Textile House #2 balances a minimalist aesthetic with a love of texture and drama, incorporating bold patterns from West African textiles and fashion, and particularly from a dress that Nwankpa Gillespie owned, into timeless architecture.
The front façade of the house mimics the cadence of the neighborhood with two pitched gables, one framing a porch and one a picture window. On the rear facade, the house takes a more modern pitched language, with wider gables framing two distinct entrances to the home’s common spaces, and to the primary bedroom, while the ADU loses the pitched reference entirely. The language thus shifts from vernacular to modern as one proceeds through the site, with shifts in form aligned with shifts in material language. The exterior brick patterns play with shifting between figure and field, where the focus alternates back and forth between patterns in the foreground and background. The solid black offset brick has a contrasting soft grey mortar that lends the configuration a graphic quality, and though bold it still acts as a background field (similar to a textured woven textile). Within the textile inspiration, the emotional parallels between fashion and personal architecture are also highlighted. Site lines, views and materials are experienced in layered relationships to one another.
On the interior, the house conceptually explores the ways in which spaces can merge into one another seamlessly, yet with defined boundaries. While the house’s interior is open, programmatic spaces are defined by furniture, materiality, color, light and cadences in form.
SERVICES:
Architecture, New Construction
Interior Architecture
Status: Completed 2024
Size: 1,600 sf Residence, 840 sf ADU Guest House
Location: Inglewood, CA
