art & design
Beauty + Style…for Everyone

January 20, 2011

Standard Magazine aims to make an artful and environmentally-savvy way of life easy. Now that’s right up our alley! Kelly LaPlante, Austin-based designer and the Editorial Director of Standard, tells us that a green way of life is a standard, not a style. Join us as celebrity designer James Saavedra talks about the Beauty + Style for Everyone program and the transformation of the Downtown Women’s Center into a home of stylish comfort and stability.

Standard Magazine: Beauty + Style…for Everyone

In 2003, when I was working on TLC’s Clean Sweep, I had the opportunity to work with a woman named Cherie Tarvin—a single mother who was struggling to raise two children while educating herself in order to provide her family with a better life. When I asked Cherie how she wanted to feel when she walked into her home, she said “like a princess.” I’ll never forget the tears that streamed down her cheeks when she saw what I created from this request. That day was a game changer for me.

When I reflect on how much great design can have a positive impact on a life, it seems so unfortunate that those with the toughest of lives are so rarely able to benefit from the therapeutic environments that designers can create. It is for this reason that I have spent the last few years developing Beauty + Style for Everyone (or B+SFE, as you will likely come to know it). This program, which will encompass unprecedented educational curriculum and thoughtfully executed design for non-profit organizations, has become the heart and soul of all that I do.

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I was fortunate to be able to launch this program with a design for the new Downtown Women’s Center here in Los Angeles. The debut was a space I designed for two deserving women who work tirelessly to care for the clients of the DWC…the women of Skid Row. You can imagine the fortitude it must take to work 14-16 hour days being the caretaker of a vast array of women with an broad spectrum of challenges—both mental and emotional.

To see where these two Resident Managers formerly resided while on their 3 or 4 day work shift…well, you would consider yourself very lucky. Picture the office where you work, a mattress hidden behind a tall metal storage cabinet and an old fashioned tube television, complete with rabbit ears and tin foil. To say that their new space is worlds away from where they’ve come is an understatement!

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By James Saavedra

Want to see the Downtown Women’s Center’s transformation in full?

Click below to read more or click here to read all of Standard Magazine’s latest issue: Winter Escape!

Lastly, here are three inspiring organizations that continue to give back in creative and beautiful ways.

Celebrity designer, James Saavedra, uses his meticulous, graceful approach to design to enrich lives in unexpected ways. The lifestyle artiste explains that interior design is the vehicle for sharing his philosophy that “Everyone deserves a life infused with beauty & style.” His background includes teaching at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) in Los Angeles, winning a coveted host spot on TLC’s Clean Sweep television program, appearing on HGTV as an industry expert and mentor, to co-creating a high-end, eco-furniture line JAK Studio Collection, and helming his own online design magazine, Fellow.

Standard Magazine is the interior design magazine of the post-green movement. Standard vets everything in the mag to make sure it’s eco-fab & won’t bore you with eco-speak, they promise.

Photos: Laure Joliet