A condition particular to the Hollywood Hills: A large house was built into the slope, with street access down low, living space at the top, and stunning 360 degree views farther up from the pool terrace. A remarkable vertical sequence, dampened by a tired, 1980’s design. Hollywood loves rejuvenation and rebirth. For a limited budget, we nipped and tucked to achieve freshness, suffused with California light and openness.
This penthouse located in the Columbia Street Waterfront District belongs to founder and principal Eric Liftin. The apartment is located on the top floor of a new building in the district. The living room has amazing views of the Brooklyn waterfront and lower Manhattan. It features a Malm wood burning fireplace accented with Moroccan encaustic tiles. MESH saw this project as an opportunity to explore materials and technologies, showcasing walnut flooring, Carrara marble hexagon tiles and LED ceiling strips. The powder room features RGB wallpaper, changing patterns as the light cycles through different colors. MESH’s custom designed pipe lights illuminate the space throughout.
The duplex starts from the concept of a loft as a microcosmic urban space, an oversized setting for activities and events. By creating loosely connected zones with varied environments, the home becomes a dynamic family setting for exploration and concentration. An area of the second floor, separating the parents’ and children’s wings, is removed. A giant skylight overhead brings sunlight directly into an atrium garden. The building is hemmed in by neighbors, so the atrium is the major source of natural light. A pale green, fiberglass wall runs along the length of the two-story space and contains loft infrastructure – plumbing, air conditioning, electrical, storage, and lighting. Behind the wall are the service spaces — closets, pantry, and bathrooms. The scheme allows the main space in front of the fiberglass wall to remain unencumbered and to fully expose its 19th century building structure. A network of digital LED light fixtures are built into the garden floor and adjacent walls. These run selected programs to set the ambiance after sunset. The programs are coordinated to the space in which they are installed, so the space itself is activated by the colored lights. Planned for the space is a system of small LCD screens throughout, embedded in walls, furniture, and cabinetry, providing access to a Home Operating System, a web-based home control and communication system. This system is not only internal but connects the micro-urban space of the loft out to the electronic urban space of the Web. This exterior-viewless home is at once an inward-focused sanctuary and an active site for mediated connection to the outside world.
This brownstone renovation, within a block of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for a creative-professional couple, created clear spaces, from the free-plan living floor to the open master bath.
The house is a minimalist container for the family’s busy life as well as its striking collection of art and design objects. We curated historical elements such as the spinning-wheel sink in the interior’s contemporary palette, itself nested in but slipping through the building’s historical envelope.
The design staff of this branding agency works in a free-flowing configuration while generous, varied spaces are dedicated to open space for collaboration and informal interaction. Between the desk and shared spaces is a bamboo panel / projection screen wall. The elongated screen serves presentations and general ambiance, and in the library it enables large-scale web browsing for brainstorming designers. Several discrete spaces are set aside for getting away to think and create. The studio is designed to save resources, both materials and money. Unlike typical office buildouts, which are routinely demolished and discarded, the entire interior structure, supporting ducts, electrical/lighting, and partitions, is fabricated from bolted strut to allow for reconfiguration or disassembly and reuse. The major partition material is bamboo plywood, a renewable resource. The workstation lights are simple lampbases with circline fluorescent lamps in a custom-cast, one-piece, removable reflector. A 12ft wide pivoting bamboo panel regulates the entry. It may be left open to connect with the management side of the office or closed to protect the designers from wandering clients.
A sky-lit top-floor studio tucked away in a West Village low-rise, had tattered charm but little else. MESH refurbished the interior, creating a balance between modern lines and raw, vintage materials. A reclaimed wood floor in a natural finish offsets a white-box room for display of art centered on a steel framed hearth. A monolithic wedge-shaped cabinet partitions the bedroom and provides crucial storage. The floor seamlessly runs into a crisply efficient wood-planked bathroom with open shower. A fully equipped stainless steel kitchen fits almost impossibly into a side niche. The result turns a tiny space into a quiet retreat — open, airy and functional.
A solution for maintaining open loft space while creating discrete, programmed rooms. The major architectural gesture is to divide the private suite from the main space with a long, bamboo-ply-clad wall. This wall contains infrastructure, storage, and part of the kitchen. We activate a space in the back, without window access, by designing three rooms in one. A home office, media library, and storage room share the space with movable dividers on high-density-storage carriages and tracks. Each room is color-coded, and the dividers hold the functional elements that define the program for the space, including a built-in sofa in the media library.
Renovation of a Soho loft included an opened-up kitchen and substantially enlarged bathroom with an epoxy floor and bamboo millwork. MESH fabricated stainless pipe lighting and a laser-cut bamboo veneer light in a bedroom.