Lee Stanton Blog

With his innate sense for what makes a classic, founder and creative director David Cameron of David Cameron Studio has some of the best taste I know. His keen eye for beauty has been well documented in the fashion and film industry, and as translated into the world of residential and commercial design, upholds his reputation for a relaxed and easy-going elegance. Airy and light, yet with an earthy, restrained sensuality, Cameron's designs embrace a warm, livable minimalism that never fails to inspire. Check out his top picks from Lee Stanton below.  

TOP PICKS

Pair of Lotte and Gunnar Bostlund ceramic table lamps.

Mixed media panel titled Positively New York, (c. 1960).

French midcentury Charlotte Perriand style display cabinet or bookcase in walnut.

French midcentury rattan daybed.

BIO

A California native, David Cameron is the founder of David Cameron Studio, a creative consulting agency with a focus on residential and retail design.

He began his career in New York as an acclaimed fashion designer, launching his own line of innovative sportswear that created an immediate buzz with the fashion press, retailers such as Barneys, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue, as well as a roster of private clients that included Bianca Jagger, Tina Chow and Paloma Picasso. At the age of 23, he was the first recipient of the coveted CFDA /Council of Fashion Designers Perry Ellis award for new talent. Subsequently, he was commissioned by Absolut Vodka to design their first fashion inspired advertising campaign. The “Absolut Cameron” ad debuted to an avalanche of publicity, becoming an iconic image for the brand.

Cameron changed his focus from fashion to film in the early 1990s when he began directing music videos for artists including Sheryl Crow and Eric Clapton. After expanding his creative focus to include photography he quickly established a reputation as one of the leading image makers in the international fashion and beauty arena. He has created many award winning campaigns featuring some of the world’s most beautiful women including Julianne Moore, Jennifer Garner, Halle Berry, Sarah Jessica Parker, Christy Turlington and Kate Moss. His diverse roster of advertising clients includes Michael Kors, LOreal, Adidas, CoverGirl, GQ, Nike, IKEA, Revlon, Pantene and American Express. His celebrity and fashion photography has appeared in numerous publication’s, including Glamour, GQ, and C Magazine.

In 2010, Cameron joined his wife, Kendall Conrad, as the Creative Director and Chief Executive Officer of their West Coast luxury leather goods and accessories brand KENDALL CONRAD, overseeing all aspects of the companies creative direction including retail design, packaging, web design, print advertising and image development.

David’s design instincts draw from his West Coast upbringing and his affinity for refined yet relaxed living spaces. His interiors have been featured in Vogue, One Kings Lane, In Style, C Magazine, Santa Barbara Magazine and numerous design blogs as examples of the California style he is known for.

Current projects include a Kendrick Kellogg restoration in San Diego and a vineyard estate in the Santa Ynez Valley.

SELECTION OF HIS WORK

Photo: David Cameron Studio, Lisa Romerein, Victoria Pearson

The bohemian minimalism of Maurizio Benadon and Bénédict Siroux's 1985 Chelsea loft stands the test of time. Along with Michael Steinberg, the pair started cult gallery Furniture of the Twentieth Century, which was responsible for bringing niche Modernist and industrial pieces to the arty, international downtown set. The restraint and audacity in their curation can be seen throughout the pair's chic Manhattan apartment. I love how it has a wonderfully unfinished quality, this distinctly cultivated feeling of fragmentation...

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The penthouse terrace of Furniture of the Twentieth Century's showroom, 1982.

Photo: @domicile.file, @elealegangneux.

Photo: Cerruti Draime

I love to see classic pieces mixed together in interesting ways. In this fabulous Paris residential project designed the ever-inspiring Fabrizio Casiraghi, the sleek neoclassical lines of a delicate wooden armchair are offset by the bold geometries of a modernist abstract painting hung above. The dark, glossy tiled backsplash adds an element of depth and continuity.    

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Photo: Paul Massey for House & Garden

Ever since seeing images of the fabulous Bloomsbury townhome of designer Erdem Moralioglu and architect Philip Joseph, I've been thinking a lot about the incredible design legacy left by the group's young bohemian visionaries. More specifically, the breathtakingly modern output of their design studio, Omega Workshops.  Located in London at 33 Fitzroy Square, the Omega Workshops was the darling of painter and critic Roger Fry, though its creative direction was also driven by the artistic husband and wife pair Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf, and Duncan Grant, the creative polymath whose work in textiles, painting, costume and set-design spurned infinite copycat variations. Perhaps most known in the interior design world is the group's colorful, delightfully eclectic home and studio in Sussex, England, Charleston House, yet for these brave Modernists, home and work were never quite so distinct.

As an extension of the Bloomsbury group's artistic practices, the Omega Workshops incorporated the group's multifarious, far-reaching talents, and was, in many ways, a reflection of their radically avant-garde disposition. While indeed there had been similar artistic enterprises that had also attempted to bring art and design closer together--the Viennese Secessionists for one, and Art Nouveau, for another--none in England had perhaps quite such ebullience, nor quite such reverberant and lasting impact. While William Morris, John Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts movement--certainly the forebears of the intrepid Omega Workshops--espoused similar ideals, their thin-lipped concern for industrial reform lacked the rebel spirit of joie-de-vivre behind the Omega renegades. 

Menu card celebrating the opening reception for the Omega Workshops. © Tate Archive.

 Opening room of the Omega Workshops. © The Charleston Trust.

Bloomsbury members Nina Hammett (right) and Winnifred Gill (left) modeling Omega designed dresses at the Workshops. © The Charleston Trust. 

 Advertisement for Omega Workshops pottery. Image: Robjn Cantus.

The "Druad" chair, designed by Roger Fry for the Omega Workshops, Tate Archive. © Annabel Cole.

Postcard of 'Holland Park Hall' interior, designed by Omega Workshops, Tate Archive. © Annabel Cole

 Detail of the mantle at Charleston House.

Details of the living quarters at Charleston House. Photo: Paul Massey for House & Garden.

Fry was foremost interested in removing what he saw as the falsely imposed division between the fine and decorative arts. His vision and aim was to see the dominant ideas in modern art, namely, a bright, expressive use of color and a simplified approach to form, applied to the world of design. Fry also believed in the collective, and as a means of emphasizing the aesthetic value of the object over the cult of the artist's personality, insisted that every object remain unsigned. Instead, each object was marked with the Greek symbol of Omega. This focus on anonymity and the prioritization of  a collective vision has been a strategy since taken up by such influential and diverse creative powerhouses as Fluxus and Maison Martin Margiela. At bottom, they share an appealing unification of theory and form, a way of actualizing the material synthesis of their innovative ideals. I believe it is largely for these reasons that their work continues to be so relevant and lasting today. 

Details from a bathroom at Charleston House.  Photo: Paul Massey for House & Garden.

Bloomsbury member Henry Harris’s London townhouse in Bedford Square, designed by Omega Workshops. Image: Robjn Cantus.

Vanessa Bell’s Charleston bedroom dresser tableau features the Bloomsbury artist Stephen Tomlin’s 1931 plaster bust of her sister, Virginia Woolf.

Photo: Gavin Kingcome for The New York Times.

Spare and serene, the Pennsylvania home of designer Lauren Sara exemplifies the type of modern New England minimalism I've been drawn to of late. Like a loft or gallery, the interiors of her renovated stone-covered Colonial Revival home feel quiet and tranquil--the perfect setting for the designer's beautiful collection of American folk-art and antiques. Get the look with some of my favorite similar items below. 

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Photo: Michel Arnaud for Architectural Digest

Photo: Claire Worthy for AD Italia

Inspired by its eclectic Georgian bones, the home of designer Patrick Williams of Berdoulat Design is traditional yet offbeat. Blithely mixing together objects and furnishings from dramatically different styles and backgrounds, Williams pulls everything together with a muted color palette; rose colored linen curtains, dusky blue shelving, and creamy taupe hardwood floors create a sense of continuity and serenity. 

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With spartan simplicity, Cy Twombly's 16th-century Italian palazzo continues to inspire. It was its cavernous scale and raw, elemental charm that first led the artist to purchase his pastoral retreat in 1977, when it was mostly still in ruins. Located about sixty miles north of Rome, in the tiny Medieval village of Bassano in Teverina, Twombly's renovation bears the same lightness of touch and spatial sensitivity one sees throughout his paintings.  

Preserving as much of the original architecture as possible, Twombly carried its principles into his renovation, repeating the original materials and following its dominant features as a guide. It was in this way that the artist was able to retain the centuries-old spirit of the building's original Renaissance architecture. Indeed, the palazzo's sparse, voluminous rooms seem to exist in the peripheries of time. Its atmosphere of monastic tranquility draws on a humble infrastructure, yet its effect is heightened by a number of highly precious appointments. 

Twombly's edit of antique furnishings and works of art is both luxurious and severe, a highly concentrated distillation of his most prized and cherished objects. This tender, poetic minimalism has a three-dimensional flow; the rooms seem to unfurl like a long deep breath. Cavernous ceilings with original raw wood beams, softly burnished terracotta tile floors and thick white stucco walls create a peaceful, zen-like atmosphere, and indeed a noble setting for his extensive, artfully displayed collection of Classical sculpture and architectural elements. Like a museum or gallery, Twombly keeps decoration of any excess to a minimum, inviting the eye to meander freely unencumbered about his impressive collection.

Perhaps, however, what I find most successful about Twombly's terse romanticism is the renovated palazzo's sense of evacuation; each room feels possessed by its coming undone. This produces a wonderfully rich dialogue with the ruins and relics on display. In many ways, it seems to also be an extension of Twombly's art practice. His flair for rhythm and fragmentation are manifest not just on the walls in his own works, but in the textures and patterning of his home's architecture and furniture design. A delicately tuned harmony of levity, gravity, and grace, Twombly's Roman countryside retreat may be his most underrated masterpiece yet.

Photo: Tim Beddow for The World of Interiors

Photo: Tyler Mitchell for The World of Interiors

Actor Grace Gummer and musician Mark Ronson have an alchemical romance--and not just for each other. Their chic Manhattan Federalist style home is a happy cocktail of their individual aesthetics. With Gummer's serene, muted color palette and Ronson's collection of bold and graphic art, the resulting combination feels luxurious and tranquil, yet full of humor and fun. I love how all the sleek lines and textures create a rich gallery-like contrast with the colorful pops of art.

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