Hi, I'm Travis

I didn't choose mid-century modern. It chose me.

I grew up in a 1959 tract ranch home on the west side of Phoenix, and from my earliest memories, I was drawn to everything around me in a way I couldn't quite explain. The kidney bean coffee table. The Naugahyde swivel chair. The hi-fi turntable in the corner. The faux-fur rug that probably shouldn't have worked, but absolutely did. There was something about the way those objects existed together — confident, optimistic, unapologetic — that felt more alive to me than anything else in the world.

While other kids played with blocks, I rearranged furniture — my mother's, my grandmother's, anyone who would let me. If I could shove it across the floor, I would. I instinctively knew when a room could be better, even if I couldn't explain why. My entire career has been the explanation.

The Era That Made Me

Reruns of I Love Lucy and The Dick Van Dyke Show were my after-school education. Those Hollywood-perfect set designs — the clean lines, the bold colors, the sense that every object in the frame belonged exactly where it was — spoke to something deep in me. Hitchcock films. 1960s spy movies. The geometry of a well-designed room caught in black and white. I absorbed all of it like a sponge and never really stopped.

By my twenties I was living the aesthetic as much as studying it. I drove a beige-on-beige 1964 Chrysler Imperial LeBaron. I wore sharkskin suits. I hunted thrift shops while my friends were at the mall, collecting vintage treasures by day and hosting cocktail parties in the evenings. The spirit of midcentury design — where the past and present merge into something timeless — thrilled me then exactly as it thrills me now.

I eventually opened a midcentury furniture store called Good Eye in Washington D.C., because at some point a lifelong passion either becomes a career or it becomes a problem. I chose career.

A Life's Work

Palm Springs was the inevitable destination for someone like me. For over ten years I've served as lead interior designer at H3K Home+Design, decorating and furnishing some of the most celebrated midcentury homes in the desert alongside my husband John. It has been the privilege of my professional life. Working inside these extraordinary spaces every day — understanding what makes them breathe, what colors honor them, what objects belong in them — has only deepened a passion that started with a kid shoving furniture across a Phoenix living room floor.

What I've learned after decades of doing this work is simple: great midcentury design isn't precious and it isn't exclusive. It's joyful. It's optimistic. It was created by people who genuinely believed the world could look better than it did yesterday — and they were right.

Why This Collection Exists

Mid-Century Modernist was born from everything I just told you. Every piece in this collection — the art, the apparel, the objects for your home — carries the same sensibility I've been refining my entire life. The bold colors. The confident lines. The cars, the architecture, the atomic age swagger that made an entire era feel like the future had finally arrived and it looked exactly as good as everyone hoped.

But here's what matters most to me about this store: these pieces are affordable. Genuinely, accessibly, no-excuses affordable. Because I have never believed that great design should live behind a velvet rope. The joy I felt as a kid in that Phoenix ranch home — surrounded by objects that were beautiful simply because someone cared enough to make them that way — that joy belongs to everyone.

These pieces made me smile when I created them. I hope they do the same for you.

Welcome to Mid-Century Modernist. You're going to feel right at home.

— Travis