On the heels of recently unveiling a new store in the Miami Design District, Cult Gaia is back in its hometown of Los Angeles to open a retail location in the high-end Palisades Village developed by Rick Caruso.
The ready-to-wear and accessories label opened its first flagship last year on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. Five stores later, it has branched out to Pacific Palisades, the well-to-do L.A. neighborhood not from the Pacific Ocean that is home to celebrities Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson and Kate Hudson.
Palisades Village is, like its name implies, like a small village with a compact park surrounded by shops and restaurants. Cult Gaia’s boutique, at 1,225 square feet, was designed under the guidance of the label’s founder and designer, Jasmin Larian Hekmat, with input from the New York interior design firm Sugarhouse, which developed the brand’s Miami and New York stores.
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The new boutique has been nicknamed “the shell,” because of its references to the sea. Design elements include plaster walls and pastellone floors with terracotta granules enveloping the space in pale cream and golden beiges, like the grainy texture of sand.
Continuing the nature theme, are a waved-shaped sofa and clothing rods as well as furnishings resembling rock formations. The front door has a shell handle made from a chrome mold.
Cult Gaia was founded by Hekmat in 2012 after the designer, who grew up in L.A., graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, where her creative energy saw her making goddess-inspired flower crowns for friends as a hobby. Those flower crowns morphed into the Ark bag, an airy half-moon-shaped bamboo handbag that grew to become a must-have among Instagram influencers.
Creativity is a tradition in Hekmat’s family. Her father, Isaac Larian, immigrated from Iran in the early 1970s at 17 with $750 in his pocket. He put himself through school at California State University — Long Beach, using his dishwasher wages to pay his expenses to get a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. He went on to found MGA Entertainment, the company behind the popular Bratz dolls and other toys that have made him a billionaire.