Light Box
Tad Beck, an artist with a keen concern for the environment, is happy to talk about the features that make his new house green, including the solar panels on the roof and the bamboo on the kitchen floor. But he also has a way of focusing on what’s really important. "The biggest green move we made was that we reused an old building," he says.
Tad Beck greets his lab mix, Little Bear, at the bottom of an alternating tread stairway that makes getting to and from the roof deck easy on two or four feet.
The kitchen, with Richlite counters and upper cabinets that reach to the ceiling, leads to a small dining area illuminated by a Plexiglas "Agave" lamp.
Indeed, his new house in Los Angeles—which includes a pair of studios (one for Beck, the other for his partner, fashion photographer Shawn Smith)—is an old warehouse building, largely unchanged on the exterior, except for a layer of charcoal gray paint and new front door. The outside is virtually windowless: The building abuts commercial structures on three sides and faces a busy street on the fourth. But inside, Beck, with the help of designer Riley Pratt, created a home around a luminous interior courtyard. The 10-by-12-foot opening, which is framed by four sliding glass doors, provides a semblance of California living—the suburban ideal of rooms extending onto terraces—within an urban shell.
To make the bedroom seem ethereal—and far larger than its 12-by-12 dimensions suggest—Pratt designed a curtain that hangs on three sides, hiding closets to the left and right of the bed and providing privacy when extended in front of the sliding glass doors. The bedspread, in charcoal with undulating turquoise stitching (www.foldbedding.com), recalls the folds of the curtain; the overall effect is of a place for floating off to sleep.
Even in a wide-open loft space, it’s possible to create cozy furniture groupings. In the living room, where Beck reclines reading a Sharon Lockhart monograph, a grouping is formed by a couple of Eames chairs and a coffee table (made of tiles by Roger Capron) on what Beck calls a “quasi-psychedelic rug.” The furniture clustering provides moments of intimacy in the otherwise open space, which moves throughout the kitchen, dining, sleeping, and living areas, creating axial vignettes around the courtyard.
The courtyard wasn’t Pratt’s only intervention. Fitting an apartment and two workable studios into a 2,800-square-foot building required him to make full use of the building’s 12-plus-foot ceiling height. Pratt lifted the apartment up on a four-and-a-half-foot-high platform, from which it overlooks the two workspaces. That way, the 900-square-foot apartment feels expansive, borrowing space, visually, from the two studios. (As a bonus, a vast crawl space under the apartment is used for storing eveything from tools to snowboards.)
A skylight over the middle of a room is a nice thing. But, as architect Riley Pratt demonstrates, using a skylight along the edge of a room can help dematerialize walls and make an indoor space feel especially luminous. Here, a shower stall inside a renovated warehouse in Los Angeles seems to continue right up to the clouds (the skylight was installed so that its frame isn’t visible from below). “It’s like showering outside,” says the resident, artist Tad Beck. Read the whole story here.
The couple’s living room (which includes a flat-screen TV) overlooks Tad Beck’s studio; art supplies are stored in niches that are invisible from the living space above. A hallway along the edge of the building provides an alternate route to the front door.
When Beck moved to Los Angeles to attend the Art Center College of Design, he traded in a sprawling loft on lower Broadway in Manhattan for a Hollywood bungalow and a separate studio, to which he biked miles each day. After three years studying, he was offered a teaching post at University of Southern California and was ready to buy a place. But Beck, who has moved from painting to working in still and video photography, and Smith, whose fashion photography needed room to maneuver, required two studios in addition to their living space, something a conventional house wouldn’t likely provide.
Except for adding a coat of grayish paint and stenciled numbers, Beck changed little about the building’s façade.
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