It all started with a vision, as these things tend to go when you’re a director like Wash Westmoreland is. With architect John Colter, he had just renovated the Craftsman where he’s lived for 20 years in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Now, they were ready to create the sequel. “At first, he wanted to add a workspace to his backyard,” Colter remembers. “But the more we talked about it, the longer the list of things we wanted became.”

As the two zoomed out, the scope, in fact, became much broader than a place to toil. It would still serve as such with a writing and editing enclave, but that area would double as a bedroom, and the unit would also include a full bathroom and powder room, an efficient kitchen, and a living area that would also work as a screening room.

“We also thought it could be a place to rent out when Wash is away on long projects,” says Colter. The footprint would be small, since most of it would have to be tucked away behind the home’s existing one-car garage, but it would at least be open to the garden, an oasis that’s tucked away from bustling Sunset Boulevard.

But the garage also provided a lot of privacy, and was even used as a starting point for the design. “We located the entry vestibule and one of the bathrooms inside of it, and it allowed us to build in a stealthy way—you can barely see anything new from the street,” Colter says. “It also allowed us to make the studio feel much larger than its 728 square feet. The circulation through the space starts at the garage and runs diagonally through the building with smaller spaces peeling off behind you.”

Chalk it up to rapport with Wash and his construction team, but Colter says the build was pretty smooth, and that he was able to approach the process like “jazz improv,” refining details along the way. Perhaps the only aspect of the site that required some problem solving was an imposing condominium next door.

“It’s tall enough that you could see it from the garden,” Colter says. “It also made getting sunlight into the studio a bit of a challenge. So we arranged the studio to focus on the garden, and when you are inside, you don’t see or experience the condo at all. All of the windows on the condo-facing side are above eye level, grabbing as much light as they can.”

Westmoreland and Colter agreed that they wanted the interiors of the studio to be minimal yet impactful; door handles, garden chairs, and light fixtures from Jasper Morrison helped them execute. They used plywood for almost every surface, from seating and storage to ceilings and walls, and enhanced them with bright pops of color for a little personality. “This is a pretty small building, but small buildings can punch above their weight,” Colter says. “Emotion in architecture comes from materials that you can see, touch, and feel, and when you can understand how they are put together. The plywood has motion on the surface.”

For a touch of drama, Colter made distinctive circular cutouts in the ceilings, creating polka dots of light that illuminate the different rooms throughout the day. “The series of portholes that run the length of the building line up with the setting sun on the summer solstice,” Colter says. “Wash grew up in England and has brought up Stonehenge often with me over the years, so I originally thought to put them in as a kind of joke about this. It turns out that being in this space on the solstice is a pretty powerful experience.”

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Project Details:

Architect of Record: Colter & Co.

Builder: John Connolly, Connolly and Sons Construction

Structural Engineer: Reiss Brown Ekmekji Inc.

Cabinetry Installation and Fabrication: Conscious Woodwork

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