Your Villa Magazine Desert Cities February - March 2020

Something WILD is coming to El Paseo C O V E R F E A T U R E Award-winning interior designers Steven Reed Love and Jeffrey Jones announce the opening of their latest design collaboration project -- “Wildest” restaurant in Palm Desert. Jeffrey Jones, a two-time president of the Palm Springs Chapter of The American Society of Interior Designers, A.S.I.D., and Steven Reed Love, founder of Egg & Dart Palm Desert, Los Angeles and Denver, were approached by Bill Hay, Charissa Farley and award-winning chef Eric Wadlund 12 weeks ago and given the opportunity to collaborate, creating a one-of-a-kind restaurant and contemporary dining experience. “Together with Terrance Ross Construction, and his assistant, Moose, our Designers pulled off the impossible. People said we couldn’t pull it off in such a short lead time,” Farley said. Wildest chef Wadlund has created a unique menu and offers plant-based and organic items, as well as grass-fed beef and wild-caught fish. The design team said the chef was a part of every design decision. Eric’s experience and vision were an inspiration, and the entire plan was developed under his careful eye. Jones, focusing on the architectural details, worked in partnership with his son, Casey Jones, an aspiring architect and recent recipient of Palm Springs Life magazine’s “Forty-under-forty” assisting the team in bringing the project’s conceptual plans. Jones and Love laid out the restaurant to have defined dining areas with gracious traffic patterns. Moreover, every part of the restaurant has its own distinct features, such as the bar’s platinum-gold drip wallpaper, which was custom made. The restaurant launched with its opening party to rave reviews. There’s really nothing like it in the desert. Party-goers were mesmerized by the wildest design motif -- a dreamy exotic dining lodge from the Serengeti plains in Africa adorned with wild extinct animals. Love says, “We began the design process with this single design element.” Leading from that single design element, complementary wallpapers and framed illustrations of the hypothetical animals, all individually named, were curated from Egg & Dart, the premier resource for Interior Designers and Architects in the valley. “It turned out to be beyond our expectations,” says Farley. “The response to the décor has been overwhelming. The use of juxtaposed lighting fixtures defines space and gives our customers a great vibe, a sense of whimsy and an exotic dining environment.” Farley says, “When we engaged Jeffrey Jones and Steven Reed Love, we knew we had assembled a team of the most talented designers in the desert, but the end result is, well, the wildest!”