Conversations: Claire Thomas' stormy sea and forest floor

“One of my girlfriends, I did her vacation house in Palm Springs, and the narrative was 1969 Pan Am flight to Morocco, and Barbara Eden is your air hostess.”

For Claire Thomas, everything is a story, one best told through the kind of experience that demands your attention, pulling you in as though you’re entering an entirely new world. Whether it’s food on a plate, furniture in a room, or words on a page, every detail is focused and precise, a way, according to Claire, of “communicating ideas and inspiration.”

Only twelve when she first found herself on set as a production assistant for her parents’ commercial production company, Claire zipped around, running errands and feeling electric. This is where she learned how to construct a story that stays with people, a skill that has carried her through her career as a director and writer. Claire applies that same ethos to her work as a designer, taking her time to craft hyper-personalized spaces for 1–2 clients per year, always someone by referral, always someone she loves. “The first thing we do is we come up with our plot. What story are we telling?” she says.

Raised in Los Angeles in a family of advertisers, beginning each project by grounding herself in the plot, angle and lens through which the story will be told makes sense. When Claire considers design, she explains that each piece, from the paint to the rug, must “talk to each other. Are they in the same conversation, in the same room, in the same story?” For Claire, everything has a home within the home, a place to be. Anything that doesn’t fit, however beautiful, belongs somewhere else. “If you plopped someone into a space,” she says, “they should be able to look around and know whose room it is.”

Her own home is no exception. As with her mother’s bookends that were collected over decades or her late father’s books and odd treasures, her joy comes from filling a space with deeply personal, intentional pieces while respecting the home’s architectural background, her current, a 1930s Spanish Colonial. “The story that I wrote for it was the Brontë sisters go on vacation in sunny Spain, but there's obviously going to be some ghosts and some mystery and some love won and lost. But perhaps they return with a little bit of wine in their suitcase and a little bit of a suntan or something.”

Claire’s knack for storytelling shows within each room, including the bedroom belonging to her two sons, James, nine, and Reggie, four. Her father, who passed away four years ago, loved Robert Louis Stevenson, and James, who was especially close to his grandfather, inherited that love. About once a year, Claire reads “Treasure Island” to the boys, a coming-of-age tale that, as she notes, has a “real darkness in it” that they have embraced. Basing the room’s design on the classic novel, Claire started with color. “The palette evolved a lot because originally I was doing something much lighter in tone. It wasn’t until I saw the wallpaper that I brought some of that moodiness out.”

“The ceiling in the bedroom is a stormy sky,” Claire says, so she chose Sienna in Storm, a plush, lustrous rug, to “look like the ocean during a storm, this liquid metal kind of aesthetic.” And of course, a “Treasure Island”- themed room wouldn’t be complete without a ship, theirs a bunkbed handmade by Claire’s stepdad and the boys’ “funcles,” the fun uncles. Surrounded by vintage 1940s rattan and bentwood furniture, the rugs solidified the theme. “The rugs are obviously the grounding part of the whole thing,” Claire says. Grounding her space with custom-sized rugs was an important, and almost literal, aspect of the office, too, where Dutton in Mocha, a more rugged indoor/outdoor rug, acts as the ground beneath the nearby sycamores and live oaks. “What’s below a forest canopy,” she explains, “is the forest floor.”