Alumni News: Clare Vivier and Kathryn Bentley Double the Fun
OH, HI, FULL CIRCLE: One of our first pieces of Alumni News was on the grand opening of Vivier & Bentley, the rad retail-slash-studio space spearheaded by two Of a Kind alums—accessories whizzes Clare Vivier and Kathryn Bentley. Now, 365 (and some) days later, the duo has doubled the goodness, with Clare setting up shop two buildings down the street (address above on the genius invite—a classic CV pouch!) and Kathryn transforming their old space at 1404 Micheltorena Street to house Dream Collective, her other amazing jewelry line. We don’t usually approve of double-dipping, but, well, these Silverlake spots are an obvious exception to the rule. —jiayi
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A Year in…Studio and Home Tours
A slew of our designers were kind enough to play host.
Not to hate on Cribs and its entertainment value or anything, but sometimes it’s more appealing to explore the pad of someone with taste—who keeps more in the fridge than Dom and Perrier. In the last 12 months, these are the designers’ living quarters and work spaces we were lucky enough to invade:
+ Hillary Taymour’s (Really, Really) Amazing Home (see pic above)
+ Kalen Kaminski and Astrid Chastka Think Big in a Really Small Space
+ The Symmetry Goods (Home) Office
+ Kathryn Bentley Busts a Move
+ Peek Inside Blanca Monros Gomez’s Brooklyn Home
+ Sara Gates Shows Off Her Space
+ Erica Weiner’s (Three-Story!) House
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In Character: Cruella de Vil
Word on this street is if she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will. You know what else is frightening? CDV’s style. It’s scary good. Here, three (puppy-friendly) essentials. —erica
A big, fluffy Yves Salomon coat that could use some dalmatian lining.
Dries Van Noten gloves that match her lipstick—and her eyes when she realizes that Lucky, Rolly, Penny, Patch, and the rest of the gang are MIA.
An impressive Kathryn Bentley ring that asserts her authority over those Radcliffes.
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Leather and Lace
Our Dream Collective cuff! Lookin’ good, lookin’ good. —erica
(Source: hunterstyle)
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Clare Vivier’s Very Favorite Places in Silverlake
The leather maven is a regular at these five spots.
Taix
“Taix is a really old-school French restaurant—the interior hasn’t changed in 30 years, and the waiters have been there forever. I love to eat steak frites in the bar area.” (taixfrench.com)
Intelligentsia
“It’s just the best coffee. I usually get an espresso, and they serve it with a little glass of sparkling water. I think that’s really cute.” (intelligentsiacoffee.com)
Forage
“My very favorite restaurant is Forage. I eat there at least once a week and order the kale and arugula salad with lemon vinaigrette and toasted breadcrumbs on top.” (foragela.com)
Mohawk General Store
“I got a pair of silver Rachel Comey loafers there last year, and I feel like she should release them again because I get so many compliments on them! There’s a Raquel Allegra coat in a nubby, boiled wool that I want right now.” (mohawkgeneralstore.net)
Cookbook
“This is a super cute little market on Echo Park Avenue. Any time you don’t have an idea of what to cook, they’ll help you figure it out. It seems like a small store with a small selection, but they’ll be like, ‘Oh! Just take this arugula, this mint, and peas…’ Which is nice—to have your selection totally slimmed down.” (cookbookla.com)
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Next Level: Orange
Everyone needed a pair of red pants this summer, and yellow’s “having a moment.” But orange? It gets no respect. [Insert Rodney Dangerfield voice:] No respect! But here we are saying it’s time to stop treating orange like a second-class color, with four ways to embrace it no matter how risk-averse you are. —erica
+ LEVEL I: This Rag & Bone sweater screams “college campus”—you know, back in the era before everyone wore sweats to class. Spice it up by pairing it with cream or hunter green cords on the bottom.
+ LEVEL II: Only wear the Sunset Wave Cuff that Kathryn Bentley designed for us if you’re prepared to have your wrist grabbed. The enamel and brass give off a warm glow that just feels so damn autumnal.
+ LEVEL III: Who knew this DayGlo hue would look so good with tortoiseshell? NOT ME. But that Karen Walker was all over it.
+ LEVEL: Talk about not messing around: These All Caps shoes could take many a Halloween costume to another (sluttier) place. But now imagine them with a knit maxi, a baggy gray cashmere sweater, and some piled-on necklaces. Yeah.
There’s more where this came from. Click here for past installments of “Next Level.”
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Kathryn Carves Out Our Bracelet
The cuff the jeweler made for us has a certain charm that comes from modeling the piece by hand.
Like what you see? Score the amazing cuff here.
When Kathryn Bentley started making jewelry under her own name (and eventually launched her second line Dream Collective), she insisted on starting from scratch. While she might pull inspiration from, say, books like The Navajo Blanket (as she did when dreaming up our cuff), every single component she employs is a K.B. original. “The best thing I learned from working with designers like Philip Crangi is to make everything yourself, even though it costs a lot more money—just to really have your name on it,” she explains. “That’s why wax carving became really important to me. These days, a lot of people use CAD, which would be a lot more efficient, but I just insist upon doing things by hand.”
The wax form—which is then cast to create a silver model that’s used to make a rubber mold (yah, it’s complicated)—looks pretty awesome on its own, and even more so when it’s translated to the brass-and-enamel finished product. “It starts with a cylinder of wax that’s the diameter of the bracelet. The basic shape is cut with a little band saw, and then I use tools like hand files to create the pattern,” says Kathryn, who makes the process sound about a million times easier than it is.
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Kathryn Bentley Busts a Move
Relocating to L.A. meant scoring a rad apartment and some seriously hip neighbors.
“I lived in New York for 10 years, and I just had to go,” explains Kathryn Bentley of her decision to head west to Los Angeles three years ago. “I lived in this amazing apartment on Fifth Avenue and 10th Street, and I thought I had arrived—and then I realized, ‘I’m claustrophobic here.’” The move bore some pretty stellar developments: airy surroundings (pictured here), a new, everyday jewelry line called Dream Collective (to live alongside her luxe one), and friends/creative partners who also call Silverlake home.
“I moved out here and didn’t know anybody, which was awesome because I had done enough socializing in 10 years in New York to hold me over for a while. And I kept thinking I’d move back to New York for the first two years, but I’m so glad I stayed. I’ve met the best people.”
“I found this place through Craigslist. The girl who was renting it—we have a lot of friends in common, and she ended up writing my bio on my website. It’s a weird, small world.”
“It’s a Craftsman-style apartment, and the guy that owns it also owns this restaurant here called Little Dom’s. He totally refurbished the apartment back to its early 1900s form. He redid the tile and made sure that all the door knobs and fixtures were like the originals.”
“Clare Vivier [Ed: an amazing handbag designer who we featured on this very site] lives across the street from me. When I moved in, she just came by and introduced herself, and now she’s my partner at the store Vivier and Bentley where I also do pretty much all of the assembly work for Dream Collective.”
“Roman Alonso of Commune [Ed: a really tremendous lifestyle brand] lives in the apartment directly above me. His company opened up a shop at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs called Community Shop, which was one of the first places to carry Dream Collective. So was Mohawk General Store, which is just down the street from me. In the beginning, it was all in the neighborhood.”
Images courtesy of Juan Enriquez.
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Kathryn Bentley Busies her Brushes
Her painting might be a hobby these days, but we’re still mad impressed.
Before she got into jewelry design, Kathryn Bentley was all about painting, a medium she studied in art school. And while it’s easy to let those things slip as soon as your career picks up, Kathryn keeps filling canvases as her namesake line and the diffusion one, Dream Collective, takes off. “It’s something I still enjoy doing, and I don’t put a lot of pressure on myself when I do it,” she says. Here, a look at some of her recent creations.
“I’m really into sculpture. Henry Moore’s pieces are a big influence in my jewelry, and I really love his shapes. These paintings are not taken from any of his sculptures exactly, but abstractly, Henry Moore sculptures were the idea behind them.”
“The colors, I think, are ones I would be attracted to in my daily life—colors I would want to wear, have in my home. There isn’t necessarily a vintage reference or anything like that. It’s just a palette that I hope to find in my surroundings.”
Don’t miss out on the wearable piece Kathryn made for us: a beautiful brass-and-enamel cuff.
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Dream Collective
Kathryn Bentley’s jewelry collections—she has two: a namesake line and the wallet-friendly spinoff, Dream Collective—grew out of that post-school bind that plenty of art students find themselves in: Well, what do I do now? Thankfully, Kathryn hooked up with some top-notch mentors in NYC, including name-to-know Philip Crangi. “When I worked with Philip, we worked in an elevator shaft in the basement of an antique store on Lafayette Street. He was still doing furniture restoration for the antique store upstairs in trade for rent,” she recalls. “I would do everything from using the torch to rewiring the lamp. If you worked there, you had to know how to do everything.” Kathryn brought this top-to-bottom approach to her own work as well: When she got the idea that she might want to start her own thing, she apprenticed for a model-maker, learning to carve wax so that she could produce all of her components from scratch—nothing would be borrowed from anywhere else.
