Palisades Business Owner Loses Business and Home in Fire

(Editor’s note: This story first appeared on April 25 in the Canyon Alliance and is reprinted with permission.)

By LAUREL BUSBY

The day after Tawnya Warren installed a new sign for her Pacific Palisades jewelry, clothing, and collectibles shop, it burned to the ground.

“I had the brass sign out one day, and the very next day, everything was gone,” Warren said.

Warren, who previously owned Blueview Atelier above Caffé Delfini in the Canyon, had moved her business to 15117 W. Sunset Blvd. in Pacific Palisades two years before in large part to attain a ground-floor location that would attract more foot traffic. She also moved into a Palisades apartment near the ocean with her son, Ile John, now 18. Both her apartment and store were lost in the Jan. 7 fire.

Just before the fire, she had completed a re-branding, using her first name as the store name with new bags, ribbons, boxes, as well as the new sign. The business also had just begun to take off after two years of solid work seven days a week to rebuild her customer base.

“December blew my mind; it was incredible,” Warren said. “I had just gotten to the part where I thought, ‘This is going to be amazing. I’m going to do this the rest of my life.’”

The store was a culmination of a career that began when she left her small Pennsylvania hometown to go to college at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. She graduated in 1993 with a degree in business and accessory design and began work at the department store Barneys New York, first selling products and then becoming a buyer.

After a decade, she moved to California and joined the Barneys in Beverly Hills, but she also kept working on her own designs. She eventually had created enough jewelry to form her own collection, which she called Zoe, and she opened her first shop, Ateshi, on Montana in Santa Monica. Barneys began to carry her Zoe line in 2004.

“My business with Barneys just went cuckoo,” she said. “I was in every fine jewelry section of every Barneys in the country.”

Unfortunately, Barneys’ department stores closed just before the pandemic, so that part of her business ended. Yet, she found great satisfaction in owning her own store, selling jewelry, clothing, and skin care products that she designed, and also offering consignment opportunities for local artisans, such as Canyon resident and ceramic artist Moye Thompson. With each new location, Warren was able to devise improvements that made the store better.

Her Sunset location featured precious items that she had gathered over the years. For example, she had cloth angel wings made by the late artist Tony Duquette for Los Angeles’ 1981 bicentennial celebration. When Barneys closed in 2020, she purchased their backlit oval display cases that were both beautiful and reminiscent of her time there.

“Nothing was new; it was all repurposed from somewhere special,” Warren said. “Everything in the store was antique and had a history. I had unique stuff both at home and at the store that took me forever to collect. They were all irreplaceable.”

While she was able to evacuate with much of her jewelry line, she lost everything else, ranging from items her son made for her as a child to 40 antique hat blocks. Insurance has had a difficult time valuing many of the lost items, and she was underinsured for such a devastating loss. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has yet to come through with any assistance. A friend started a gofundme for her, and it had raised about $45,500 as of Apr. 25.

In the months since the fire, Warren, a single mother since 2018, has relocated to a Santa Monica apartment with her son, who is currently planning to attend Villanova University in the fall. She has also made her business mobile, operating a weekly Saturday pop-up from 10:30 a.m.-3 p.m. at Guidi Marcello (1649 10th St.), featuring fine and vintage jewelry, skin care products, cashmere, and ceramics.

Although she is finding her way forward, she misses not only her business and her precious antique items, but also her Palisades life with her ocean view apartment near Self-Realization Fellowship, where she would regularly attend meditation sessions.

“I’m completely off my axis,” she said. “Beyond the loss of everything, it’s the loss of that soulfulness. The soul part that’s gone is hard to get back.”

Warren has an online store (tawnyawarren.com) and offers home visits to show her product line and special items not pictured on the website. Email shop@tawnyawarren.com or call (310) 871-7781 for more information.