Daniel Pontius

 

Daniel Pontius is an interior designer by education and an artist by inclination. His eye for beauty is influenced by a narrative-driven style and the interplay between beauty and function.

A love of textiles has led him to travel in search of beautiful things: China, the Philippines, Italy, France, and across the USA. His interest in textiles comes from his wonder at the ever-present cedar chest in his childhood home, stacked with textiles made and handed down by earlier generations but left folded and unused.

Pontius earned a Master of Arts in Interior Design from Washington State University in 2003 and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1992. Reading Bruce Chatwin drew him into writing, and the early '90s pulled him to Seattle. The early oughts with stacks of design magazines threw him into graduate school, which led to his final paper, Ornament as Narrative in the 21st Century, in which he focused research into Horta, Stölzl, and Wright.

A week after graduation, he moved to London, where his first design job was sewing curtains for Hatch House, a 17th-century Wiltshire Manor partially updated in the grand style of Detmar Blow in 1908. Pontius still contemplates the faded valance of tattered silk surfeit of passementerie that he insisted, to the client's delight, be left as it was, with fresh white Volga Linen curtains he made on site.

Arriving in Manhattan after London, he designed custom fabrics and furniture for Clodagh Design International. This was followed by a formative position in Deborah Berke and Partners Architects' interiors department.

After moving to Los Angeles, Pontius and his husband, artist Cirilo Domine, founded their studio, Simeona Leona, in 2014, named after their respective grandmothers.