Designers’ Duet : On the Face of It, the Lloyd-Thompson Alliance Was As Unlikely As That Between Robin Hood and Friar Tuck

Back in September--Friday the 13th, as it happened--Douglas Lloyd and Gordon Thompson went to a euphoric graduation party in the Park Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. They rented a limousine, “since we knew we’d be rather trashed when we left,” Thompson says. Four girls go-go-danced in 1960s miniskirts. (Lloyd and Thompson were born in 1961 and 1962 respectively, so the ‘60s are almost as much “history” to them as the 17th Century.) Lloyd joined the girls on stage and cavorted about. Thompson egged him on but stayed on the dance floor.

The two men had taken their degrees that morning at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena--Thompson as Bachelor of Science (Industrial Design), Lloyd as Bachelor of Fine Arts. And both men were awarded a distinction.

In a college of high-fliers, well known for supplying the designers of the future, Lloyd and Thompson were the cream of the crop, the vaunted golden boys of their year. Art Center is accustomed to bringing out precocious talent. What made Lloyd’s and Thompson’s graduation different was that they had been allowed to collaborate on their final project and its presentation.

“It’s natural for art colleges to encourage individualism and competitiveness,” Thompson says, “but we wanted to work together. Usually the final project--the ‘independent study,’ as it’s called--is done by one student supervised by one teacher. We combined our disciplines and worked with five teachers.”

Thompson was an environmental-design major. Lloyd was a graphics major. They had met on their first day at Art Center and liked and respected each other from the start. At the beginning of their eighth term they asked whether they could pair their subjects in a project that would last the whole term. The response was a gulp and agreement. The two students chose to design a hotel because, Thompson explains, “a hotel pulls together so many aspects of design that we thought each of us could take different initiatives with different areas.”

On the face of it, the Lloyd-Thompson alliance was as unlikely as that between Robin Hood and Friar Tuck, or the Walrus and the Carpenter. Gordon Thompson III is distinctly, though agreeably, yuppie: horn rims, striped shirts and sober neckties, with red suspenders his nearest approach to wild abandon. Ostensibly he is a bit “square,” a Clark Kent resting between Superman flights. He comes from four generations of attorneys. His father, Gordon Thompson Jr., a U.S. district judge in San Diego, was the first federal judge to sentence a man to prison for refusing to register for the draft when that controversy resurfaced two years ago.

Doug Lloyd is a bird of a different feather. He was born and educated in Boise, Ida. His paternal grandparents owned a dime store in Chicago. His father is executive director of the Idaho State Board of Pharmacy. Lloyd is punkish, with dyed gold hair and a nice line in splattered shirts and jackets decorated with dizzying arabesques. As a teen-ager he was involved in competitive figure skating. He took second place in “the sectionals” (groups of states competing with each other; his group combined California, Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Washington). He gained third place in “the regionals” (representing the western regions of the United States). The next stage would have been “the nationals,” the winners of which included one of Lloyd’s contemporaries--Rosalyn Sumners, who went on to represent the United States in the Olympic Games. But Lloyd won an art scholarship to Boise State University, Idaho, and had to choose between ice-skating and college. He chose college.

The “hotel” they designed together was strictly a fantasy project. As a starting point, they chose the I. Magnin & Co. store on Wilshire Boulevard, an austerely neoclassical building of 1939 with strong vertical lines, a black-granite facade and an Art Deco panel of running deer high above the entrance. In their designs for the imaginary hotel, which they called “Magnin Park,” the store building was to remain unchanged, except that the mannequins would be removed from the windows. The main development would be on a skinny rectangle of land running along New Hampshire Avenue.

“The Magnin building was in the area we favored,” Thompson says. “We didn’t want to go to Beverly Hills with all the chi-chi hotels, and we didn’t want to go downtown because we thought we’d exclude ourselves from people who had business at mid-Wilshire. We thought this was the perfect center.” Their target clientele was both business executives and people in the entertainment industry, whether producers or celebrities.

The two men wanted to create an Art Deco feeling throughout the hotel, down to the smallest details of ashtrays, writing paper and match-books. “So we kept looking back at the original Magnin building,” Lloyd says, “and always kept sight of what the architect did and what the feeling or mood was.” They adapted the deer panel as the main symbol for the hotel.

I had heard of writers combining on an article or book, but I wondered how two designers would work together. Had they developed different roles? Had one of them turned out to be more practical than the other? Was there friction? According to Lloyd: “At the beginning it was a very close collaboration, because we had to set the basic direction. We wanted the project to be very structured; we wanted to know how far and in what direction we could push it without losing congruity. Each Sunday we would meet. I would review Gordon’s work and he would review my work. Then, throughout the week, we would work in our own way.”

Thompson was more concerned with the architecture, the guest suites; Lloyd did most of the graphics and packaging design. But each influenced the other. For example, Lloyd adapted the long vertical lines of the architecture for the packaging and even set three gray lines of varied lengths down the center of the writing paper, which was headed with the deer-panel symbol--blind-embossed on the guest paper and in more businesslike black and white on the corporate paper.

“Corporate paper for answering complaints?” I suggested.

“Yes: ‘Dear Sir or Madam, Why the hell are there vertical lines down the writing paper?’ ” Thompson riposted.

The new buildings were to be ensconced in a park-like setting. “The guest rooms have the plumbing up front,” Thompson pointed out. “I don’t want to hear someone next door flushing their toilet.” When planning Magnin Park, they bore in mind the things they didn’t like about hotels. One thing they disliked was to walk into a hotel room and be greeted at once by the sight of the bathroom. “So in Magnin Park you would walk in and see a small sitting-area that could be used for entertaining,” Thompson said. They also avoided the grisly word starters on the menu.

So much for the fantasy. But where do Thompson and Lloyd go from here? Will they set up a business together? “I think if we had the money, we would,” Thompson says.

“Yes, I’d love to go into business with Gordon,” Lloyd says, “but I think going out of school you need a couple of years’ seasoning with a firm you respect, to find out exactly what goes.”