Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

The present lot arrives from the personal collection of designer Gere Kavanaugh, who included it among the vibrant objects and artworks adorning her home in Los Angeles's historic Angelino Heights neighborhood. Kavanaugh moved from Los Angeles's Westside to Angelino Heights around 1980, when she was already well-established as a textile, industrial, and interior designer known for her embrace of color and larger-than-life spirit. As Louise Sandhaus and Kat Catmur write in A Colorful Life: Gere Kavanaugh, Designer, "To describe Kavanaugh is to evoke all that 'colorful' can: vivid, lively, animated, dramatic, fascinating, interesting, stimulating, scintillating." 

Somewhere between a home and a museum, Kavanaugh's residence in Angelino Heights embodies the spirit of her life. From knocking down walls to designing her own furniture and crafting much of the decor, she has made it an evolving project for the past three decades (and she isn't finished with it yet). In the 1980s, when Kavanaugh purchased her home, the downtown Los Angeles neighborhood that had originally been a Victorian locale for the well-to-do was now considered a bit down-at-the-heels. Shortly after Kavanaugh moved in, she joined a community project to spruce the place up by planting myrtle trees, many of which still grow on her street. The orange trees in her backyard fill the air with the scent of citrus blossoms. Angelino Heights has changed over the years, but it's still a potpourri of distinctive characters, and Kavanaugh always bumps into someone she knows. Kavanaugh's sense of home extends far beyond her front door.

—Louise Sandhaus and Kat Catmur, A Colorful Life: Gere Kavanaugh, Designer