hand, careful to respect its architecture while also making it their own. As preservationists with a reverence for design, they’ve made the house uniquely their own because it reflects their commitment to maintaining the integrity of Turnbull’s vision.

Visitors to the home, located on the forest side of the highway and engulfed in trees, often wonder why they don’t punch a big picture window into the middle of the living room to capture better views of the ocean beyond the treetops. But living intimately with a house allows its secrets to be revealed, Vadakan and Myung said. The floor to ceiling old-growth Douglas fir planks that extend up and outward at the entrance to the living room offer a view of their own, an intimacy almost like a forest in context with the soaring 27 foot high ceilings. Other small windows that seem oddly placed in fact offer a fleeting beauty as they capture the sun at certain times of day. The couple has since sold the house.

Vadakan and Myung met in San Francisco, where he was working in film and video and she was studying graphic design at the California College of the Arts. They bonded, among other things, over their passion for art and design and a year later had founded Poketo (inspired by Angie’s grandmother’s mispronunciation of the word pocket.

It didn’t start as a business, but rather a pop up show aimed at showing off the work of some of their talented artist friends who were struggling to sell their work.

They sold out that first night, a success that inspired them to develop ?the concept further into retail space after they moved to the Los Angeles area in 2004. They now have four locations, each of which hosts art ?exhibitions, workshops and other events aimed at ?fostering the arts and artists.

The pair also visited the home of Windy Chien, a textile artist and previous owner of the beloved independent Aquarius Records in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Chien, whose expertise was tapped by Apple, which recruited her to help build iTunes and their App Store, established herself as an artist with a project she called The Year of Knots,” in which she completed a new amazing knot every day and documented it on Instagram.

The front of the house in painted in gradients of green.

He said he loves her bedroom, tucked into the attic. There under the eaves she painted stripes on her ceiling that mimicked the colorful stripes of the Pendleton blankets draped over her bed. The idea came to her only after long moments staring at the pitched ceiling. The space was just raw wood when she moved in.

As for their own homes in Los Angles and The Sea Ranch, Vadakan said they keep them very simple. Because they spend so much time within their stores, spaces that are colorful and visually stimulating, they find it more calming to not be surrounded by a lot of interacting and attention-getting art and decor.

“We love it,” he said of the vivid intensity of Poketo. “But at the same time we intentionally made our home the opposite, a place for peace and respite, where we’re not having to look at tons of colors. What we love about our space is it’s very personal. All the objects are from artists themselves, people we know and from our travels. We see in our own space, more a representation of the experiences we’ve collected over the years. It’s the opposite of the store, which is chock full of stuff.”