Shaynna Blaze grew up in a butterfly house. The roofline kinked at the centre — a signature of early 1960s Australian domestic architecture — and she spent her childhood in a space that, without anyone naming it, was teaching her the language of mid-century modernism. That early fluency became a career built on the idea that good design is not decorative, it is structural: it changes how a space feels to live in, how people move through it, what they allow themselves to do inside it. She has spent more than two decades applying that thinking across Australian homes — on television and off it — and what drives her is the belief that design is not a luxury of taste but an act of understanding. The best rooms are the ones that know what they are.

Palm Springs has always existed at the edge of that belief. The architects who built here in the 1940s, 50s and 60s were not decorating the desert — they were arguing with it, finding forms that could coexist with heat and light and that particular stillness the Coachella Valley carries in February. Albert Frey built his own house around a boulder. Richard Neutra opened Kaufmann's walls to the mountains. E. Stewart Williams gave Frank Sinatra a pool in the shape of a piano. The arguments those buildings made are still legible today, and Shaynna knows how to read them — and, more importantly, how to translate them for an Australian context in a way that no amount of magazine research can replicate.