Hot Hot Heat

There’s a certain knack to understanding your environment while designing a home. This home couldn’t-or shouldn’t-exist outside Palm Springs. Because, with its warm light nearly 365 days of the year, Palm Springs allows for a home that can be bold, showy and, most importantly, colourful. "The house is so white-I just wanted to throw in as much colour as I could," says Calgary designer Paul Lavoie. "It’s the opposite of living in Alberta. The last thing I wanted here was taupe."

Lavoie has been coming to Palm Springs since 2002, and in 2005 he invested in a condo with his partner Doug Olafson. When the real estate market went downhill a couple of years ago, this vintage Palm Springs home was too irresistible to pass up. With its Hollywood pedigree-it’s the former residence of Fess Parker, he of Daniel Boone and Davey Crocket fame-its south-facing yard and its view of the mountains, Lavoie and Olafson jumped on it-then started renovating.

While much of the home’s interior had been renovated in the early ’90s with timeless materials-saving them costly renovations-the clay floor was a little too Tex Mex for their tastes. Out it came in exchange for high gloss, white porcelain tile throughout. Paired with white on the walls, the flooring became the perfect set-up for hot splashes of colour in every room, starting with the bold yellow chairs in the dining area. "They were really the jumping-off point," explains Lavoie. "I wanted everything to be as high chroma as those yellow chairs. I didn’t want any wimpy colours that wouldn’t be able to stand up to them."

So a William Switzer chair in the bedroom was reupholstered in hot pink ("I’m crazy about pink right now-I love it with orange. And I never thought I’d say that"), marigold-coloured accessories highlight the living room, and three of the six bar stools in the kitchen feature multicolour striping. "We didn’t want it to look like a conference room bar-this is a place for vacation and fun," says Lavoie. "Like, ‘I get the striped stool!’"

Many furniture pieces in the home speak to Palm Springs royalty: a dining table that hosted Betty and Gerald Ford, and bold red chairs scored from an auction at Liberace’s mansion. ("That’s the thing about Palm Springs. On a Saturday, you’re not at a garage sale, you’re at an estate sale at Liberace’s former home.") And many of the pieces, now recovered and modernized, came with the house and hail from Fess Parker’s era-recalling a time when ’60s starlets and dapper gentlemen lounged poolside. "It’s a nice spin on recycling something with the house too," says Lavoie. "There’s lots of love and scratches on these pieces. Who knows how long they were with the house?"

Many pieces come from local consignment stores, where Lavoie is amazed by what’s cast off: floor-to-ceiling mirrors from a 1920s New York apartment, a 1960s silver orb pendant light now in the sitting room and, his favourite find, the bold orange side tables in his bedroom.

In some ways, Lavoie was just returning the home to its origins as a bright and vibrant place-recalling Palm Springs’s heyday as a movie star’s playground. And a surprise Lavoie found in the walls during the renovation seems to confirm that a playground is just what the house was. "Someone had hidden a bottle of 1972 Veuve Clicquot," laughs Lavoie. "That’s so Palm Springs!"