A Designer with a Cushy Position

It all started during grade school in the 4-H Club. That’s where Kiyo Ohara began garnering kudos for her design know-how, winning awards at the age of 8 for her formal table settings. These days, she is the creative force behind West L.A.-based Dragon 88, her year-old contemporary furnishings line.

With a background in fine arts (ceramics, to be precise), Ohara, 44, made the move to home design after a long career in fashion, including a stint as Esprit’s vice president of merchandising. Her aesthetic is unabashedly glamorous, whether she’s upholstering a sofa with bright red mohair or edging throw pillows with Swarovski crystals. More than 65 pillow styles form the core of Dragon 88’s offerings, bolstered by a handful of furniture sets.

Bloomingdale’s New York recently debuted Ohara’s Asian-inspired silk brocade throws; her latest pillows feature vintage prints of Shanghai cosmetics models and iconic Japanese landscapes screened onto bamboo.

Ohara credits her half-Chinese, half-Japanese heritage as a source of inspiration. She often fuses the minimalism of Japanese art and the decorativeness of Chinese culture with her own Western experiences. “I like to take those things that I find beautiful, digest them and then interpret in a totally new way,” she says.

Ohara has always found herself translating to fit an ideal (she recently added a beaded tassel to an office lamp that needed more “oomph”), a habit dating back to her childhood in Alfred, N.Y. The rural hamlet was hardly fashion forward, but rather than endure a long trip to the nearest hip boutique, the precocious kid just took apart patterns and reconstructed them. “I was pretty wacky back then,” she says, “even had the whole bell bottom look going on.”

This flair for the dramatic caught the attention of the Screen Actors Guild, which commissioned Ohara to design the celebrity lounge for the 2001 SAG Awards. “Knowing we were passing the ‘derriere test’ with the celebrities was awesome,” she says.

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Dragon 88, www.dragon88.com; (310) 474-8931