January 26, 2025From the comfort of a mid-1960s Pierre Paulin–designed Groovy chair in the living room of his Palm Springs home, Rick Reilly surveys the fruits of his three decades of collecting: postwar Italian lighting, 20th- and 21st-century art, ceramics by George Jouve and Jean Lurcat and tables and chairs by Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Chapo.
A former advertising executive who shifted vocational gears in 2023 to launch RCR Design Consultants, Reilly lived for years with most of these prized pieces in both a New York City apartment and an early-1800s farmhouse in Litchfield, Connecticut.
Now, following the purchase, renovation and decoration of this mid-century-modern California desert townhouse in the historic Seven Lakes Country Club — designed by architect Richard Harrison in 1964 — he’s seeing the treasures he’s long loved come to life in a whole new way. And he’s clearly pleased to show them off to Introspective now.
“I don’t like to be beholden to a certain look, and I like to juxtapose elements,” he says as he begins the tour, noting that he’s put tribal pieces from Ghana and Zaire and statues from the Ivory Coast in a steel 1970s Zig Zag bookcase by Joelle Ferlande. “This home is the place where everything can coexist.”
The stylish convergence of Harrison’s Desert Moderne architecture — with its deep eaves, sculptural brick exteriors, clerestories and window walls — and Reilly’s eclectic, sophisticated interior decoration will soon be unveiled to a wider audience. On February 19, the townhouse will be one of the destinations for the Palm Springs Modern Committee’s Iconic Home tours during Modernism Week.
By opening his doors to the residence he shares with his husband, Craig Robinson, a financial executive and ceramist, Reilly hopes to open people’s minds as well.
“I think my house is a reaction against the typical Palm Springs aesthetic of the past twenty years, with its Rat Pack references, bright colors and tiki bars,” he says. “To me, that does a great disservice to the architecture, which deserves to be complemented by important furniture.”
To counteract previous anachronistic renovations and create contemporary spaces that better suit/harmonize with the 1965 design, Reilly updated the interior envelope. He reskinned the orange-peel textured walls and painted them a clean gallery white, he replaced white-tile floors with terrazzo, and he redid the bathrooms using period-correct four-inch matte-gray tiles he had imported from France.
The kitchen now has white-oak cabinetry and white Caesarstone countertops, plus Arne Jacobsen sink taps. There’s also a new wide pass-through, so guests in the living room can be part of the conversation while their hosts cook.
Reilly furnished the sunny dining area off the cooking space with a marble-topped Eero Saarinen Tulip table and Perriand Bauche chairs. Against a wall, he placed a Pierre Chapo R07 Petit buffet, topping it with a dainty Roger Capron lamp emblazoned with a hand-painted sun. “The little sun just brings a smile to your face,” the designer says.
The mixing of rustic, natural materials, chunky wood pieces and refined sculptural forms that characterizes the dining area is a recurring theme throughout this home — as well as those he has crafted for other modernist devotees since launching his design career.
Reilly entered the field a couple of years ago after realizing that collecting, refinishing, reupholstering and arranging furniture and decorative arts, which he put so much time and care into for his own homes, was his true passion. Almost immediately, his friends and neighbors — who’d long been impressed with his houses — validated his career change by commissioning him. Before long, he had wound down his work in advertising.
For his Palm Spring home, Reilly imagined a romantic narrative to work from. “I pictured a well-traveled person who bought this place in 1965 and also had a place in the South of France and visited Spain’s Costa Brava and Portugal’s Comporta,” says the designer, who has lived and worked in Mexico City, London, Sydney and Bangkok and has taken several trips to southern Africa with his husband, who is from Zimbabwe.
Reilly’s design for the open-plan living room, which he divided into several sections, reflects that Mediterranean jet-set sensibility. In the more formal entertaining area, he points to a 1950s chrome-framed Florence Knoll tuxedo sofa, which sits across a slatted Perriand Cansado bench — here used as a coffee table — from a Jean Prouvé SCAL daybed.
“I wanted pieces that were flat and low slung, to accentuate the ten-foot ceilings,” Reilly says of the furniture arrangement.
Artworks include wooden Alexandre Noll sculptures, masks from Ghana and Zaire and a dazzling Jean Picart le Doux tapestry from the 1950s. The tapestry hangs above a terrazzo-topped Prouvé table holding a Gae Aulenti lamp that resembles a futuristic helmet and visor.
The art, Reilly notes as he walks on, continues into an adjacent gallery-like nook hung salon style with works by Keith Haring, Gilbert & George, John Baldessari, Gregory Crewdson and Todd Hido. Thanks to its Jeanneret table arrayed with art and design books — all underneath a Marcel-Louis Baugniet mobile — the space also feels like a library.
In the living room’s media area, Reilly placed a rosewood and marble Knoll sideboard, topped with a Piero Fornasetti lamp, and a small-scale Harry Bertoia Sonambient sound sculpture. “It’s my dinner bell,” Reilly says, laughing as he runs his fingers across the piece’s upright metal rods.
He and Robinson often sit on the sofa here eating dinner or snacks off an unusually tall Perriand coffee table with tapering stiletto legs. “It’s incredibly functional because of its height,” says the designer.
Reilly turned a nook in the primary suite into an intimate work area with a Compas Direction desk and Standard chair, both by Prouvé. In the sleeping space, he placed a low-profile upholstered bed between a pair of walnut Florence Knoll dressers, which he calls “prized 1stDibs finds.” He countered these rectilinear forms with the sensuous organic curves of a Jouve mirror and a Charles and Ray Eames La Chaise daybed.
Even with all these blue-chip names of 20th-century design, Reilly “wanted to keep the bedroom pared down and calm.” And thanks to its palette of grays and wood tones and its minimal, small-scale artworks, he has.
It doesn’t lack for grand gestures or little luxuries, however. The designer mounted a dramatically overscale swing-arm Serge Mouille light fixture on the wall over the headboard. And his-and-his fluffy flokati rugs rest on either side of the bed.
“We’re in the desert,” Reilly says, smiling as the tour comes to an end. “But it still gets cold at night.”