Commune Design
Architects · Americas“Founded in Los Angeles in 2004 by Roman Alonso, Steven Johanknecht and the Shamshiris, Commune helped define a whole register of relaxed, collected California interiors the rest of the world spent a decade copying.”
Why Commune Design is in the Design 100
Commune Design was founded in Los Angeles in 2004 by Roman Alonso, Steven Johanknecht, and siblings Pamela and Ramin Shamshiri, working as a genuine collective rather than under a single name. That structure shows in the output: rooms built from a deliberate mix of vintage furniture, regional craft and newly commissioned pieces, arranged with a looseness that reads as collected rather than decorated — in effect a house style for a strand of West Coast interiors that a decade of imitators spent trying to reproduce, rarely with the same restraint.
The studio’s reach runs from private houses to hospitality, most visibly in its remaking of the Ace Hotel & Swim Club in Palm Springs, where a 1950s motor lodge became something closer to a curated desert camp, furnished with commissioned pieces from Southern California artists and artisans. Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Award and a standing place on the AD100 have followed; more relevant here is a studio that changed what a room full of comfortable, well-chosen objects could look like.