NATASHA BARADARAN

I FEEL MORE THAN ever that Los Angeles has become an artistic melting pot of natives and transplants coming together to create a unique voice,” says Natasha Baradaran. And she should know: Her residential design business morphed out of an early tenure on the hospitality side, which yielded a valuable perspective on innovation and craft. “When you have a 1,000-room hotel, you don’t start in a showroom. You go to the creative side—the workrooms, the third-generation upholsterers and woodworkers, the factories with new, cutting-edge innovations.” They were, it turns out, powerful springboards for her own furniture collection, which in the seven years since it debuted has expanded into textiles, from performance velvets to a forthcoming line of vegan leather. “Creativity here is especially abundant because of an openness, a tradition of working together rather than competing.”

“There is so much

innovation in craft

happening right now,

new possibilities that are in our grasp.

I see this and think,

‘OK, what can I do with this?’”

—NATASHA BARADARAN