"Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles," Frank Lloyd Wright reportedly said. That looseness -- a spirit of experimentation, a refusal to be bound by convention -- will be on display June 23 when the MAK Center for Art and Achitecture hosts a tour of groundbreaking modern homes by Frank Gehry, Neil M. Denari Architects, Eric Owen Moss and artist Peter Alexander. 

The tour was organized in conjunction with "Everything Loose Will Land," an exhibition at the landmark Schindler House in West Hollywood that explores the design conversation among Los Angeles...

The thornless blackberries in Mary Steffens' backyard in Echo Park are going on three years, and one of the plants is finally setting fruit -- big, purple-black globes of nearly seedless, sweet-tart juiciness.

Steffens got the plants from a friend at Ocean View Farms, the community garden in Mar Vista, but her initial planting site was too sunny. So two years ago she moved the plants to a spot that got late afternoon sun but was shaded during the hottest part of the day.

“This is basically a Northern Californian berry,” she said. “They don’t like heavy heat. The first...

Culver City designer Matt Winter is known for creating vintage-inspired restaurant interiors and his new pop-up design studio in Venice is no exception.

For the next six months, the designer plans to use a salvaged 1939 Quonset hut as a temporary office for his M. Winter Design Studio, as well as a retail space for his surplus of vintage treasures. Sharing the property with Winter is the Styleliner, a pop-up shop of unique jewelry, bags and other accessories.

This is the second time that Winter, 28, has installed the two Quonset huts on a vacant parking lot. Last year, he set up shop on La...

Every house is a reflection of its owner. Some owners are just a bit more complicated than others. Tim Tattu is still settling into his new house, designed by Los Angeles architect Tom Marble in the steep hills overlooking the Silver Lake Reservoir. It is an explosion of angles, steel and outsized ambition. But the house is also filled with small spaces, contemplative moments and simple materials. It's an epic study in contrasts, as is Tattu himself.

Tattu grew up in Hermosa Beach, studied art in the early '90s at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and at the prestigious Städelschule in...

With condo buildings sprouting from vacant lots and talk of lifting height restrictions on its high-rises, Hollywood offers one of the best illustrations of Los Angeles' push toward population density. In the heart of this quickly changing neighborhood, in an appropriately tiny storefront gallery, two exhibitions show the direction of L.A. through studies of micro apartments and multifamily apartments.

"How Small Is Too Small" and "By-Right/By-Design," running until Aug. 4 at the WuHo Gallery, examine a future that, the exhibits propose, is already partially here.

A micro-unit, here defined as...

Anyone who has searched in vain for a backpack during August or agonized with college-bound freshmen over dorm-room furnishings knows that now is the best time to shop for back-to-school supplies.

Parents and students charting their course to various stores and malls may want to add one more stop on their itinerary: PBteen has opened its first brick and mortar store in Southern California at the Oaks Mall in Thousand Oaks.

The new store kicked off with the early release of the PBteen gear collection, a graphic assortment of backpacks, messenger bags and lunch totes, as well as the PBdorm...

Santa Barbara horticulturalist David Harris noticed an unusual succulent growing a few years ago in a client’s backyard in Ojai. Harris, a founding member of the Santa Barbara Cactus & Succulent Society, thought the plant was unlike any Echeveria gibbiflora he knew, most notably because it didn’t bolt into a flower like many do. Instead, the plant almost never flowered -- usually the final flush before death for a gibbiflora. It simply put out a stalk topped by a new rosette.

The succulent retained its good looks in the wintertime, another rare attribute. It was long-lived. And it...

At Resource Furniture, the newly opened Los Angeles store of the New York-based company, you don't have to be a Transformers-loving kid to appreciate the genius of the Poppi Book, a shelving unit that converts into a loft bed.

The loft bed is just one of the space-saving products by the Italian design firm Clei available through Resource Furniture, which specializes in streamlined, multifunction storage and sleeping pieces for lofts, studios and small rooms -- perhaps the home office that has to double as a guest bedroom.

I admit to being a bit mesmerized by the company's videofor the...

Home offices might be a trend, but interior designers Nicholas Hertneck and Lawrence Lazzaro grew tired of running a business from their personal residence. In early June, the decorating duo moved their business, a division of the Beverly Hills firm Piper Hertneck Design, to the second floor of a Brentwood Village storefront.

On the lower floor, they created Nicholas Lawrence, a retail space with herringbone hickory floors and Venetian and plastered walls. The Vermont soapstone sales counter, Lazzaro said, "was designed to look like it was salvaged from an Art Deco movie theater."

The space...

When Reeve Schley launched his online company, Seed Furniture, four months ago he hoped people would go for pieces he calls “modular, customizable and re-purposable.” His nursery chest, for instance, has whimsical puzzle-piece-shaped doors that can be switched out for plain symmetrical doors as baby grows.

There is also the Queen Mary bar, whose top, modeled after the captain’s bar on the 1936 ocean liner, is fitted with bottle-sized slots to steady your favorite pours. Should one’s landlubbing life require it, that top can be removed via a sliding dovetail system and a...

Dorothy said, "There's no place like home." I disagree. Every place can be home. Even that place with the bare walls, the wannabe DJ next door and the A/C unit older than your first car.

I've lived in six apartments in seven years. From a studio with blue carpeting to an old Victorian with soaring ceilings, every one of those places I have made my home.

That's the point of this new column and video series: to look at design through the eyes of the space-starved, budget-minded renter. My monthly tips and projects won't be DIY just for the sake of being crafty. They will be designed for renters,...