Artist Live, Work & Gallery Space
This combination living, working and lofted gallery space by Studio 010 Architects is based on an architectural idea that is at once absurdly simple and brilliantly subversive: invert the normal expectation of views (inside to out) from a home and design around gallery spaces within a house that are made to be seen from the outside in.
Even from a distance, hung paintings will be visible on the stark white interior walls inside this cube-shaped home. Floor-to-ceiling glass an virtually invisible frame divisions highlight what is inside. Dark-painted exterior wood cladding enhances contrast and contributes to the effect, focusing the eye on the works of art intended to be placed along corridors within.
The result is a kind of wrapping art gallery composed of wall spaces set just within the boundary of the building. This has the dual effect of shielding more private spaces from view and exposing passers by to the artworks made by the occupants.
Kitchen, living and dining rooms are set on the main floor of this two-volume home. Home office, guest rooms and the master bedroom are situated on higher floors but positioned so as not to be in the limelight for pedestrian viewers of the interior artworks.
“A single-family residence designed for a couple and set in a postwar subdivision, a few blocks away from the ‘hip’ strip of Sawtelle Blvd. in Los Angeles. Considered a last bastion of the ‘traditional values’ of home ownership, the neighborhood’s properties of mostly single level cottage typology have been predominately occupied by their original owners since their creation.”
“However, with the aging of many of the original owners and with still reasonable real estate pricing, a new generation of home seekers is buying in. Armed with favorable zoning regulations, many of the recent buyers have sought new opportunities for an architectural reconsideration of their property. Though still early in the neighborhood’s transformation, there is an emergence of a new aesthetic and potentially new synergy for a design enclave in the patchwork urbanism that is Los Angeles.”
