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Modern Matter Blog
Collaborator Spotlight: Pure Salt
Best friends from the moment they were assigned to be college roommates, Aly Morford and Leigh Lincoln have always been drawn to one another’s creative spirits. Together, they have transformed their friendship and love for beautiful design into a thriving business that believes great design begins with a fresh and clean palette, quality furnishings, artisan textiles, layered neutrals, and nature-inspired decorative accessories. With a client list that includes Lauren Conrad andThe Bachelorette’s Hannah Brown, Pure Salt Interiors has been creating beautiful spaces for projects both big and small since launching in 2015. In 2022, they opened their new flagship store, Pure Salt Shoppe, in Newport Beach.
Q: Tell us about your background and how Pure Salt started.
A: Leigh and I met as college freshmen at Cal Poly. We were roommates and immediately connected over our shared creativity, entrepreneurial spirits, and love for gathering our friends and families. During college we lived together and traveled together, and after we started our careers and then our families, remaining best friends and each other's ultimate champions. In 2016, I had recently sold my successful floral and event business and had moved with my young family to Saudi Arabia, and Leigh was at the height of her hectic career in advertising, when I had the urge to finally take the plunge and start a new business that centered creativity and focused on building something entirely new. And I immediately knew who I wanted by my side—my extremely talented best friend. So with a little convincing, Leigh and I started Pure Salt as a design studio that year, pouring everything we had into creating a signature style, finding clients, growing a team, and building a business that has continued to evolve to this day. —Aly Morford
Q: How do you start your design projects?
A: While much has changed over the years of our business, our creative process is still the same. It all starts with defining the vision with our clients. This often looks like a moodboard that hones in on crucial style markers, pain points in their current home, and aspirational visuals that help us discover where we can open up creatively. Once we’re aligned with our clients we can begin the first round of design that sketches out layout and construction materials. These days, Aly and I are lucky to have a great team of designers working with us on all our projects, so they help take the lead on rendering these concepts and bringing the vision to life while we direct on the overall design. In between these moments are where we’re able to explore color, pattern, materials, architectural features, and other elements through our own experiences traveling, engaging with other creative mediums like art and music, and being out in the natural world—all of this helps inform our creativity and sparks new inspiration within all our projects. —Leigh Lincoln
Q: How has living in California influenced your design?
A: We are both born and raised in Southern California and have found that has had an indelible effect on our design point of view. Living near the beach has shaped our appreciation for nature and coastal aesthetics, and the ease for outdoor living in this corner of the country has emphasized the importance of bringing the outdoors in across our designs. There is also a certain relaxed sensibility that’s become quintessential of Californian living that we incorporate into our projects and collections—unfussy upholstery, cozy layers, and an emphasis on natural materials are a few ways this manifests in our work. —Aly Morford
Q: Why did you decide to start Pure Salt Shoppe?
A: After a few years running our design studio we found that there was a need to serve our larger audience, and not just our clients, with a more available product assortment that was curated with our Pure Salt style. So we created our Shoppe which is both a retail storefront in Newport Beach, California and a national online retailer that showcases our favorite vendors, artisans, and even our own product designs, which we are very proud of! The goal for the Pure Salt Shoppe is to make our style accessible to as many people as possible, including those who can’t hire us directly as designers for their projects, and to offer a product assortment that is a direct representation of our aesthetic, so that a customer can shop the totality of their home in one place and have a cohesive, curated, and connected experience that allows them to live deeply in their space. —Aly Morford
Q: What are your favorite items at Pure Salt Shoppe, and what items inevitably always make it to your client’s project?
A: While we love everything on our Shoppe—all has been hand-selected by both Aly and myself—there are a few standout favorites. We have a collection of vintage-inspired wood pieces that we’ve designed exclusively for our Shoppe that always find a way into every client project. The Gable Cabinet, Welles Coffee Table, and Crawford Stool are a few of the standouts from that collection that I personally love; there’s just something about a vintage item that brings a sense of story and history to a space that you can’t replace. Another favorite is our Makers Series, which is a collaboration with artists that brings exclusive art to our Shoppe. Our latest collaborator is Tenaya Wickstrand, who is an incredible artist that creates the most beautiful landscapes, using raw linens as canvas and creating her own inks and dyes with natural materials. Her pieces also add a sense of story to a home, and have that handmade artistry that transports and embodies a viewer, not to mention they are beautiful pieces to work into a design! —Leigh Lincoln
Q: Your interiors are so clean and refreshing. Do you have a few go-to white/neutral paint colors?
A: Such a great question! At Pure Salt, we are believers in a natural, neutral paint color as it creates the ideal base for us to create our designs. The perfect color depends largely on the particular space and lighting, so it’s difficult to recommend just one, but Simply White by Benjamin Moore is a winner as the perfect warmer white. To the casual eye, white is white, but there is so much nuance in shade and tone that can transform a space, not to mention the science of taking into account the space specifics of natural light, room size, and color refraction to find the best white that feels light and airy. We’ve found that Simply White almost always works in a room of any size and brightness, and allows the room to become a true blank canvas that doesn’t lean too warm or too washed out, perfect for creating a cozy and relaxed design. —Aly Moford
Q: What do you look for when sourcing hardware for your clients?
A: Hardware is often described as the jewelry of a space, acting as a finishing detail that transforms a design. But for us, we approach every design holistically where no one thing is the standout showstopper, and so hardware becomes another element that both complements and enhances a space through its ability to be layered in. As texture and natural elements are a cornerstone of our design philosophy, hardware is an avenue to bring this sense of character to the forefront of the design, and we’re always looking for something that marries the unexpectedness of material with the larger aesthetic and function of the space. And speaking of function, we also ensure that the material and use are in line with one another—something that looks better the more you use it (like an aged brass) is a good option for high-traffic spaces, while you can get away with something more playful or delicate in smaller, low-traffic spaces. —Leigh Lincoln
Q: Do you have a favorite piece in the collection and why?
A: It’s hard to choose a favorite when you have a hand in designing every piece, but the Newport Rattan Pull, Newport Rattan Knob, and Newport Rattan Ring Pull are maybe my standouts. They truly feel unique and fresh, and are totally Pure Salt! —Aly Morford
Q: What was your inspiration for this hardware line?
A: As it often is, the natural world was a big inspiration for this collection—the natural materials and finishes are what drew us to designing each piece with thoughtful intention. We were also inspired by our travels, and the way these materials are used in a utilitarian, yet beautiful way around the world; leather straps on trunk latches, sailors knots, European ironwork, to name a few. —Leigh Lincoln
Q: Pure Salt’s line is introducing a lot of new materials like wood, leather, and rattan. Why did you want to incorporate these into the collection?
A: These materials are core elements of our designs. You’ll see them repeated in our products and projects as a way to add texture and imbue the natural world into our work, and we were hard pressed to find quality hardware that offered these materials to suit our aesthetics. For us, it is important to have a cohesive sense to our designs that follows all the way down to the very materials we use, from fixtures to soft furnishings. —Aly Morford
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