Domenique Mora: Where Design Meets Vision

Jean Louis Deniot brings his inherent refinement to the interiors of the Paul R.Williams house. Deniot spent over a year restoring and renovating the 1938 house, improving and enhancing every corner of the house, located on Doheny Drive, Los Angeles. His goal was to reveal the elegant Thirties Hollywood style of the house, and not to ‘modernize’ it or reinvent it. Keeping true to the homes European aesthetic, Denoit shows off in a very subtle way that the house is located in Beverly hills and not anywhere else.

Cuban-born, Brooklyn-raised Art Smith was one of the major modernist jewelers of the mid-twentieth century.  He attended Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art from 1942 to 1946 where he first pursued architectural studies but eventually abandoned them to concentrate on sculpture and the manipulation of three-dimensional forms. During the early 1940's he learned jewelry making while working part-time as a crafts supervisor at the Children’s Aid Society, and through a night course at New York University. He also worked for and was influenced by Winifred Mason, an African-American jewelry designer with a store in Greenwich Village. In 1946, Smith opened his first store, also in Greenwich Village. Inspired by surrealism, biomorphism, and primitivism, Smith’s jewelry included large scale, asymmetrical forms made from hand-hammered elements of silver, copper, or brass, sometimes combined with quartz or other colorful stones.  His jewelry explored organic shapes and ...