Outside of Paul Chan’s Silver Lake studio, the rush of L.A. turns tranquil as pineapple guava plants brush against a wall in the warm breeze. Chan opens the wooden gate and ushers me into a sanctuary of his creation: a yard flanked by a tall tree, a worn picnic bench and a Chinese porcelain table and stools. In the shadow of the porcelain seats, as if placed by gnomes, sit four children’s chairs. Each just the size of my hand, the soft wooden chairs lie strewn around a stack of bricks. Here, in this miniature teatime, I can imagine that at any moment, children will come running back to play while adults laugh from the porch.
There is a sense of familiarity in the oak floorboards and the slanted sunlight within Chan’s thoughtfully designed space. The Hong Kong-born architect opened the studio, Days of Being, this year, as a place for visitors to rent and artists to have a place to create and recharge. This fall, he is also launching his first handmade furniture line, Domestic Ritual, designed by Chan and constructed by collaborator Jeremy Kim. Together the pieces weave together his upbringing, a life in New York and his journey to L.A.
As I walked into the house for the first time, incense and woodsy aromas filled the open space. Looking above, I saw no ceiling — only imperfect, exposed beams holding the roof up. These airy, continuous structures are core to his architecture: sliding shelves, curtain-covered doorways, openings peeking into another place until little is hidden. In his studio’s design, Chan wears his heart on his sleeve.
When I took on this house, I was thinking, how can we highlight components of it, from the ceiling to the roof to the joists, as if it were an art piece?
The house was in pretty bad shape when I found it. I see architecture as a living thing, and this was like seeing a puppy that was not being taken care of. I wondered, what happened here? I saw that the house had great bones, beams and trusses, but it was just in disrepair. In a way, I felt a responsibility to restore it and honor its original intent, but make it personal.
It’s a 1920s Craftsman home, a very L.A.-style home. The Craftsman house was created to say, can we strip a house down to its basics and make something beautiful for the common person? Before, with Art Nouveau, beautiful homes were only mansions for the rich. The Craftsman was the antithesis. And that spirit is what I wanted to tap into as I reworked this space.
I think we live in an era where, as a society, we try to tackle hard work with AI and efficiency, but I think that makes me want to instead find the soul of something and actually take time for that. There’s a lot to be said about handmade things, which started as a necessity but got replaced by fast production. To go back to that is to ask, how can we make everyday things artful again?
Then I thought, how can I give this to someone on the object scale? Handmade furniture is a way to give someone a taste of the artful, to give them a place to curate their objects and their history within each piece. In Asian culture, there are lots of shrines in homes, ancestral shrines with pictures of grandmas and candles. But instead, we can create shrines to what we love with our objects. Each of us has our own trinkets that we collect over the years. I want a place for people to put that on display.
Wong Kar Wai is a big inspiration in how I approached this home. He would make things up in his films as he would go. There’s improvisation. The cadence of that, I love. His films aren’t trying to say anything. It’s just a moment that happened, and he captured it in a very artful, beautiful way. Part of what I resonate with is the repetition of small gestures.
In “In the Mood for Love,” there’s a relationship between the characters played by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. They would both be going to get food and pass each other in the staircase. This was a repeated narrative of the enclosed space forcing them to pass each other by.
As an architect, that got me really thinking about, how do people make their coffee everyday? What is the routine of someone in this home? Someone gets up, goes to the bathroom, brushes their teeth, makes coffee, and all of those things I think about as I approach a design. Life is an accumulation of these small moments. How do we interact with each other because of the space we’re in? I want to create a space that makes you feel like this is your sanctuary.
I almost see the role of an architect as a kind of director: behind the scenes, setting up the sets and allowing life to unfold within these spaces.
I also think of it as a conversation. I am speaking, when I’m designing this, to the original architect. As I build, I’m having a conversation with the architect 100 years before me. I understand his decisions and why he did things a certain way. I get to come in and build off of his choices. Imagine, a hundred years later, someone else will build off of me. I leave this sentence here for the next person to complete.
The post An L.A. Craftsman home channels “In the Mood for Love” and the art of the everyday appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
