Emeco Abides
Emeco has transformed a rundown 1940s workshop into a home away from home (image: Ramak Fazel).
“Look,” says the architect David Saik, grinning down the line from his studio in Berlin, “we all know there are fantastic old industrial buildings where you walk in, sweep the floor a bit, and it’s basically there.” He pauses a beat. “This was not one of them.”
What Saik was dealing with was, instead, something of a wreck: a small former sewing workshop in Venice, Los Angeles. Built in the 1940s, the space stood just a couple of blocks over from the crummy bungalow occupied by The Dude in the Coen Brothers’ 1998 comedy The Big Lebowski. “These small buildings like The Dude’s bungalow are quite typical of the area” Saik continues, “but they’re being knocked down for redevelopment. There are actually very few left, so [the workshop] was a lucky find in that sense. But the first big, grand act was to not just demolish it.”
Demolition would probably have been easier. “It hadn’t had any money put into it in forever,” notes Gregg Buchbinder, CEO of the US furniture brand Emeco and the current owner of the space. “It had become very architecturally dishevelled.” The main building was dilapidated and sandwiched between two supplementary spaces – a small, pitched-roof structure at the front, with a box garage out back. “But when you went in, you couldn’t tell that these structures were connected and you couldn’t see the pitch of the roof,” explains Saik. “There’s no shortage of light around here, but the space itself was actually very dark. It just didn’t have any qualities that would, you know, attract you.”
And yet. “It was everything I was looking for,” says Buchbinder. This was to be Emeco House.
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The idea for Emeco House began in the late-2000s, when Buchbinder became interested in the idea of opening a new kind of space for his business. The brand’s factory – where it produces its celebrated aluminium Navy Chair (1944), as well as contemporary designs from studios including Barber and Osgerby, Jasper Morrison and Industrial Facility – is based in Hanover, Pennsylvania, but Buchbinder had begun mulling over the possibility of a space elsewhere that might fulfil a different purpose. During a work trip to Tokyo, for instance, he had found himself in an area of the city that caught his eye. “It was full of creatives,” he explains. “Photographers, candle makers, leather makers: it attracted me a lot. And as I was walking through it, I came across a traditional, wooden Japanese home and just thought, ‘That could be a really cool place for me to have a little showroom.’ Whenever I came to Tokyo, rather than stay in a hotel, I could just stay in my favourite area instead.”
Similar experiences followed in Paris and London, but Buchbinder never advanced his idea for an Emeco outpost. Although he lives in Long Beach, it wasn’t until Buchbinder made the short trip across Los Angeles to Venice to see his daughter Jaye, Emeco’s head of sustainability, that plans began to progress. “I realised that Venice, where Jaye lives, is full of creative, inspiring people and it’s so close to LAX that anybody could easily fly in,” Buchbinder explains. “Our factory is on the east coast, and can be hard to get to [in Pennsylvania], so I often connect with people in LA. I just thought, ‘Oh, you know, maybe Venice could work.’”
The idea behind the space was relatively simple, but procuring it more complex. Buchbinder wanted a flexible space in which people could be introduced to Emeco’s products and brand through informal conversations, presentations or exhibitions, but also a place where the public could visit socially or guests of the brand could stay overnight. “But there’s only about 7 per cent of real estate that’s actually zoned for that in Venice,” he explains. When the sewing workshop came on the market, its previous owner looking to flip it at a profit, Buchbinder leapt at the opportunity. “It seemed perfect,” he explains. “It had two levels, with apartments upstairs and a larger space downstairs, which was exactly what I needed.” Further motivation came when Jaye Buchbinder introduced him to Designing Your Life, a 2016 design philosophy book by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. “It said to stop dreaming about what you want to do, and prototype it,” says Buchbinder. “Well, I make furniture. I know how to prototype – that’s all I do. Suddenly, this idea felt more like product design than chasing a dream.”
One of the first steps in the project was to bring Saik onboard as Emeco House’s chief architect. Buchbinder and Saik had not known one another previously, but were introduced by a mutual friend who was aware that Buchbinder was working on a building project: the designer Jasper Morrison. “It certainly helps to be introduced by Jasper,” Saik notes, “but equally that could have meant very little to Gregg.”
“Jasper doesn’t mince words, so for him to speak highly of someone meant a lot,” Buchbinder explains. “So I already knew that David’s quality of work was going to be good, but the overall decision wasn’t something that I can articulate clearly – it’s more that something either feels right or it doesn’t. And David was such an easy guy to talk to and be with. It just felt a good fit.”
Core to this connection was an understanding of Buchbinder’s ambitions for Emeco House and his desire to steer away from a traditional branded space. “Gregg wanted this very generous, open feeling, so that people could come in and get the sense that this was a real part of the neighbourhood,” Saik explains. “It wouldn’t feel pretentious, it wouldn’t feel like a showroom, and it would have some accommodation upstairs so you could stay over or head up there for a drink. But we were a long way off that at the start. We really had to start taking everything out piece by piece, before looking at how we could bring it all back together.”
Guided by Saik, who worked in concert with the local architect Keith Fallen, the project began to radically restructure the space from the ground up. The downstairs was opened up, such that you can now look through the entire building from the front door through
to the rear courtyard and out onto the alley beyond, which is separated off by an industrial rolling door. These changes to the internal structure were radical, but intended to appear discreet. “I really like that, now, you can’t really tell what is new or old,” Saik says. “Because we did a lot to get these spaces to connect.”
New apertures were created within the structure increasing light within the space, while a central light well was introduced across the two floors. Within this double-height space, Saik has planted a vast cactus that stretches upwards through the building, providing “a kind of iconic element that holds the core of the building together,”1 with the light well additionally driving airflow to ensure that the space can be naturally ventilated. Upstairs, the building’s original wooden joists have been maintained, adding to the sense of a more domestic space. “It’s a little bit like a beach shack up there,” Saik explains. “But a very nice beach shack.”
Throughout the development, the guiding notion of prototyping remained essential, particularly when the project was slowed by the onset of Covid-19. In total, Emeco House took five years to create, with the team using this extended development period to allow for constant refinement. “It clearly took longer than it had to because of the circumstances,” Saik concedes, “but there’s never anything wrong with a project being built slower, especially with an existing building. It gives you the advantage of being able to actually stand there and say, ‘Well, I’m standing next to this window: should we keep it or not? Should we extend it a little bit? Or how about some more light here?’ Jasper always says that the problem with architecture is that you can’t make a prototype, but if you’re building slower that’s essentially what you’re doing. You can’t get everything right from the start and you’re always going to change something if you’re standing there. That was the process that we tried to apply to every aspect of this building.”
The slowness of the development fed into Buchbinder and Saik’s desire to focus on the detailing and materiality that would be core to the space. A large front window went through multiple variations until everybody was satisfied with its proportions and placement, while door and window frames were specially executed in galvanised steel; “Which ties to the vintage of the house,” Buchbinder notes, “but David had to find a local guy to specifically make those, because nobody does it any more. That took about 10 times more effort, but it just looks right.” Elsewhere Saik designed bespoke doorhandles that are precisely calibrated to their positioning in the space, ensuring that they won’t be hit when the blinds are lowered, nor make contact with a wall when the door
is opened. “It’s rare to find someone who wants to have a discussion about door handles for two weeks,” says Saik, “because a client typically just wants the door handles they saw in some chalet in Switzerland or something. But Gregg was always driven by questions over whether we could do things a little bit differently or a little bit better. He really kept the project moving forward over a very long period of time.”
To Buchbinder, this approach grew out of Emeco House’s positioning as a passion project, rather than a conventional branded space. “The biggest benefit to the process was that most of the time a client has a deadline and a budget – I didn’t have a deadline and I didn’t keep a budget,” he explains. “This was more of a debate about what made sense and would work.” Saik took Buchbinder to visit Peter Zumthor’s Kolumba Museum in Cologne, for instance, in order to see an example of the lime plaster finish he had in mind for the space. Buchbinder quickly became infatuated with the material. “It was about three times the cost of a more conventional material, but it seemed perfect for this project,” he explains.
In addition to its tactile and aesthetic qualities, this plaster brings environmental benefits – while lime releases carbon during its production, it also captures ambient CO2 during
the carbonation process that sees it revert to limestone – feeding into the wider ecological conscientiousness of the building. All power is sourced form solar panels on the roof, with temperature managed by airflow through the building and its many apertures providing daylight for illumination. “It’s essentially off the grid,” Saik notes. “Although we haven’t designed it with materials specifically made for sustainable construction, it’s very practically sustainable.”
The space’s design is considered, but intended to be relaxed – what Jaye Buchbinder, who worked with her father to develop the house, describes as “a quiet comfort”. “Nothing is flashy,” she says, “but everything is thought through.” To the Buchbinders, the space stands as a manifestation of Emeco’s wider design work, built around the same principles that the company designs its furniture in accordance with. “This was just like a chair project,” Buchbinder summarises. “Make sure we talk about the materials we use and consider any connection, because that’s where things fail.”
Within Emeco House, the individual details are all designed to add up, but ensuring that they were executed properly was a hard-won battle and the work of half a decade. “Someone talked about it being minimal, which is a word that many people, myself included, don’t like,” Saik explains. “Because this building really isn’t minimal. It’s the product of everything we wanted to do; everything we wanted is there. So, really, you could say that it’s maximised. The design wasn’t a process of just reducing everything down to a clean, white form. While the final result may appear simple, it’s actually anything but.” He pauses for a moment, before laughing. “If you had to pay for it, you certainly wouldn’t say it’s minimal.”
1 Fans of The Big Lebowski may enjoy the parallel between Saik’s unifying cactus, and the Dude’s beloved rug, which “really tied the room together.”
Words Oli Stratford
Photographs Ramak Fazel
This article was originally published in Disegno #32. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.