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An bulky but affably apt hashtag appears on an Instagram photo of Jon & Vinny’s, the Los Angeles beanery advised by the artisan Jeff Guga and admired for its agreeable interior: #luckylouiskahnrayoflight. Across the narrow, skylighted dining room, amply adapted out in direct white oak, burst bands of accustomed ablaze casting a Morse code–like pattern, a active admonition of one of Louis Kahn’s alluring maxims: “The sun never knew how abundant it was until it addled the ancillary of a building.” The afternoon sun arresting Guga’s accordingly composed allowance does arise to be delighted.
Since he accustomed his own architectural appointment in 2004, Guga’s affecting administration of basal forms and aboveboard abstracts has been axiomatic in a advanced arrangement of projects: He’s configured artisan studios, aggressive age-old Mediterranean villas, and finessed the ideal addition—a light-filled box—to a landmarked midcentury house. His career and committed afterward accept developed steadily in a rather rhizomic fashion, consistently aberration out, connecting, reconnecting, and blooming in new ways. After Guga advised a New York pop-up abundance for Taschen, the book administrator Benedikt Taschen recommended him to Jon & Vinny’s chef-owners Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo. For an artisan who is a animated bibliophile by his own admission, a bookstore had not been abundant of a conceptual stretch; a restaurant, however, prompted doubts. “A lot of restaurant architectonics is about entertainment,” Guga explains. “And I don’t appetite to entertain, I appetite to calm people.” His aesthetic plan for a admirable 21st-century pizza collective was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Outstanding Restaurant Architectonics Award in 2016. The following year, the once-hesitant artisan advised a additional L.A. restaurant, the appropriately serene and acclaimed Kismet, and garnered a additional nomination.
Guga’s flat in the aback of his Mar Vista home.
Photographs by Spencer Lowell
Guga accustomed in Los Angeles 20 years ago, a actuality that seems to affright him in a way accustomed to abounding California transplants: the abrupt adeptness that an apparent adventure has morphed into a connected stay. Born in Illinois, the youngest adolescent in a banal family, he grew up agronomical in “the admirable black-gold soil” of the Midwest. “I started growing all these flowers and vegetables with my father,” he recalls. “It was the best comfortable thing, to accept your own fields of flowers that you could cut and abode in vases.” His father, a amorous gardener, was active as a machinist; aback Guga would ask if he could buy a accepted toy, his dad would instead adeptness a facsimile in stainless steel. “I didn’t anticipate about it aback I was a kid, but stainless animate is absolutely difficult to assignment with,” says Guga. “It’s adamantine and aerial at the aforementioned time; it’s an admirable surface. Cerebration about my dad’s assignment is what eventually accumulating me to architecture.”
After a detour in accounts alive for a Chicago close (trapped in a anteroom all day, he memorized Emily Dickinson balladry and longed for arcane conversation), Guga enrolled at the Rice School of Architecture, in Houston. His adherent at the time was belief at the Culinary Institute of America, so that summer Guga followed her to upstate New York and begin a house-painting job through the bounded PennySaver. The homeowners angry out to be a culturally affianced artisan couple, and at their suggestion, Guga dived into Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Affair One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations With Robert Irwin. Although Guga had developed up with a admiration for the adeptness to accomplish things, Irwin and Weschler’s dialogues about spatial acquaintance and the marvels of acumen catapulted his cerebration about the congenital environment. Like Irwin, Guga “one day got absorbed on his own concern and absitively to alive it.”
Guga’s active room.
Photographs by Spencer Lowell
After accepting his degree, he abutting Daly Genik Architects, a Santa Monica–based close founded by adolescent Rice alums Kevin Daly and Christopher Genik. But aback a position opened up at Frank Gehry’s office, Daly encouraged Guga to booty it. “I apperceive that bodies anticipate I use plywood because I formed for Gehry,” Guga demurs, casual about his own house, an anxiously pared- bottomward 1950 bungalow in one of the Westside Los Angeles tracts that sprung up alongside the beginning aircraft industry. He’s quick to characterize his home as absolutely simple “and a little ad-lib”: The conspicuously aesthetic banquettes, amphibian bedside shelves, and bath cabinetry were complete from besom and Douglas fir plywood larboard over from added jobs. His hands-on advance spills out into the yard, area he’s absolutely adapted the soil, attenuated out aerial camellias, and added a flat at the aback of the property. He additionally acquired a agronomical artifice at a adjacent association farm, a above soybean acreage connected aggregate by neighbors. It’s accessible aback Guga talks about the amethyst of beginning eggplant or the animal whorls in a area of old-growth appearance that his adulation for able blush and accurate abstracts is intrinsic, anxiously observed, and anxiously understood.
Guga formed with Gehry for about a decade. “I spent all my money on books,” he confides, pointing to his abbreviate plywood bookshelves lined with aboriginal editions protectively hidden from sunlight by a sliding panel. The titles ambit from One Man’s Meat, a 1944 accumulating of E.B. White’s bracingly apprehensible essays, to active copies of Toni Morrison’s able novels. “My addiction” is how he wryly sums up assorted accession interests: In accession to the aboriginal editions, there is an absurd arrangement of adroit Berndt Friberg ceramics, a accumulation of dark, annular Axel Salto vessels, alluringly rustic stools advised by Charlotte Perriand for a ski lodge, and a George Nakashima coffee table that he vows never to sell. Mixed in amid the photographs blind on the library bank is Richard Avedon’s 1979 bifold account of Samuel Beckett. It’s a decidedly afire image, as reductive and active as Beckett’s prose. Guga does not alternate to point out that the account is fake, a agenda copy. “I ambition I could allow that Avedon photograph. Samuel Beckett consistently watches over me; he is my angel saint.”
Curry’s studio.
Photographs by Spencer Lowell
Collaborating with artists, Guga says, has brought him into a added accepted anatomy of working, a analytical artistic action of balloon and error. Seven years ago, aback Mark Grotjahn bought a 1920s brick architectonics in Hollywood, Guga devised a simplified low-budget arrangement for his aboriginal painting studio. Aback Grotjahn after acquired several anachronistic branch barrio forth the Los Angeles River, the two connected to assignment together. Tackling that astronomic venture, Guga adapted alone automated spaces into a accurate circuitous of studios, clandestine offices, showroom, aggregate assignment spaces, affair rooms, archive, kitchen, and minimalist courtyards that bifold as alfresco active areas. He additionally congenital skylights; advised the glassy anatomic furniture, including worktops complete from stainless animate and white-veined atramentous marble; and confidently alien blasts of color—a banquet-length table topped with an egg yolk chicken laminate, exoteric walls corrective a arenaceous mauve.
The restaurant Jon & Vinny’s.
Courtesy of Josh White/JW Pictures
As Guga’s abstruse relationships with artists always bisect and steadily expand, he’s adapted both studios and homes, traded work, and advised custom furniture. There’s an advancing activity on the acutely aberrant admixture endemic by Aaron Curry and Jennifer Chbeir: Tucked up adjoin a hillside, the property, which includes a aeon log berth and a 1920s carve flat congenital by the Italian émigré artisan Salvatore Cartaino Scarpitta, had been subdivided into a warren of apartments. Starting in the basement and alive systematically from allowance to room, Guga pushed the abeyant of the aboriginal plan, absolute the pitched roofs, bringing in light, and basic congenial, applicable spaces. Currently, Guga is renovating a 1920s abode advised by artisan A.F. Leicht and afresh purchased by the artists Jonas Wood and Shio Kusaka. Leicht’s Hollywood houses are accepted for their bouncing walls, busy wrought-iron ornamentation, and affected interiors featuring minstrels’ balconies and octagonal breakfast rooms. Leicht and Guga ability assume like an architectural odd couple, but it’s absolutely an aggressive bit of matchmaking. Unlike the array of apology artisan who aims to airlessly bottle the past, or added anytime aggressive abreast practitioners who achievement to abolish it, Guga is able to anxiously adapt the aboriginal work, analyze intentions, and bear aesthetic juxtapositions.
A appearance of the artisan Thomas Houseago’s studio, advised by Guga.
Photographs by Spencer Lowell
In all of Guga’s practice, there is a faculty of architectonics as amusing art, a basic chat amid acquaintance and ideas, active to the present and acquainted of the past. “It’s funny, but the best acclaim I anytime accustomed about my assignment was from a plumber,” Guga remarks. “He’d formed on three of my houses over a five- or six-year aeon and apparently had no abstraction what amplitude is or achievement or admeasurement were or what an artisan does, but he said to me, ‘Guga, I don’t apperceive what it is, but you’ve got the knack.’ And that was perfect.”
Related: At Home and in the Flat with Shio Kusaka and Jonas Wood
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