Who is he to say so? Leyva grew up in a “very large colonial home” in Michoacán, a state on the Pacific coast of Mexico. He was always interested in art and design, and he eventually moved to Los Angeles to study fashion design. He later manned boutiques for Armani and Dolce & Gabbana in Orange County as he tried to make a go of being a fashion designer. Seven years ago he gave it up. He wanted his work “to be treated more like art than clothes, and that’s really not the right idea. I knew I wasn’t going to be happy with it and I gave it up.” He turned to another longstanding passion, interior design. He relocated to Las Vegas and launched an interior design business, ELITE Interior Design Studio&Associates. He opened a modern furniture store in Commercial Center, but too many people were drifting through without buying anything. So he went back to square one and in 2009 launched Living Penthouse. He calls it “a furniture store like every furniture store, except it’s completely different.” It is. Retail stores, no matter how much they resemble lofts, are still stores — with cash registers and logos and brochures, annoying sales people, price tags, other customers. Instead, Leyva operates out of an actual working condominium, a space filled not only with all variety of sleek, high-end tables, sofas, chairs and lights, but also rugs, art, books and music. Even the kitchen faucets work. “This space was conceived with the idea of getting to seduce people to want to live this way,” he says. “Everybody wants to stay here, hang out here.” He’s right. Walk into the penthouse and all you want to do is put down your reporter’s notebook and go mix yourself a highball, crank up some propulsive Flamenco by Paco de Lucía, lounge around on furniture that costs more than your car, soak in the views … and then call some friends over. The view of sumptuous sky and mountains, foregrounded by a lot of fabulous furniture, is subtly intoxicating.
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Seduction connection He says clients — around one a day — have been finding him, despite little marketing and no website. Clients come by appointment only. “It’s a one-on-one experience,” he says, “where we can talk about product at length.” You can spend a little — glasses for $20, for instance, but really, why would you? — or you can spend a lot. Like that batch of sofas that you can position together to make one big sofa unit, with seating on four sides for a few dozen friends. That’ll run you around $74,000. That’s more like it. There are many sublime selections. Like the $3,750 UP5 chair, a Gaetano Pesce piece of art-design-politics that’s shaped like a woman’s body. Sit down and the chair envelops you — the ottoman is shaped like a ball, with a “chain” (actually a cord) attached to the chair, which is supposed to symbolize the continuing subjugation of women. Then there’s the Great JJ Lamp, an outsized fixture based on an architect’s lamp crafted in the ’30s by Norwegian designer Jac Jacobsen. Think of a 10-foot high Pixar Studios logo lamp, and you get the idea. ($8,165.) Or the circular 1907 Fortuny Lamp, designed by Mariano Fortuny, which looks like it belongs in a photographer’s studio. ($5,000.) But the prize piece? The piece Leyva retreats to at the end of the day in his own home? Antonio Citterio’s Mart Chair, a sort of large sculpted saddle, stitched with buttery-smooth leather, mounted on a chrome frame.