Design : PAINTED DESERT

Her prickly pears and saguaros conjure up visions of the desert, but don’t label Laurie Lee Warner a Southwest-style designer. The 31-year-old Los Angeles artist says she simply likes “the shape, color and humor” of cactus. One look at her furniture and sculpture--all fanciful figures, eye-popping colors and crazy-quilt patterns--and you know what she means.

Warner is meticulous about her work, often spending about 300 hours on one chair. She designs (using real cacti as models), cuts out, assembles, sands and primes each piece of birch plywood. Then she decorates every inch with acrylic paint. The six-foot organpipe-cactus chair features more than 15 colors and 65 patterns. Prices range from $250 to $3,850.

Warner fashioned her first cactus from cardboard and toothpicks for her mother’s birthday in 1986. A gallery owner suggested she try it in wood. As a fashion stylist, she knew little about power tools, so her initial potted cacti were rather crude. For cactus spines, she drove nails through wood, yanked them out and then inserted dozens of dowels by hand.

Today Warner knows her way around a drill press as well as an orbital jigsaw. “It makes me freer in my designs,” she says. “And I don’t need to use as much sandpaper.”