Valleyford couple create an artful home

Art is home for Bill Simmons and Karma Lloyd.

Nine years ago they built a place to live and create together. Their big gray barn in Valleyford contains a spacious workshop/studio on the main floor and their loft living quarters above.

The journey that brought them to this place is as interesting as the art they create here. Two years after meeting at a mutual friend’s card party, the couple sold all their worldly goods, bought a sailboat and moved aboard.

“We sailed for three years,” Simmons said “We’d only planned to be gone three months.” Neither one of them was a sailor.

“We stole someone else’s dream.”

They had plenty of time to talk about their future as they sailed from northern Canada to the southern end of Mexico.

“We talked about what kind of life we wanted to have,” Simmons said. “We both wanted to make furniture.”

Eventually they sold the boat and moved back to Spokane.

“We’d designed a lot of furniture on the boat,” he said.

For three years they labored on their home, incorporating living space with working space. In addition, Simmons was busy crafting the prototypes of the furniture they wanted to sell.

They’re both involved in the design process, but Simmons does most of the manufacturing.

While Lloyd has no formal art training, Simmons says she has a fearless imagination.

“She’s just real brave,” he said. Lloyd said she was raised in an athletic, not artistic, family.

Simmons’ artistic background was hit and miss. He was exposed to a lot of art while living in Germany as a child and showed some interest in junior high.

However, as an adult, he dabbled in a lot of things that were distinctly unartistic.

“I was the worst stockbroker in America,” he said with a grin.

The couple launched Lloyd Simmons Design in June 2005 with a showing at Art Fest.

“We were really encouraged by the public response,” Lloyd said. “Our work seemed to appeal across the board to all ages.”

They call their style “organic industrial.” Their designs integrate the beauty of exotic woods with the strength of industrial metals such as aluminum and steel.

They craft beds, dining room tables, end tables and patio furniture. In addition to their own designs, the couple also works with clients to customize furniture.

Their home above the workshop is filled with evidence of their passion and creativity.

Lloyd designed and built the bathroom. She liked the color and the shapes of the drainage rocks they were using outdoors.

Instead of using tile, she painstakingly stacked and mortared the stones, creating a stunning drainage-rock shower.

The workshop is visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows in the dining room. This allows them to get a new perspective on works in progress down below.

“A piece of art should look good from all sides,” Simmons said.

An open staircase made from purple heartwood winds up to the open loft bedroom and office above the dining room. The porthole window in the office came from their sailboat.

A winsome bridge links the home office to their sleeping quarters.

“We call it our bowling alley,” Lloyd said of the long, narrow bedroom. The pale yellow walls are covered with the couple’s favorite artworks, softly lighted by track lighting.

“Our vision is an art gallery with a bedroom in it,” she said.

Their graceful bed frame was crafted using powder-coated steel, tigerwood, verawood, jatoba and beech. Simmons’ polished aluminum and copper-plated steel sculpture, “Not Your Father’s War,” hangs on one wall.

A window seat framed with aromatic cedar looks out over their pine-covered property.

The couple, who have been together 13 years, and married for the past four, say they truly enjoy working together.

“We’re not fiery,” Simmons said.

Lloyd chuckled and said, “I’ve always had ideas, but Bill can actually execute them!”

She paused, looking around at the home and the art they’ve created.

“The most satisfying thing,” she said, “is doing this together.”