(audience applauds)

Hi, I'm Pamela Shamshiri from Commune,

and this is my friend and client

and at partner at Ace Hotel.

Kelly Sawdon is gonna do this talk with me,

and we've done several hotels together,

and we've figured out some rules about collaborating,

so we're gonna go over our golden rules of collaboration.

The first golden rule that Ace and Commune

have come up with over the years:

Good intentions bring great results.

So, with a directive from Ace to keep things local

and give back to Los Angeles and make the project

about Los Angeles, Commune embarked on

setting up a narrative.

Our narrative was really simple:

it was what if Mary Pickford, who had built this building

in 1927, had a wild affair with Rudolph Schindler,

who was a modernist and a contemporary of hers at that time,

and they had a daughter named Exene Cervenka

who is from the band X.

So, this represented a lot of different aspects

of the design for us.

Obviously, Mary Pickford built this incredible

Spanish colonial gothic building

with a 1600-seat theatre that you can see on the edge there,

and so she represented flappers

and that era of hedonism and freedom in Los Angeles,

and Rudolph really, you know, these buildings

are actually cement, and it's actually a cement bunker

and very spare inside,

and there wasn't much history on the interior

of the building when we got it.

So he represented sort of this whole minimalism

and other, you know, the other counterpart of

Los Angeles in the 20s.

The last bit of the love child, the LA punks

from the 70s and 80s, really, for us, represented Ace,

and the no-holds-barred, irreverent, outsider culture

that Ace has embodied.

This is the lobby.

This is the restaurant space, the downstairs.

This is the mezzanine of the restaurant.

This is one of the hotel rooms.

A typical bathroom.

And this is the rooftop bar.

So with a clear intention set,

everyone had a narrative that they worked into.

I think we had 30 to 50 artists and artisans

working on this project,

as well as hundreds of people on the job site.

And this is the theatre space,

which underwent a two-year restoration,

which has now become very pivotal to downtown.

So, our second golden rule is

allow time and space for dreaming and exploration.

I think it's important for both Ace and Commune

that the artists are actually part of

the conceptual process.

The artists were all brought in as early as these stages.

Some of them found materials, salvaged parts,

and found inspiration from particular floors.

It's important to make sure they're involved this early on

so that it doesn't become decoration, but that it's

actually a seamless part of the fabric of the project.

This is what became later the rooftop bar.

Okay.

Defining parameters from the get-go.

I think if you're gonna engage an artist or artisan,

you need to really be very up-front about the parameters

that they're working within.

If it's as small of a detail in the room like this hook,

I think we need to really define function.

We made everything in these rooms,

from the toilet paper holders to the towel holders

to the desk caddies, and we make sure

that the parameters are respected.

So, it's important that every artist is allowed

to go through their process.

One of the artists that we worked with,

Mike Mills, we commissioned him to do

all the in-room art, and we wanted to take

a different approach than we have

in some of our hotels in the past,

and so with Mike, he was really inspired by

1927, the year the building was built,

so he dove into the history of Los Angeles in 1927,

spent about two years researching,

reading every book he could get his hands on,

every documentary, and came up with a list of, you know,

hundreds and hundreds of interesting facts for what happened

during that time.

On the other end of things, we had the Haas Brothers,

Simon and Niki, engaged in doing several pieces

at the hotel.

This is the reception desk,

and they had a completely mysterious

and different kind of process, which involved

their friends and their family,

and at the very last second,

they were like, oh, we gotta make this quintessentially LA,

so they came up with foggy palm trees,

which I think was brilliant.

They're 16 oil panels of these foggy palm trees that dot LA.

So they had a completely different process from Mike,

and we had to honor both of them.

So somebody's gotta do the dirty work

and make things happen.

So, you know, in a hotel project,

there are a lot of different consultants and people

that are involved, just to get things permitted,

to get things designed, produced.

This is an example of the light fixture

by Michael Schmidt.

He's a costume and jewelry designer

who's done a lot of stuff with Cher, Madonna,

and Lady Gaga.

We brought him in early, and as we were decommissioning

some of the lights in the 1600-person seated theatre

that we had, he decided to salvage some of those lights,

and he spent about two years collecting chains

up and down the coast of California,

and put together this chandelier, so to speak,

and it required us to work with structural engineers,

the lighting designers, a number of different consultants

that really had to buy into this art piece

and not work against us and tell us it was too heavy

and impossible to do.

Allow for margin for error.

So, these are actually some collages.

So we had these sort of two eras of hedonism

and freedom in Los Angeles book-ended, which is the flappers

in the 20s at one end,

and the LA punks in the 70s and 80s at the other end.

So some of the kids at Commune made these collages

in the meeting areas, you know, we wanted something

that expressed the freedom and hedonism

of these two periods in Los Angeles,

and there's rubber cement,

and it's not cut very perfectly,

and, you know, there's crazy layers,

but you can feel how much went into these collages.

No one should ever work for free, ever.

So we had two artists who approached us about doing

altars in the theatre space at Ace,

and we have learned throughout the years

to always pay an artist and to always make sure

that not only their materials are covered,

but that they get a fee.

This piece was done by Kevin Wus.

He had never shown her ceramics to anyone,

and we went crazy when we went to his studio.

He ended up doing a lot of the votives on the roof

and the restaurant, and once we settled on a materials fee,

he made these 90 cats, and a self portrait of himself

as Our Lady of Fingers.

And if you go to the theatre,

you can see it right on the left as you walk in.

On the other end of the spectrum

was Niki and Simon's mother,

who was an ex-opera singer, and her name is Emily Tracy,

and we were thrilled when she offered to do an altar.

She takes old statues and reworks them,

and came in and did this beautiful piece

which is in the downstairs women's bathroom lobby.

Check your ego at the door.

This is a big one.

And this applies not only to us as designers,

but also to the artists that we're working with.

This is Alma Allen, who Commune has worked with

for almost 10 years now.

He's always been a part of every project we've done.

He's really an artist and not a furniture-maker,

and we treat him as such.

We settled on pencil wood for these pieces

and we gave him heights, and he went to town.

No agents or lawyers in the studio.

This is another big one,

and it should have been earlier.

Simon and Niki, we would have never gotten them

going through their agents.

It would have never worked out for this project.

So we went right to them.

They did all these graphite pencil drawings

in the lobby and in the restaurant

that are a sort of pictorial and cultural

essay on Los Angeles,

so it's everything from the Hollywood Hills to

Diane Keaton.

We have Tom Bradley represented.

But had there been layers or agents involved,

we would have never been able to use the likenesses

and this would have never happened.

Bad timing's a killer.

I think we were really fortunate with this project,

specifically, the theatre had been owned by

Reverend Dr. James Scott.

He had basically run his congregation

out of this theatre, and so this really

beautiful ornate 1927 historic theatre

was preserved.

So when we started working with Commune on the project,

they came in and preserved a lot of the things

that were in the theatre.

I think we all knew to fight

for extra time for the theatre to happen.

A lot of it was about deleting design elements

so that you could see the ornateness of all the cast plaster

and giving the proper time to lighting, cleaning,

you know, all the restoration work that had to happen.

I think all in all, Kelly and I were so fortunate

to have companies that are not about

authorship or one voice, or one star,

but about many voices layered together

to tell a story and create an experience,

and we feel very fortunate

to be in the design business at this time.

Thank you.

(audience applauds)