LETTER 15. THE STUDIO: 3 THINGS WE’RE SPECIFYING THIS MONTH

There is a new project on the studio’s worktable this month, and I want to tell you about it, alongside three specific pieces we are specifying for it right now.

The client is building a home wellness retreat. That is the actual brief — not a house that happens to have wellness features, but a house whose entire architecture is organized around the discipline of being calm to live in. Japanese design principles at the center. Restraint everywhere. Materials that quiet the room rather than fill it.

I have been dreaming about a project like this for years. I spent the earlier part of this year in Japan — Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima — and returned with my eye recalibrated in a way that only happens when you spend real time inside a design tradition that has been perfecting restraint for a thousand years. Every kitchen I walked through. Every ryokan. Every small teahouse in the hills above Kyoto. The proportion of things. The stillness of surfaces. The way water sounds in a Japanese bath and a traditional tea house — not because the fixtures are loud, but because the room has been quieted around them so that the water can be heard properly.

Later this summer, this client presented a brief that matched almost exactly what I had been thinking about since the flight home. Sometimes the work finds you. This one did.

Zia is an LA-based house making handmade zellige in Morocco and ceramics in a potters’ village outside Nagoya, Japan. The 2x2 tile we specified in sumac for this space is the perfect attention-to-detail sized hand-cut squares in a deep, earthy tone that reads like the underside of a sumac leaf in early fall. We are specifying it immersed within a wet room, and at the countertops of an adjacent multi-use space. The eye reads it as texture first, color second, and the linear grid-like feature overall reads like I’m right back in Kyoto.

Not our first time specifying Lo & Co hardware, and this knob is the right detail for this space; hand-shaped in clay, cast in solid brass, finished in electroplated pewter. When you hold it, you can feel that a person shaped it first. We are using it consistently throughout this space; where the palette is quiet and the surfaces restrained, the hardware becomes the small jewelry moment of the room.

A two-for. Both handmade fiber-reinforced concrete, from the same maker’s language, being specified together for the primary wet room. The Maui is a 69-inch freestanding tub in a warm putty tone that reads almost identical to the wet room’s plaster walls. The Orlando Vessel Sink sits on a custom washed oak vanity. Both are beautifully handmade, honest concrete pieces priced far below their custom-cast equivalents.

That is a taste of the monthly source list. Paid subscribers receive the full list — five to seven pieces per month, always tied to current specification work, always with the judgment behind the selection. The first full list lands next week.

I will keep writing about this project as it moves. The wellness house is going to be one of the most important pieces of work the studio does this year, and I want you along for it.

—xobe.