David A. Keeps

Brand Content, Lifestyle Journalist, TV Producer and Host

Portfolio

DESIGN

Los Angeles Times
12/18/2012
Landmark Houses: The Eames House

Charles and Ray Eames' colorfully clad glass-and-steel house and studio — like monolithic Mondrian canvases springing from the ground — were not merely a residence and work space. They were incubators for a new way of living and an enduring symbol of post-World War II design and L.A.'s indoor-outdoor lifestyle.

Los Angeles Times
12/13/2008
Thrifty shopping with Philippe Starck

Walking into Big Lots on Vine Street, just blocks from the swank interiors he created for the restaurant Katsuya and the nightclub S Bar, Philippe Starck appears a bit wary. "Can you live elegantly and economically?" he asks, surveying the store's vast array of closeout merchandise for the first time.

WSJ
07/23/2015
Interior Designer Bunny Williams on Dogs and Elegance

"I AM ALWAYS slightly suspicious of people who don't like dogs in the house," said the New York City-based interior decorator, who is also mother to six rescued mutts. If you pay attention, she said, pooches will "always show you the coziest places in the house to curl up."

House and Garden UK
Michael S. Smith at Home

A tour of his Los Angeles residence with the designer, whose deft blend of Old World charm and California casual has attracted an A-list clientele including Steven Spielberg, George Clooney and Michelle Obama.

House Beautiful
David A. Keeps published in HOUSE BEAUTIFUL

Interviews and photo galleries of interiors by Peter Dunham, Mary McDonald, Jeff Lincoln, Schuyler Samperton, Nathan Turner, Benjamin Dhong, Betsy Burnham, Chris Barrett, David Dalton and Wendy Owen.

Departures
The Haas Brothers

With new ideas and radical techniques, Nikolai and Simon Haas have become design's latest enfants terribles, with obsessively detailed sculptural work--spiky sea creature ceramics and fur-covered settees with bronze animal feet-- they describe in one word: "Ridiculous."

1stdibs: Introspective
David A. Keeps published on 1stdibs.com

A cache of features on artists, designers, galleries including Timothy Street-Porter, Cliff Fong, Oliver M. Furth, Patrick Dragonette, Nickey Kehoe, Francesco Soro, R & Company and Obsolete.

GardenDesign.com
Sculptor Stan Bitters - Garden Design

Stan Bitters is a 21st-century caveman. In a windowless steel building on an industrial strip of Fresno, California, the 76-year-old sculptor shapes earth, water, and fire into primal ceramic forms. It is a ritual based more on instinct than intellectual precept. "It's not about thinking about the clay," he says.

Veranda
David A. Keeps for VERANDA

Feature stories on homes designed by Orlando Diaz-Azcuy Design Associates, Peter Dunham, Richard Hallberg and Daniel Cuevas.

Forbes
03/31/2014
Redesigns for Living: Joe Doucet

JOE DOUCET IS A LIVING BLUEPRINT FOR THE 21ST-century designer. He has produced brand identities for BMW, packaging for Procter & Gamble and concept appliances for Whirlpool and Braun.

Elle Decor, Cover, Sept. 2012
Reese Witherspoon at Home in Ojai

For Witherspoon, who grew up in a 1930s brick house in Nashville, the elaborate stonework, arches, soaring fireplaces, and turrets of the Libbey Ranch were magical.

BRAND CONTENT

Men's Journal
Why Owning a Dog Adds Years to Your Life

Every weekday morning at the In Situ Foundation in Chico, California, an eager pack of workers awaits their shift. One by one, they are led into a laboratory where their boss, a medical researcher named Dina Zaphiris, gives a simple directive: "Go find."

FASHION

LA Times
03/18/2007
The Outlaw Rides Again - Feb. 2007

'Deadwood' chic kicks the metrosexual look out the saloon doors. GOODBYE waxed eyebrows, hello mustache wax? This post-metrosexual ruggedness is all about woolen vests, chambray shirts, crisp-legged denim and manly man belts.

Spring 2019 Lookbook | St. John Knits

At the intersection of classic and modern, St. John presents a new collection that shifts your unique personal style into high gear. This season, we draw inspiration from the city and the shore...

Spring 2019 Lookbook 2 | St. John Knits

Spring beckons you with the promise of renewal, the romance of adventure… and the adventure of romance. Dress code: effortless luxury, created in a timeless artisan tradition with a modern twist...

Pre-Fall 2019 Book One | St. John Knits

Presenting your passport to style. Depart from the commonplace and embrace your wanderlust in a collection of modern American classics with globetrotting embellishments...

1stdibs Introspective
04/19/2019
JF Chen's 'Collision' Combines High Fashion and Haute Furniture

Cocooned in Issey Miyake's 2018 World dress, a pleated confection of silk imprinted with aerial photography of the planet, a blue - yes, blue - mannequin floats above nearly 100 iconic fashion and home-decor designs at JF Chen's 5,000-square-foot C Project gallery, in Los Angeles.

TRAVEL

Travel + Leisure
04/01/2015
Brisbane's Boom

No longer in the shadows of Sydney and Melbourne, the Queensland capital has evolved into an incubator of forward-thinking design.

Travel + Leisure, 2003
Road Trip Across Michigan

On a road trip across his home state from Detroit to Lake Michigan, David A. Keeps charts the enduring legacy of the Modernist movement.

Art & The City, Ovation TV, 2007
David Keeps

My host reel for Ovation TV's Art & The City, a 6-episode series set in London, Paris, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and New Orleans. Directed by .World of Wonder Productions.

Travel + Leisure
02/28/2013
A Drive Down Mexico's Pacific Coast

On a drive down Mexico's central Pacific coast, David A. Keeps encounters lizards in hats, the Pie Lady, a little luxury, and more than a few bumps in the road There is only one word you need to know when you are driving in Mexico: tope. That's Spanish for "speed bump."

Travel + Leisure, Dec. 2011
Palm Springs and the High Desert

This is a tale of two deserts: one as glittering and artificial as a futuristic theme park, the other as spare and elemental as boulders and cactus. It's roughly a 32-mile journey north from Palm Springs, the Midcentury Modern center of Southern California's low desert, to the rustic, beautifully barren high-desert communities of Joshua Tree and Pioneertown.

Financial Times of London, Feb. 2013
A long weekend in... Los Angeles

Endlessly envied for its ideal weather and downright derided for its plastic-pretty, populace, Los Angeles is, nonetheless, the US's most successful company town. Its exports - movies, television, sportswear, fusion-food trucks and celebrity - occupy imaginations across the globe.

ART + PHOTOGRAPHY

1stdibs
12/15/2014
The Rolling Stones | 1stdibs Introspective

Gathering together some 50 years' worth of photographs - many of them never before seen - by the likes of David Bailey, Andy Warhol and David LaChapelle, a new book from TASCHEN and a related selling exhibition at the publishing house's new Los Angeles gallery provide a riotous, rowdy and riveting portrait of The Rolling Stones .

latimes
07/24/2010
Vintage whimsy

David Weidman's silk-screen artwork helped to define the look of the late 1960s and '70s. But only now, at 89, is he reaching his prime. On a visit to the Long Beach area in the early 1960s, David and Dorothy Weidman had their first glimpse of a planned community.

WSJ
10/14/2015
Graphic Artist Michael Bierut on Logos and Emojis

"FORTY YEARS AGO, graphic arts were a form of black magic-only a handful of people even knew the names of typefaces," said Michael Bierut, a partner in the New York office of the international design consultancy Pentagram, who has crafted visual identities for clients as diverse as Saks Fifth Avenue and Manhattan's Museum of Sex.

1stdibs Introspective
10/08/2014
Seeing Like Sid

Mid-century photographer Sid Avery captured some of Hollywood's biggest names in a uniquely natural way, often in their own homes. Now, the Los Angeles gallery Dragonette Ltd. is offering some of Avery's masterpieces on 1stdibs - and they're bigger and more beautifully printed than ever before.

1stdibs Introspective
04/20/2018
1970s Corporate America Has Never Looked So Chic

The American office has long served as an incubator for modern and contemporary domestic design. In the economic boom following World War II, such manufacturers as Herman Miller, Knoll and Steelcase built their reputations on efficient modular work stations for the clerical class and sleek, high-end furnishings that exuded prestige for power lobbies and executive [...]

LOS ANGELES TIMES

latimes.com
05/16/2015
We've certainly been 'Mad' for modern

In its nearly eight years on the air, AMC's period drama "Mad Men" became must-see TV for design professionals and decor fans and, arguably, a boon to the home furnishings industry.

Latimes
Cowabunga: Herman Miller's new L.A. showroom

The manufacturer of midcentury classics by Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson, including his famed 1956 Marshmallow sofa, shown here in cowhide upholstery, has opened a new showroom in Los Angeles.

L.A. Times
Set Pieces: The 1930s California interiors of HBO's 'Mildred Pierce'

"Mildred Pierce," director Todd Haynes' five-hour miniseries based on the James M. Cain novel, has been accused by some critics of being overly languid, like taffy stretched too thin. It may not be as snappy as the 1945 flick that earned Joan Crawford an Oscar, but for vintage design enthusiasts, this HBO event is intoxicating eye candy.

Latimes
Set Pieces: The look of 'Tron: Legacy'

They had me at the trailer. For weeks now, the previews for "Tron: Legacy" have offered a striking look at what digital-age decor could look like. Though the film, which opens this weekend, unfolds in a virtual landscape know as the Grid, it also features the midcentury childhood home of hero Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) and a modern house made from shipping containers where Flynn's son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) lives.

L.A. Times
10/01/2013
Timothy Corrigan and 'An Invitation to Chateau du Grand-Luce'

In "An Invitation to Chateau du Grand-Luce," Los Angeles designer Timothy Corrigan details the five-year restoration of his dream house, and boy, does he dream big: a 45,000-square-foot Neoclassical chateau on 80 manicured acres in the Loire Valley of France.

Los Angeles Times
03/07/2009
Herman Miller's new Embody chair

The Aeron chair has long ruled as an office status symbol, a throne for key-stroking drones and corporate captains. This week its manufacturer, Herman Miller, launches Embody.

L.A. Times
11/14/2012
Our 'Million Dollar Decorators' challenge: Shop Kmart, Marshalls

They shop, they drink, they dine, they kvetch. They turn otherwise ordinary rooms into polished interiors, and then ... they go shopping again. They are the stars of Million Dollar Decorators, the Bravo reality series that started its second season tonight, yanking back the curtain to see how four Los Angeles design personalities - Martyn Lawrence-Bullard, Kathryn M.

latimes.com
01/30/2015
Smart ideas, designs to make more of your home

From rediscovered design classics to brand-new innovations, from the ceiling to the floor, 15 easy pieces and smart ideas for making more of your house in 2015. Spring bouquets "Floral patterns feel fresh again for chairs, headboards, curtains and bedding," says Los Angeles designer Susann Thomason Tunick.

Los Angeles Times
05/28/2015
Dutch designer Marcel Wanders: 'We cannot only be about the surface'

Over the last 25 years, the provocative and philosophical Dutch designer Marcel Wanders has created home furnishings for dozens of big-ticket European firms, plates and cutlery for Alessi and KLM airlines, compacts for MAC cosmetics and a Christmas collection for Target.

latimes.com
03/06/2015
The new moody blues of home decor

A longtime preppy and beach house standard, nautical navy blue has returned in a huge way, with interior designers splashing it on walls in New York dining rooms and Palm Springs decorator show house bathrooms. For those who'd rather forgo painting and wallpaper, a host of designers are offering moody blue furnishings that add texture to rooms, referencing California denim and the deep indigo of the Japanese shibori folding and dyeing technique.

latimes.com
03/28/2009
A flair for the whimsical

As children of the Great Depression, Jerome and Evelyn Ackerman had modest dreams: They wanted to own their home and decorate it with beautiful things. In 1952, the couple left Detroit to start a mom-and-pop arts studio in Culver City, and in the decades that followed they produced hundreds of handmade ceramics, tile mosaics, woodcarvings and rugs -- affordable home furnishings that, starting Sunday, will be elevated to museum pieces.

WALL ST. JOURNAL

WSJ
10/31/2014
Designer Ilse Crawford on the Power of Dimmers and 'The Shining'

LONDON-BASED DESIGNER and educator Ilse Crawford -whose third book, "A Frame for Life" (Rizzoli), came out Oct. 21-is no fan of superficial décor. After stints working in an architecture office and as a design journalist, she became the first editor of Elle Decoration U.K. at age 27.

Wall St. Journal, March 2014
Holly Hunt, the doyenne of designer showrooms, shares her wisdom

"THERE WAS A PERIOD in the late '80s, when everything was overly traditional and antiques were selling for millions," said Holly Hunt, the contemporary-design impresario who bought her first showroom in Chicago in 1983. "We were making new money look old."

WSJ
08/25/2015
Inkblot-Inspired Décor That Adds Personality

IT DOESN'T TAKE a great deal of analysis to conclude that inkblots, an evaluation tool used by psychologists since Swiss doctor Hermann Rorschach devised his classic "tell me what you see" personality test in 1921, have begun to surface as a decorative motif.

Wall St. Journal
Retying the Knot: The Macramé Revival

The design world, high on 1970s nostalgia, is busily reinventing the sort of humble fiber creations once found in hippie pads and Big Sur vacation getaways.

Wsj
01/02/2015
Top 5 Interior Design Trends for 2015

Mixed Metals In London, designer Kelly Hoppen says mixing warm metals, such as copper and rose gold, with cool ones like silver is particularly hot right now. Los Angeles designer Jamie Bush agreed, saying he is no longer interested in matching every metal finish in a single room: "It's too staged."