Mother Stories
Meet Furniture Designer And Mama of Two, Michaele Simmering
Written by James Kicinski-McCoy
Photography by Photography by Katrina Dickson
Nov 18, 2014
If you haven’t heard of Kalon Studios, boy are you missing out. The made-in-Los Angeles furniture brand is booming—not to mention utterly fabulous! Here, the designer and co-founder Michaele Simmering invites us into her beautiful Silverlake home, that is of course, filled with hers and her husband Johann’s exceptional makings (the duo just won the coveted 2014 Martha Stewart American Made award). Along the way, she introduces us to their two adorable daughters, 8-year-old Io and 5-year-old Echo. With an admirable intentional approach to design and honest take on motherhood, get ready to be inspired!
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"Minimal. Contemporary craft. It’s spare, but that’s because we move frequently
(about every three years), which has the benefit of making us shed. When we
move, we whittle things down to what can fit into a car.
There were a lot of years when our living room had a giant rug and that was it. With our most recent move, we decided to furnish the house entirely with our own pieces. The materials
you see are wood, ceramic, and metals. We have to really need a piece and truly love it to make the
effort to build it. It has to be an essential. So, right now, things are pretty pared back."
Michaele wears a white linen Jesse Kamm dress. Oldest daughter Io wears blue harem pants and a mesh tank by Nico Nico. Youngest daughter Echo wears black shorts by Tumble N Dry and a long sleeve t-shirt by Zara Kids. Tree prints by Isabelle Famiglietti (Michaele's step-grandmother). Pink Sectional No 5 Series couch by Kalon Studios.
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- "We started Kalon around the same time we had kids. We always made things for ourselves, but never on the level that we do now. There’s been a real refinement in our home. An increasing focus on material and craft. The studio started with a reaction against the idea that having children meant changing your aesthetic or filling your home with so-called kid’s stuff, so we’ve never had a 'kid' dominated space."
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- "Love it and really need it before buying. Good design should wear in and not out, meaning beauty and personal value should increase with age and use. I have real heartache over the massive amount of cheap furnishings that are bought, that aren’t intended to last more than a year or two."
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- Vintage straw hats, purchased from street vendors.
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"The kitchen. Everyone is always jammed in the kitchen. I love kitchens—I think
everyone does."
Echo wears a gray henley shirt by J. Crew.
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"Again, the kitchen."
Echo wears puffy shorts by J. Crew Crewcuts. Kitchen baskets are traditional shaker onion baskets. Leather and gold drawer pulls made by Kalon Studios.
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- "A carved wooden lion and camel. They’re Bedouin children’s toys that we got in the Sahara over 10 years ago. They’re some of the few items that have survived our many moves. There are a pair of clothespin indians my daughter made for me out of clay and feathers when she was two. I also love the Lindsey Adelman DIY light we made last year. It was our first experiment with lighting and is really accessible and a fun medium."
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"Life is more textured. I have gone to living with one amazing person to living with
three. There are four vibrant minds, personalities, and bodies contributing to the
minutia of my days. This is the good and the bad of it. There is no time for me,
the individual. Sometimes, I get the sense that I’ll wake up one day in 10 years and
there will be a silence in the home and I will have to meet myself all over again.
That will be both exhilarating and heartbreaking."
Michaele wears a white tank by Scotch & Soda. Echo wears a plaid dress by Felix. Tent is by Kalon Studios + Nico Nico.
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"Maybe it’s the purity of the look in your baby’s face when they lay in your arms
and look at you—the absolute love—the way they see you and love you for
exactly who you are."
Io wears a tank and camo skirt by Nico Nico.
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- "Everything, honestly. They blow my mind daily."
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"I’m a designer. I design mostly furniture. I’m also the Creative Director and co-founder
of Kalon Studios."
Michaele's belt is self made and part of a special project by Kalon.
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- "I have no formal training in design. There are a lot of creative people in my family, on both sides, going back generations. Artists, a lot of musicians—even more so, there are a lot of strong-willed people who did things their own way. My formal training was in cultural theory, literature, and writing. Design was something I fell into when I was living in Berlin. People would meet me and recommend me for design jobs. I found it curious at the time, but when I look back at my life I can connect the dots. I have always been highly focused on the spaces I live in, and very sensitive to the objects I surrounded myself with."
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"To have a vision and have the tools to see it materialize. That’s a powerful drug.
To make things exactly the way I want to. The ability to shape a company
according to the ethics I believe in. To create a micro-world according to my own
ideals, and the freedom my job gives me to live my life, my way. To be with my
children. To prioritize according to the life I want to have for myself and my
family."
Isometric table, chairs, and Bamboo 3blocks by Kalon Studios.
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- "We were just awarded the 2014 Martha Stewart American Made Design Award. That is huge. Making our pieces in America, strictly from domestic materials, is something we’ve been really dedicated to and it’s been a struggle. The recognition for that work feels great."
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"Kalon was founded when I was pregnant with my first child and founded, in large
part, as a way for Johann and me to be equal participants in our children’s lives. I
mean, we all have to work and I love my work. But my life is bigger than my work.
It’s an intertwining of my home life, my family life, my friends, my relationship to
the world around me. I need a daily connection to nature. I have never equated
success with career—it’s about something much bigger than that. I think that’s
reflected in the life I’ve created for myself and the kind of business I’ve built."
Michaele wears an embroidered sheer tank, Cotélac, and huaraches from a street vendor on Olvera Street.
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- "I work from home. My children have a completely transparent relationship to what I do. More often then not, they join us in the studio and work on their own projects. That’s important to me."
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- Working in the studio, together.
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- "Simple and easy. I gravitate towards basics. Pieces that I can see myself wearing today and many years from now. I guess it’s a very similar sensibility to what you see in my design work."
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- "Yes. But I think that is more a result of being older than being a parent. Almost 10 years have passed since I got pregnant with Io."
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- "For skin care, I use mostly Weleda and Dr. Hauschka. They’ve both been making natural skin care products for decades. I also wear sunblock. In LA, it’s necessary year round. I love Sunbum for my whole family. The scent I wear has never changed. I’ve been chasing the scent of orange blossoms since I was a teenager. I wear Santa Maria Novella Honeysuckle or Coqui Coqui Orange Blossom."
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"Be honest about who you are to yourself and to your children. Children are
amazingly adaptable and highly intuitive. I think the only thing that truly unsettles
them is when their parents are stressed or trying to pretend something else is going
on, other than what is."
Caravan Divan by Kalon Studios.
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- "We knew Io would be named Io before she was born. It was a name I had carried with me for years. The meaning is ‘an exclamation of joy or triumph’—sort of a primal cry of joy. Her middle name is Zara, a nod to two women in my family who inspired me greatly. And, as an Arab name, a nod to her Bedouin forefathers on her father’s side. Echo wasn’t named until she was three weeks old. Her first name is Esmé, which means ‘beloved.’ Echo is Echo, a sound returning—a beloved echo."
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- "I am fortunate to know a lot of incredibly talented and successful women. Most of them run their own companies while raising a family. I don’t know if it’s a bubble I live in or a larger cultural shift. These women inspire me every day."
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"An ideal day is a day when there’s nothing to do but hang out and do our thing
together. We cook together, color, ride bikes, walk, make stuff, we read books. We just are—together—that’s ideal."
Teepee by Roommate. Io wears a blue and white patterned dress by Forever21 Kids.
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"I’ve always thought about it, but it rarely happens. Now that they’re in school full-time, I feel like the days are so short. Alone time with one means not getting to see the other. I suppose we focus more on family time. We eat all our meals together and close each day together."
Michaele wears a black t-shirt by American Vintage. Vase by Victoria Morris. Simple Table and Isometric Benches by Kalon Studios. Black framed print by Isabelle Famiglietti.
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- "For me, it’s about balancing motherhood, marriage, and work. I made the choice to share all those things with the same person. Johann is the father to my children, my husband, and my partner at work. Sharing so much with him means that he gets what’s going on with me. There’s not a lot of separate experiences. This is either the best decision I have ever made in my life or will prove to be a disaster. We can’t tell yet. But so far, so good."
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- "Ha! Does everyone laugh when you ask that? I mean, who really wants to be honest about that with themselves? I adore my mother. She is an amazing, loving, caring, intelligent, and incredibly capable woman. She worked hard to raise three girls, who saw themselves as equal to the men around them. She raised me to believe I could do whatever I wanted and made sure that she never got in the way of that, never asserted an opinion about what I could or should do with my life. I want to give that to my girls. It’s an incredible gift to give anyone. Other than that, she’s blond and almost 6 feet tall. I’m a brunette and 5’7”. She cries easily and publicly. I don’t. We do have the same hands."
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"I think I end every day with the promise that tomorrow I will be a better mother. I
realize there’s part of me that’s being really hard on myself when I do this, but it’s
also very honest. Being a parent is a crazy experiment. There’s an endless amount
of striving. The older the kids get the more so. When they’re babies, it’s simple.
It’s about survival and keeping them healthy. As they grow older it’s so much
more complicated. There’s such heavy decision making."
Floor pillows by Hopewell.
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"If I had an immortal body and complete freedom to do whatever I wanted with each day, I would keep having children. Who knows how many? For what I have, two is perfect."
Michaele wears a blue tank by Scotch & Soda with a green vintage skirt by H&M, and moccasins by Beatrice Valenzuela. Io wears a colorful American Apparel dress. Echo wears khaki pants and a striped tank by Nico Nico.
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- "Jeans and a t-shirt. A simple dress in the summer. And a good belt—I love a good belt."
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- "Sadly, I don’t really have date nights. I really need some help on that front."
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- A drool-worthy wall hanging by Heather Levine.
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"Jesse Kamm, Black Crane, Kathleen Whitaker, Clare Vivier, and Nico Nico are all
local designers who are doing work I love. It’s all made in LA, which is something
I respond to."
Michaele wears a striped apron by Fog Linen.
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- "I’m more of an object person than a clothing person. Tortoise is probably my favorite store ever. I also love OK. I can spend a solid hour in each store just looking. Both are like mini museums, full of beautiful everyday objects. I get the same fix in Germany, at Manufactum. I have a bookshelf dedicated to its old catalogs—love that place."
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- "I buy less and less and rarely shop. Most of the things in my life—food, objects, fashion—have followed a similar trajectory. There is a shared interest in knowing about the making of the piece, the hands involved, the materials used. It brings so much more value and meaning to the piece."
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- "Although I design nursery furniture, I never really did our girls’ nursery. Our homes have always been small and there’s a fluidity to the spaces. So, there’s a shared aesthetic in all of the rooms and not a so-called 'kid’s space.' I’ve found that my girls always want to be in the same room as me, no matter what amazing things I may put in their room. So, bedrooms are sort of for sleeping. The most energy we have put in their room was trying to find an efficient and aesthetically pleasing way to store all their stuff, in a way they could access it, while keeping it organized and manageable. We wanted their room to work for them. Things are low, easy, simple, and accessible."
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- "It’s not as hard as it seems. I think going two to three is probably the killer—when the kids outnumber the parents. Also, that each child is different from the next and so the experience will be equally different. None of the same rules seem to apply."
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"Their desk. Our girls are big time drawers. They spend hours drawing every day."
Wall hanging quilt is by Hopewell. Beds are by Kalon Studios (releasing winter of 2015).
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- "The idea of living anywhere forever stresses me out. I move a lot and haven’t ever found a place that I wanted to settle. That being said, I do love living in Los Angeles. There are days when the city gets me down, but then I find myself driving in the hills, and it’s golden hour, and the air is full and warm and there are succulents everywhere and the ocean is sparkling in the distance and I’m hooked all over again."
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"There are two kinds of days. There are the days when we stay in the neighborhood,
walk around the hills, meet up with friends, go to one of the local farmer’s
markets, ride bikes, make stuff, cook dinner with friends. And there are the days
when we take a day trip, usually to the beach or to a canyon. There are so many
amazing places to go within an hour of our house, so many completely different
environments. Each is like a mini-vacation."
Io wears a pink Nico Nico dress and blue button up top by Zara Kids. Echo wears a blue and white striped long sleeve top by J. Crew Crewcuts.
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So Cal is really filled to the brim with barefooting mamas! Michaele’s toes look so cute and seductive in picture #18. However, picture #25 is my favorite. I love when barefoot women sit that way! Michaele’s bare feet look perfect! I love the tone of her skin and how smooth her sole looks. She also has nice arches! Picture #36 is cute too. I love it when women are dressed nicely and walking around barefoot. The timing of the shot was perfect with Michaele standing on her tip toes!