Philosopher Alain de Botton‘s desk at  Heathrow.

Writer and illustrator Dallas Clayton‘s home office can fly to space and tackle the ocean.

While Unplggd editor Gregory Han wished for a spot among the trees. He chose Peter Daniel Frazier’s The Cube (above).

I’ve had my own practice for less than two years and my business is still taking its shape – much like the space in which I work. The expanding library of monographs, architecture design and philosophy books combined with all of our families interests have just about maxed out our available shelves, but a clever library tucked into our stairwell like Lake|Flato has done with this house in Austin, TX would be a dream.

The outdoor areas become my expansion space.  I need a view.  The tangle of branches and the active wildlife that we share our corner of this oak forest with let my eyes wander while I’m on calls and help me think more creatively and clearly.  Getting outside is important, too.  Whether on the phone, writing, or thinking something through, our north facing deck just outside the upstairs office is usually in the shade (which cuts down on the laptop glare) and I can work from there while watching my husband and daughter do their own work.

One thing I would love to add to my work space?  The expansive chalkboards that I love from Maison Martin Margiela’s Paris studio.

Everything is its place and a place for everything.

Being creative, my desk is not your typical mess. In fact, some may say is kind of OCD-ish. I can’t stand clutter or being un-organized. My mind works better when I have lots empty space around me and only have the stuff I need for the project deadly accessible. After I’m done with the project, or even if the project is not completed but I’m done for the day, I would put everything away and start from a blank canvas the next morning. That will give me different angle on the process of creation.

In my current set up, I have made some compromises, but If it was up to me, my ideal workspace would be one with plenty of sunlight, empty spaces, almost spartan with glass surrounding me everywhere; that way I could enjoy the outdoors with it’s incredible views.

Computer with a dual monitor set up with everything wireless (I hate cables) and it would be extra nice if I had a section of my working space that I could use for a very small shop; as I like to tweak, disassemble and create stuff all the time.

A great wireless sound system where music play non stop and even a TV playing in the background on mute. I love to work around white noise and visuals. I can’t work when everything is too quiet.

Our ideal office would be located in the heart of San Charlestoniscork, an imaginary combination of our three favorite cities. It would exist in an area both accessible to the surrounding city but also have ways to remain intensely private and secluded.

We imagine an open format environment where spaces defy simple definitions. A lounge may be a workspace, a workspace may be the kitchen, with transitions allowing a change of environment for a shift in mood or to find a different perspective – mixing the feeling of home with work.

Above: HUB offices in Madrid.

We like natural materials, straight lines, hard angles and textures to accompany a more spare, minimal space. There is always room for antique and found objects to set off old from new. Here are some places that are inspiring to us:

Below, the HUB Offices in Madrid are a huge inspiration. We love the raw, open feel of the space.

We love textures. The cracking plaster juxtaposed with the smooth white ceiling gives the room so much character and interest. Concentrated groupings of things give an otherwise sterile room a place of warmth and vitality.

Every little detail matters. These door handles by Valentin Garal are so beautiful.

The Storefront for Art and Architecture (below) is incredible. It’s like an egg- the shell is this clean, neutral facade and there are cracks that pivot to reveal the very colorful, textural interior- like the yolk of an egg. Surprises like this are so playful and unexpected. We love things like hidden doors, rooms and anything that represents exploration or discovery.

Sometimes organized clutter is necessary to promote creativity- you might see something that jogs a memory or makes you think about something else differently. Well curated wall displays can do a lot for a spare space- giving the room interest while not mucking up the living/working space.

It would be amazing to have several different rooms with completely different feels to help people develop concepts- some rooms could be light and airy and others rich and dark- maybe some rooms are completely conceptual- like a tree house, enormous couch fort, room that exists underwater, or a rooftop with expansive views…

We love the chalkboards in Makr’s space. They compliment the handmade nature of their business.

This stairway represents the perfect transition from a naturally lit space to something darker and warmly lit. We’d need a large meeting area where people can quickly brainstorm, create and build off of each other’s ideas. Whatever happens in the space needs to be easily accessible and not complicated to maintain. The space would ideally be naturally lit. Any artificial lighting would give off a warm glow – radio bulbs or edison bulbs are great for this purpose. We love the concept of room within a room like you find in the VCU Brand Center in Richmond, VA.

We are really inspired by The High Line project. We love the sculpted walk ways, juxtaposition of natural and built environments and especially how they made use of the old rail with the lounge chairs on tracks. So cool.

This is a great example of a transitional indoor/outdoor space. We’d love to develop something that feels like a fort- something you may have imagined when you were a kid but better.

Incorporating life into a space is important. We would have an edible garden that was on a drip irrigation timer. A water feature with fish and turtles. Our fantasy space would have friendly animals ranging from wild to domestic. Chickens for daily fresh eggs. Bears to hang out with. Cheetahs to race. Monkeys to compare thumbs to. We are only partially joking. And we love to make up games. Something like these colorful posts could be the basis of a myriad of games or places to hang out.

We imagine making sand castles and climbing trees here. We love the feel of outdoor rooms.

The workspace would be huge and multifaceted with everything we need to work happily and functionally including a full kitchen, shower, a room where people can escape to stretch or rest or read and other obvious necessities like private bathrooms, dining areas, lounge areas, etc. It would also include a shop where we could make things: tools for working with wood, foam, cloth and more.

The clean, airy feel of the office below is so refreshing. The rooms feel like a blank canvas. Nothing distracting to inhibit one’s process. The red stools are a strong statement in an otherwise neutral space and provide such nice energy. Natural, somewhat masculine materials with hard edges paired with round furniture shapes and pops of color provide nice compliments to each other.

We’d love to be able to easily transform a room to make it bigger or smaller, to bring in more or less light or to make it more public or private – moveable walls, large sliding doors and similar elements would work well.

At the end of the day we need to be highly organized which means we need lots of storage space. The more we integrate storage in necessary structural elements the better to save space. All told, we love our current space. We were able to incorporate a lot of elements described here like warm, natural materials, a variety of textures, a combination of natural and warm lighting, hidden doors, full kitchen and an outdoor patio. See photos here.

I believe food has the ability to change the way people think about the life they lead. Growing up, I was very aware of the emotional connection food fosters between people. Because I now work with food, my husband and I knew that our ideal home would need to have the potential of facilitating that emotional connection.

Our space would need not only a marvelous kitchen, but also a location for hosting many gatherings with friends. Finding our 1926 Spanish house under the Hollywood sign four years ago was serendipitous.  It has the space for my food reference library, for all of my cooking gear and styling props, and supports our Angelino indoor/outdoor lifestyle.

Our space also has a garden where I grow the food and do beekeeping.  I beekeep not only because the taste of honey is one of my favorite memories; but because urban beekeeping is a terrific way to build community since the bees pollinate throughout the neighborhood and many of my bees have come from unwanted nearby hives.

When not in the kitchen or with the hives, I am at the outdoor office right outside the kitchen: a 10-foot outdoor dining table built by my husband, using reclaimed redwood as the top.  Here I plot menus for my clients based on what is seasonal and nibble on food experiments. I use wifi and a laptop which, combined with my smartphone, allow me to work outdoors just steps away from where I can pluck juicy Persian mulberries and snip fresh bay leaves.

Next up will be the ideal treehouse for our son, hopefully something like the one pictured above from Elias Blog. We would love for him to have his own nuanced architectural environment to navigate and discover–and perhaps even plant his own little garden beside.

We began TOUCH from our home, but after a year or so, the business grew and the space felt too small. We found our new studio, this terrific open ceiling space with room for our studio and a showroom for the amazing products we feature.

Above: TOUCH LA showroom

My desk there is usually full of objects, prototypes, samples, new materials, a travel journal and catalogs. I like to have objects around me, they are my inspiration and I constantly change them. I call it a curator’s mind revealed.

Above: Melo and American intern Jessica Hudson at the studio in Brazil.

Right now I am setting up our new studio in Brazil.  It is a fantastic experience opening a new market and developing new projects and products with communities. I have reached my dream by combining travel and work, and have this mobility of using technology to coordinate various projects in different places at the same time. This is very satisfying work for me; to learn a lot about different cultures and places, while helping people to have a better living condition.

Above: A meeting with designer makers at Aglomerado da Serra Slum in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

I now travel to many countries to develop products in artisan communities and to organize exhibitions during design fairs and events. Since I am on the road for work constantly, I can say that my “office” goes with me wherever I am working. So I work from hotel rooms, airplanes, friends’ houses, cafes. In fact, after we created our office in a cloud, things became much simpler. Truthfully, wherever I am connected to the internet feels like an office.

Above: At designer Domingos Tótora’s studio in Maria da Fe, MG – Brazil. This encapsulates Melo’s ideal live/work space – a studio open to nature.

An ideal work/live space for me is the combination of having a studio, showroom, home and nature. It is a place that feels like I can produce much more without much of the stress of the big cities.

But when I am on the road, a library at a hotel is my favorite. The Unique hotel in Sao Paulo, Brazil is a very inspiring social space; the bookshelf, the Campana Brothers beautiful pouf, and the Gaetano Pesce chairs make it a perfect place for a design talk.

Above: Melo meets with designers at Unique hotel in Sao Paulo, Brazil – another ideal work space.

Maybe the best of all worlds would be a mobile office space, where I could travel around showing our projects and exhibiting our products and living deeply within the talents of the world’s creative peoples.

Some notes for the fairy-godmother who is planning to conjure up our dream studio* for us.  We like a clean, minimal and zen space with lots of natural light but we are pack rats who like to leave things out (e.g. we don’t put things away), and we have many things in progress in parallel which need space for the following:

- A place for our son Felix (2.5 years old) to start apprenticeship via crayon and cars

- Place for innumerable gadgets, pieces of gadgets, materials and objects

- A past-projects archive and storage for lots of books

- 4 permanently-allocated computers, with another 3 in various rotation with no glare on computer screens

- Space for 1 etching press, 1 small cnc mill, 2 sewing machines, dedicated space for thousands of tiny electronic components and, lastly, a dedicated space to use a blowtorch.

*Please fit this into 450 square feet.

Some places that inspire us:

Above: Brancusi’s studio, tool area. A dedicated place for every tool. If only cables could make such a composition.

Above: Eames House. Our current fabrication lair has a buckled floor, sloped roof, and crooked walls, so rectilinearity is a dream.

Above: Brodsky and Utkin Turtle House etching. An encapsulated jumble of assorted spaces, with the bonus of being portable.

Above: STORA+NYGATAN: Eclectic, tidy, and we have a lot of paper prototypes to turn into lamps.

Above: Library in the Ryotaro Shiba Museum, Tadao Ando. This is the kind of storage we need.

Our whole home is 1200 square feet.  200 of it is dedicated to the studio room, but the lines tend to get blurred a little. For example, right now, the recording room has some coloring book pages on the floor from our son Niko coloring in here while I am mixing our new record. And, sometimes we use the other rooms for recording a little. And we’ve used the stairs and hallway before as a kind of echo chamber to add a real at-home kind of sound to some tracks.

One of our heroes, Brian Eno, is famous for saying that studios should be treated as instruments. We try to treat our studio and our whole house as a playground – we want it to be fun to play with and to explore and to work. We made this short film called Experiments Around the House with that in mind.

When we were building our house we decided to have as few walls and doors as possible, and in fact, the first floor is all one room.  We want be able to reconfigure things for all of the different projects we tend to have going on here.

We try to be as tidy as possible in everything we do. We built a DIY rolling keyboard stand that hides away to keep our desk clutter free.

Charles and Ray Eames are another big inspiration for us. Not only are they the ultimate couple / partner team. They also tried every medium they could find, and still put their own distinct style into it.

I think we try to do that too.

Neither of us intended to work out of the house, but the pros of convenience outweighed the cons of domestic distractions. It worked well for the first year. It was a pleasure not to commute to an office. But as our businesses grew, we also outgrew our home offices set up. Suddenly the cons outweighed the pros. My wifeʼs company moved into a large commercial space in Pasadena and I hunted for an office space.

At the same time a house in our neighborhood of Eagle Rock went on sale. It was a faux-spanish style stucco box and it was falling apart. It also had a huge lot filled with old trees. It was the perfect fixer. We jumped on it. Now I had a tremendous opportunity to design the perfect live/work space. I had spent the previous year in a less than ideal work/live environment so now I knew exactly what I wanted. First, I wanted to make my office as high-tech and and spatially efficient as the cockpit of a jet, without looking like one. Thanks to Skype and other networking tools I collaborate with people without sharing a physical office space. One of my 3d modelers lives in New Zealand and another in Canada. With high speed internet and streaming video we meet on-line as if we are all in the same room.

The new home office reflects my aesthetic and the sustainable focus of my practice. Since I design a lot of residential projects it made sense that my residential clients meet in one of my residential spaces, namely, my own. My office and home are a living portfolio through which I walk my clients. I can show them a grey water recycling system in action or custom concrete counter tops or any of the details that went into the house,

The office runs off of solar energy panels on the roof. The ceiling is made of recycled lumber and clerestory windows keep the room filled with natural light, without the need for any artificial light during the day. Unlike my old home office, the new one has its own entrance and can be shut off from the rest of the house.

The custom desk and shelf system hang from threaded steel rods bolted through the ceiling beams. Everything is adjustable and small trays slide out underneath for keyboards and computer peripherals. The vaulted ceiling makes the space feel much larger than the floor plan and allows for more shelves that take advantage of the tall ceilings.

Concealed trap doors in the floor open (above) with a foot pedal to reveal an under floor storage area. The doors opens up in sections using the same pneumatic arms that hold open car hoods. Stairs descend 4ʼ to a storage area we created out of the space under the raised foundation.

We live in Southern California, which has amazing year round weather, yet most offices are climactically sealed temperature controlled boxes. I designed this space where I could walk out the door with my sketch book or a laptop and draw under a tree. A tree with wifi. Erasing the boundary between indoors and out is a theme in my work. In my last home office, I was constantly escaping to be outside. This time I created lots of outdoor options so that every room in the house opens to an outdoor garden space built around a tree.

When I really feel like escaping I walk down into the garden where I designed a big work table made of galvanized metal and sustainably harvested cedar planks. It is inspired by picnic benches which make their own space. This is where Robin and I often start our day on dueling laptops answering email and sharing a coffee. This is a sea of calm just twenty feet from the office door. It’s my favorite place to work. The only problem with having your ideal work/live space is that its hard to get me to leave.

Photos: From the top - 1) Fernando Galvez, 2) Jeremy Levine, 3) Tom Fowlkes, 4) Fernando Galvez, 5) Tom Fowlkes, 6) Steve Rice, 7) Steve Rice, 8) Steve Rice

My ideal workspace is wherever I am when a thought or an image comes to mind and I can sit with my sketchbook.  I have always carried a notebook with me, for at least thirty years.

This hand to paper, mediated by my fountain pen or RoTo pencils, switches on my mind and focuses my attention. As I draw or write, all of my senses become more acute—apprehending everything around me more clearly and precisely.

A paradox, but true.

Above: It’s All One Thing, installation of 100 Rotondi notebooks at BROODWORK: It’s About Time

If I am looking at something, someone is speaking, or my mind’s eye has conjured an image, I begin to diagram and write what I see and hear. Thoughts and ideas merge into visual thinking.

Above: Rotondi working with Ven. Lama Chodak Gyatso Nubpa

My hand moves at the speed of an evolving idea as it appears on paper. Writing and sketching is a form of uploading rather than down loading.

I work in this way, most often, at home, at RoTo (my office).

And at SCI-arc, and at Miracle Manor Retreat in the desert, which April Greiman and I own.

But I also work on the road (especially on a plane), which is my quiet time.

Above: Jing and Forian’s house in Brooklyn from Common Ground film, 2011, image by Iwan Baan

We started our office somewhere between Amalia and Francis, our two daughters. In hindsight, it might have been because we did not differentiate very much between work and family, and that we were just ready to explore the possibilities of our own ideas in the real world and to take on the responsibilities. So we did. We got married, had children, moved out of our mouse heaven, east-village studio and opened shop as SO-IL, all at the same time, and all intuitively.

Above: SO-IL offices, Brooklyn, NY

We never got to have the time to think about what kind of parents we wanted to be, nor what kind of architect. We fought the sleepiness through the night feedings by thinking about the window details. We brought the kids along to the numerous site visits on weekends. They were always happy guests at our office dinners and holiday parties, knew the name of every one of our staff members, and proudly invited their friends to the openings of our projects.

Above: Pole Dance for MOMA/PS1.  Winner Young Architect’s Prize, 2010

There are many ways one can learn to become a parent, or to start an architectural office. Our way took its own course rather than being set out by us. The conflicts between the two did not result in compromises, but help us in making wise decisions. We rarely feel the split between the two roles, but one always makes the other more interesting. Sometimes we are impatient waiting for the next step, other times we feel chased by the growth of a child or the office. In time, we learn how to wait for the current and ride it when it comes.

Above: Design for nursery school, Prato, Italy, 2008

Now our older daughter is 4 years old and the office 3, there came a natural convergent point where we sought to rethink the model of the living spaces, as we increasingly find the over-priced housing market in New York structurally ignores the relational spaces in a residential environment. We wanted to test the viability of an architecture that facilitated a communal oasis in a hyper-urban setting.

Over dinners and tea times, we spoke of this desire and our dream with our “extended families”, our diasporic friends who sought out each other in this metropolitan New York. Once planted, how powerful it is, the way in which a seed bursts out of its shell and pierces though the dirt to reach for the light, of possibilities! Quickly, the dream grew in an infectious way. Now it has a name, Common Ground. It is a place to work and to live; to support and to depend; to be and to become.

Above: Conceptual model for Common Ground, currently exhibited at BROODWORK: It’s About Time.

Above: A still from Common Ground film.

Space is an awfully difficult thing to deal with. It’s not even really a thing, which I suppose is sort of the problem. I actually wish that space was just an emptiness waiting to be filled, a vacuum to easily occupy with dancing fantasies and comfortable sofas; a clean, well lighted place, but it, perhaps unfortunately for us, isn’t. For any space to exist, it has to have some parameters of reality, some boundaries or markers that make it a space. Take Montana, a spacious place by most popular reckoning, it has that huge blue dome painted with wisps of lonesome clouds, the horizon line stretching in all directions giving way to fields and plains and badlands and the feel of the earth and grass beneath your feet, the smell of dust or cattle or big-rig exhaust and the sound of Hank Williams or lowing cows or wind or Eminem echoing in your ears. Or, let’s take another space. Even the whitest white box of an art gallery, all accouterments stripped down to their most starkly minimal, still has all the connotations of what it is: the drywall and white paint, the polished concrete floor, the spot lamps. They all mean something, a spatial language developed over years and years of showing art. Even when reduced to what seem the simplest and most spacious places, they all still give shape to the liquid of space.

Thus, problem firmly if unresolvably in hand, the most ideal space to live and work in is even more troubling: the ideals of what can be and the necessary reality of what is. My current work space is a large wooden desk imported from Winnipeg by the artist who carved me out a corner of his studio, a couple hundred yards from my previous and still alternative workspace, my apartment. The desk is strewn with empty coffee cups and unused tea bags and brambles of sinewy cords. An overstuffed ashtray and a battered electric tea kettle preside over all the mess with a certain regal abjection. There’s an experimental bottle of since abandoned St. John’s Wort from Trader Joe’s hanging out next to lemon from the tree next to my house that I like to idly roll in my hand and sniff its citrus clarity when I’m blocked. A stack of art catalogues, magazines, and novels, supports the plastic CD case of my girlfriend’s most recent album as she, clad only in a see-through top and pumpkin orange tie that I gave her, alluringly beckons from a field of wallpaper paisleys.

Is this my ideal work space? This dank, windowless studio, this dirty desk. Yes it is. Perhaps one day I’ll find myself with laptop overlooking the Casbah or the ocean, with a view of the Eiffel Tower or some other obviously awesome sight, in the most comfortable chair ever built in the most beautiful space ever designed, but this space, the room I write from now, is here, ready right now for me to sit down in the ratty leather armchair with the broken leg, ready to simply and happily support my time and weight. As Virgina Woolfe once wrote, what every writer most simply needs, male and female, is a room of their own and the time to work in it. This dark untidy cell very happily affords me both. It’s joyous mess is the joyous mess of life. It’s bare fluorescent light-bulb gives me more than enough light to write. It’s simple existence, that it can exist, this free place for me to create, is ideal enough.

As I take another sip of cold black tea and I roll myself another cigarette, I lean back and survey my humble domain. Finally after all these years of struggle and sacrifice, I am so grateful to be here, now, in my ideal workspace.

I have my studio at home and a workshop down the road. I love the area in which I live, it’s in the heart of the East End, situated close to Brick Lane flea market and Columbia Road flower market. I love the atmosphere and characters you find as well as the odd bits of bric-a-brac. I am by nature a collector and cannot help arriving home with some strange artifact that I’m sure will come in handy one day.

Our live-work space is hidden away from the densely urban populated area in a very narrow cobbled street.  According to our local pie and mash shop owner, who holds the collective memory of the neighborhood, it is a former sausage factory. When we acquired the space an artist had been living there and it was a raw shell. I worked on developing the space, it was a labor of love! It is unusual in many ways, and somehow secluded in this urban melee. It would be nice to have more space as we are constantly accumulating bits and pieces and the space is becoming increasingly cluttered.

I love working from home but it also means that there is little separation between work and family life.  My studio is part of our open space living room and kitchen.  I can’t claim that I’m juggling the work, life and family situation very well, but being a designer helps a lot - when the kids comes back from school they find the tables and floor full of drawings, paper models, glue gun and scissors and they join in as if it had been set up for their playtime.

It is a bit trickier when I’m working on the computer — as the kids are always happy to get on a computer in the studio the good thing, I guess, is that at least I’m around and the kids can participate in or follow what I’m up to. Weighing it all up, I can’t imagine working in a different way.

The perfect work-life balance does not exist; I’m always working or never working, depending on who is doing the judging. My kids do not think I’m ever working. How can you call making doodles in your sketch book work? Or cutting shapes in paper and cardboard? Achieving balance in our family life is dependent on our weekend chalet on the beach. This is the one place in the world where I can’t work. I fish, cook, play, swim, sail in my canoe and socialize with friends. This stream of unconscious stuff fuels the soul and body. It is kind of magical but also puzzling how places can define moods and energies.

The chalet is a simple timber construction sitting on steel frame, clad with cedar shingles on the exterior and roughly cut pine on the interior. Every time I enter the smell of the pine hits me, and serves to evoke the nature of the place. Here time takes on a different dimension: even being there a short time somehow feels longer and you leave feeling recharged. There is never any plan, but always things to do. I feel a strong connection to the place and the bleak landscape which has its own strange beauty.

I love to see the changing seasons and the contrast of light during the course of the day. The sea is often out for hours, uncovering mudflats for us to walk on. We have learnt to forage for food, collecting seaweed and salt as well as cockles and mussels.

I love this contrast between the dense urban living and the open, spacious, visceral nature of the coast. I feel that this relaxing state of mind stimulates and nourishes the soul and in turn stimulates creativity.

The laptop is my swiss army knife, it turned me into a total nomad. It’s reflecting and displaying all the different threads of action on a vertical surface in front of me. We call this “Auftischraum” (this would be translated as “creating an instant space on the table”). This is true for the studio, where we don’t have dedicated desks, but settle in a spot that fits the task, e.g. if you need absolute silence you pick the big table in our new “Einstein room” (that’s the name of the coffee brand neigboring that room, but fits pretty nicely to the purpose of the space as well).

If you want to exchange your ideas with your collegues or at least don’t want to miss what’s going on, you rather pick a spot on the big dining table in the modelshop/kitchen of our studio.

The same is true for my work style at home. I am wandering around, picking a spot on the couch or on the balcony, depending on the lighting conditions, the temperature and the mood. Only if I need to focus for a longer period of time for something urgent or serious, I pick a table and a serious task chair. The only odd habit: at home I need to put my feet up to think: so even when sitting on a Mirra chair, there is another chair on the opposite side of the table to put my feet up.

A new habit I now develop: I try to “suck” every artifact into the computer, because otherwise it tends to get lost due to my habit of deserting every work place after a while

About 3 years ago, my wife, our daughter and I moved to Silver Lake, CA. As the second owners of a house built in 1937, we’re getting towards the tail end of a fairly substantial renovation. By far, the best feature of our place is the concrete regulation badminton court in the backyard. On first sight, it was obvious that this fairly unique feature would not only be ideal for hosting badminton tournaments (natch), but would be a fantastic outdoor studio for photography, film & video productions.  On days when I’m not shooting, the court additionally works great as a roller-skating rink for our daughter. The goal is ease of use for shoot days and play dates alike.

As we get closer to finishing the overhaul, we’re still weighing the best direction to go in terms of setting up office space.  Our project manager is my wife Andraleia, an interior and exterior designer who’s hands-on construction experience and amazing taste have made this a family effort. Andraleia would like nothing less than to get my butt out of the breakfast nook, where my temporary office is.

So we have our sights on one end of the badminton court as a place to build a small office plus multi-purpose makeup/wardrobe/equipment/guest room.  Those are a lot of purposes. We’ll have to be efficient if we want to allow enough room to keep the court functional for the Silver Lake Badminton Club.

I often daydream about this perfectly organized space with its array of shelving, storage space and open desk area. Also of key importance will be the ability to allow for complete range in light levels. I prefer ample daylight when I’m writing or editing the magazine. But when working on photo editing and video editing, it needs to be very dim. This should be easily accomplished with a good set of blackout drapes or sliding panels.

The entire house serves also as a case study for Andraleia. Her clients see what the rooms actually look like and she can figure out first hand what certain materials work for what particular purpose (fixtures, patio pavers, etc.). It’s a tactile proof of concept.

Because of all this multi-functionality we regularly move furniture all over the place. I consider this a good thing.

Friends are always saying the place looks different when they come over. They’re always right, and always welcomed.

My ideal workspace is spare, sparse, empty and clean. That way I can walk in, set down something I have in mind to draw, and draw it. Or I can sit my computer on the empty desk and write clear, succinct expressions, unhampered by the clutter and clumpy detritus that clogs my home.

Children (and cats) are exceptionally messy.  Their boundless enthusiasm makes life one big tangle that is constant.  How to untie the knots of an over-scheduled day. How to clear the rubble of snack time, meal time and glitter-glue time. How to cleanse the crustiness of the growing child. Dried cheerios in the jacket pocket. Rocks in the washing machine. I am not particularly neat, but the messier my life is, the more order I crave.

In fact, I find I cannot work at all without a clean empty space to retreat to.

My studio is such a place.

It is a separate building (hallelujah!) that sits in the back yard. I try to keep it empty and clear but it never fails to get clogged with projects in various stages of production after a while. At least the cats and the kids don’t bring their unkempt habits into my workspace. They are only allowed to visit, empty handed. Spiders are the only creatures who can work alongside me. They spin their orderly webs in the corners which are clean and clear, so they love them. But once a month I escort them out, vacuum up their creations and cleanse the space entirely.

I love cleaning day and in the spring it is even more thorough. That is when I take out every object, empty every drawer, box, cabinet and shelf.  I take off every book and dust and clean and wipe the storage areas before putting anything back. Only those things that I have used in the past year go back.  Everything else is given away or discarded.

I have to escape my life to write about it.  I have to clear the table to be able to sit down and draw. Just a desk. And the work gets done.

How to Set Up and Maintain Your Home Office

First of all, determine how big a home office you’ll need. For most purposes, a queen-size will do. If you have lots of paper work to deal with, or if you have a spouse or significant other who insists on using your office to sleep in, you might want to step up to king size, or even California king. You can get away without using a bedframe, and, indeed, proximity to the floor makes stacking papers much easier; but you’ll find that your morale is much higher with a nice, inexpensive frame.   Make sure to get one with a handy ledge, for your coffee cups, pencil holders, and alarm clock.

Furnishing your office:  You’ll require the usual—a laptop, stapler, telephone, good quality cotton sheets (nothing less than a 180 count, preferably), and several comfortable pillows to prop yourself up on.  A two-drawer filing cabinet is also a good idea, and it can easily double as a nightstand. Same for a mini-fridge, which will also eliminate those interruptive and exhausting trips to the kitchen. A warm quilt or comforter is optional, but is certainly nice to crawl under during those post-lunch “brainstorming sessions!”

For maximum efficiency, you’ll want to make sure that you can reach everything you need without getting up from your office.   I suggest a power strip (within reach, as well, of course) into which you can plug your chargers—laptop, cell phone—as well as a printer, shredder, coffee maker, and night light.  Most printers are wireless now, which makes it much easier to print documents without your feet ever touching the floor.   You will, eventually, have to retrieve any printed documents, so if you can’t keep your printer within reach, I suggest combining document retrieval with meal or bathroom breaks.

Many people who work from home appreciate the fact that you never have to dress up to go to work, or, for that matter, dress at all. I find this attitude lackadaisical. Just as the British prisoners of war shaved and bathed every day to keep up their spirits, the home worker should still attempt to dress neatly and maintain at least a minimum standard of personal hygiene. That said, if you do happen to be in your  “You Have Died of Dysentery” T-shirt, and your last shower is a distant memory, it will make absolutely no difference to the person on the other end of the phone.

Video chats are a boon for the Home Worker, but have the distinct disadvantage of requiring you to be dressed.   I suggest avoiding them whenever possible. If, for some ridiculous reason, you absolutely could not get out of one, it’s best to put on a decent shirt, and, unless you’re in the entertainment industry, a tie. Pants are optional, unless, again, you’re in the entertainment industry, when it will be taken for granted that you’re not wearing any anyway.

Of course, some people might find the sight of your headboard on the other end of a video chat “unprofessional,” so I suggest using a simple but dignified background. There are nice ones available at office supply stores like Office Depot or Bed Bath & Beyond. Styles include “Modern Loft,” “Executive Suite,” and “Knotty Pine,” all designed to fit temporarily on the headboard or wall behind your office. But you will have to temporarily ditch the pillows.

Remember: Why work standing up when you can sit, and why work sitting when you can lie down?

Next time we’ll discuss decorating the home office, and how items brought from other rooms of the house can help “personalize” your workspace.

First, what is ideal about working? The best thing about my work is that it takes place while I’m doing other things.

I empty the dishwasher because the dishwasher is nine feet to the right of the end of my kitchen table, and ten and a half feet from my computer that sits on the kitchen table. I need to get away from that workspace and go dominate another. One percent of that need is that the dishwasher needs emptying. The other 99% is that I need to get away from that bad idea, that half a good idea, the almost idea, the stupid idea, the internal editor that called my idea stupid, the idea that is almost fully formed Athena-like but then evaporated when I went to check my email.

As I empty the dishwasher, I hope the dishwasher simultaneously washes away whatever I was thinking about and recovers the original, best thought. I would like to erase. I would also like my pristine idea.

I like to pretend that if I could record every idea, get the idea at the moment it happened, then the true and good work would prevail. But that’s not what happens. In the middle of Harry Potter, I have an idea of humans and adaptability. Should I get up from where I’m reading in bed and write it down? Should I have some technology that allows me to nod in the general direction of that idea and have it permanently imprinted on a document that one day, if I put it through the dishwasher of revision, it will come out clean?

That idea, if it’s a good one, will emerge again. And so my ideal workspace is wherever there is other work to do to allow the ideas to resurface.

I should go outdoors without shoes on. I should sit in the middle of my garden with my laptop and type the words, “let’s all adapt.” I should pull a weed or two and write, “there’s something very much like the movie Waterworld about humans adapting. I don’t want gills.” I should go find a hoe and dig a trench. Into it, I should plant tiny carrot seeds. “But maybe I do want gills. Who am I kidding? Gills would be rad.” Now I stand up. “If I had gills, would food still taste good?” I both wonder this and write this and I’m so glad my computer doesn’t mind a little dirt and tiny carrot seeds.

The ideal workspace is a place where my computer can be and I can escape from it. It should be in an open enough place where I swear I just saw a fox run out the backyard and with just enough open windows and doors that my kids can find me and bring the kitchen forks outside and take the pinecones inside and the wind can send me away and the flicker of a hawk tail can draw me back. It should be in reach of both popcorn and tea. It should be loud enough that I have to stand up and ask, “what?” and quiet enough that when I do get one of those pristine ideas, I can hear it echo, resound, resonate and come back until it’s finally ready to be written down.

Back in 2000, almost by accident, we bought a 1923 Mediterranean in the middle of Hollywood. We happened by an open house, instantly fell in love with it and without ever looking at another house, offered to buy it. Maybe it was the grapefruit tree, or the easy walk to the Larchmont Farmers Market, or the legacy of the Hollywood sign looming in the distance-we just had to have it. We knew it would be the perfect place to start building a family. Well, almost perfect, after we made a few additions here and there. We now have two beautiful girls ages 2 and 6 to mess it all up.

We are both actors, but work as a team on our numerous writing projects. Being able to work out of one’s house is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing in that you can write or memorize dialogue for hours without ever having to find your pants. However, when one needs to concentrate with two kids running around, it can be a bit of a curse. It is difficult for us to think in clutter…chaos. Our home is decorated in 18th and 19th century furnishings and the juxtaposition of the inevitable brightly-colored plastic toys can be a bit maddening. We do our best work when we can find that one area of the house that has been untainted by the detritus of the kids’ day.

For instance, the only official “office” space is a small detached room in the corner of the backyard. We don’t want to say “converted garage” because, like a lot of structures behind Hollywood homes, the transition from garage to office was not a city-permitted venture. It’s where we house our library and is where we tend to do most of our research and organized thinking.

The antique partners desk enables us to face each other as we bounce ideas back and forth, the baby monitor hissing gently in the background. The oversized windows and a glass door allow us to see the backyard in it’s entirety, as the girls play on the swing, in the sandbox or up the apricot tree.

But the real heart of the house is the kitchen. As actors, we work together to memorize lines in preparation for an audition or a shoot. These rehearsals most often end up at the kitchen table in spare moments snatched from the day’s schedule. The deep red tones, Regency chairs, the giant rooster staring down at us are lit by the ever-present California sun. And at nightfall, the kitchen is where the post-dinner dance happens, usually to a Rosemary Clooney song or the likes, as the family, en masse, blows off a little steam. After the girls are asleep, the kitchen table is where the brainstorming begins. A legal pad… a bottle of wine… invariably leads to the evening’s furious scribble-fest.

To generate new material we often link up two keyboards and connect them to the television in the living room so both of us can have control over the same document. At night the uncluttered space, low light and more formal setting makes it a place free from the physical and psychological happenings of the day. It’s the room where we can light a fire, swirl a medium-bodied red and dig in.

When reading through and evaluating drafts, we often treat ourselves to an outdoor session: sitting on Adirondack chairs, we project the computer onto a ten-foot screen and sit under the stars ruminating our literary efforts.  When school projects and various arts and crafts have consumed our surfaces, we resort to alternative venues: our bedroom window-seat, the front porch, or even the bathroom, with one of us in the tub as the other quizzes from the throne of the toilet seat.

This is how we imagine the first inhabitants of this house, the actors and actresses of the 1920’s, working on their lines. Houses are like handbags. We will always manage to fill the space we have to maximum capacity. If we only had more storage…

All photo: Gary Judson Smoot.

A Lifetime of Studios
We lived and worked for 10 years in a brownstone in Brooklyn. Life was separated by a staircase–work downstairs, life upstairs.  As a young, composed designer most of my day was spent downstairs and then my kindergartener would walk in and change the tune and I would float upstairs – with the intent to do both. This was modeled on the Eames House, two clear volumes with two clear occupations. For years the space was clearly divided where I was not – I existed perpetually on that staircase, never quite sure which floor I should be on.

A radical move to a small town in Mississippi provided another model for working.  A Queen Anne extravaganza, it allowed for rooms to live in and rooms to work in and more rooms and even more dust…I mean rooms.

Photo by Caleb Crawford.

The model for this can be Olana, where Fredric Church resided over epic landscapes (real and painted) and an ever-growing family.  Influenced by his East Asia travels, Church manipulated a beaux-arts floor plan into a Persian court as a sitting room for his family, directly adjacent to his studio.

“You’ll see, great work will be produced in the bosom of your family!” I proclaimed. My studio was a dream studio, a large square room with a pink crystal chandelier, graciously next to the kitchen. I was paralyzed with creative fear and made furniture in the garage, burned a lot of dinners writing “just one more” e-mail and never finished a slew of drawings. The studio remained very neat.

When the Queen Anne house proved too much, a small industrial building (that had been our ill-fated dream café and its small apartment in the back) became our oddly productive construct.

Many might say that a 600 sf two bedroom/one room apartment with a 5’-11” thirteen year old girl was a bad idea. We find the broad space of the café makes for the perfect workshop-atelier.  The density and layering of life suits my work.

For this stage I look to Vanessa Bell’s Charleston, a small cottage used as a refuge from the bombing in London during World War I. Life ebbed and flowed through the house. All rooms were studios and all life was art. My family might be too straight-laced to provide the bohemian drama of Charleston, but I have employed Vanessa’s “all over” method for work and my couch is the anchor.

I know! You’re horrified – I am designer, I should designate a space for work. Be more Virginia Woolf (“a room of your own”), less Vanessa. But finally, with my daughter older I have the luxury to do creative work. That can be done any time, any place, and with my family. My daughter has a workspace in the workshop equal to that of her father and mother.  I can write first thing in the morning on the couch. I can embroider during homework. I can sew in the studio next to the freezer. Furniture is painted as dinner is assembled. The garden can be composed and picked at before coffee is finished and I can read that book at last. This messy blending of life and work is our most productive state.

I would love to believe that the buildings presented these problems, but life did, and happily I have decided to look to Vanessa Bell for more architectural solutions.

Life will present us with another space come this summer.  We are not sure what the square footage will be or what architectural style it will promote but I would like the clarity of thought from the Eames studio, the epic expanse both imagined and real from Olana and the nurturing of ideas and activities at all scales from Charleston….that would make a perfect studio.

All photos except as specially noted by Jennifer Hudson.

My name is Dallas Clayton. I write kids books. I don’t require much space or many amenities to be happy.  I guess I’m lucky like that. To be honest, I would be just as happy living in a van parked next to the ocean as I would in any variety of palatial estate. I’m not much for sprawl or grandeur, or making other people who don’t have any houses feel bad about it because my house has six basketball courts and a television made of diamonds.

But I can recognize that “van” is a pretty lackluster answer to what is my ideal space.  Maybe instead of van, I should say craft. Vehicle. Traveling machine.

What does that look like? It’s going to need to be fast, so I can hurry all over the world meeting new friends and getting into new situations. Maybe even “warp speed” fast. You know, near-instant traveling capacities.

And its going to need a lot of room, so that people can come inside and hang out and eat food and play party games, and draw pictures on the walls if they want to. What good is it being able to get Iceland at warp speed if you can’t have a dance party when you get there?  And it’s going to need to be able to fly, and go underwater also, because – well, you asked me to use my imagination…

…and while we’re at it, it should probably be able to go into space- maybe to the furthest reaches of space- the parts of space that could answer all sorts of questions about mankind and god and science and whatnot.  I would also like it to be painted on the front like a mural at a pediatric dentist’s office (rainbow-colored misshapen animals, wizards, etc).

Oh, and it needs multiple swimming pools for when we travel to desert climates (you’re invited too, you know!) I would also like it if it could play music as it traveled, like an ice cream truck- but less annoying. Maybe it could play something easy on the ears, like Sam Cooke or Bill Withers, man those guys could sing. If only my house could sing as well as Bill Withers, I’d be a happy fella.

I guess since we are on the subject I’d like to make one final request of my ultimate home- if it could end poverty, disease, and global inequality and maybe across the board make people of the world feel better about themselves, well that would be great too. *

Thanks so much!

Love, Dallas!

* They said I could use 600 words. I only used 428 words so far so I would like to use the remaining space to tell you that I love you and that maybe you should call your mom today if you get a chance or maybe if you see someone outside (it’s pretty cold these days) who doesn’t have a house you should try to talk to them or maybe buy them some food or maybe just even a big smile would be nice. I know isn’t much, but at the end of the day we’re all just people, right?

When asked what my ideal live/work space would be, the question initially was digested as an overwhelming proposition. Ideals tend to overcomplicate and a truly meaningful place to live and work would be one where life’s complexities could be peeled away and where the simple answers for difficult questions could be tackled with both focus and calm. Given the opportunity to add or subtract, I believe the space I would most prosper within would be one of minimalism, but with well devised tech and storage options, maximizing the transition between work, relaxation and play seamlessly.

I find my most memorable moments of inspiration happen in two disparate places: in the bath tub (which I try to enjoy at least once every few days) and while hiking outdoors away from the madding crowds. In both cases, it’s because of the solitude and quiet each allows I find myself thinking and creating freely; internal dialogues, problem solving and just free-form visualization happen either while soaking in the tub or climbing into a creek carved valley. It’s a wonder I haven’t yet tried to work from the tub, considering my affinity for hot baths.

So where does that leave me now with the question of my ideal live/work space? Currently I work in a very small home office, really just a closet made into a noir darkened niche comprising of a shallow desk, some installed shelving, a task chair and a few computing components. Despite the tight quarters, it works well for what I do as managing editor, and as is the case in many design problems, due to the limitations I’ve been forced to edit, minimize “things” while maximizing utility. Taking what I’ve learned from both this home office and the previous slightly larger (but still quite small) home office, the desired space I’d most want is not one enlarged spatially, but a work area detached from my living space…but only a few footsteps away from a main living area.

Noek Design design these beautiful prefabricated shelters called deckhouse (above); the sheds evoke the feel of a traditional Japanese structure in their simplicity and the honesty of the materials used. Sliding doors and an expanded deck which melts the idea of indoor and outdoor space. I’d love to have one of these deckhouses situated in a darkened, lush garden with a pond or fountain just outside the window or placed on top of a hillside amongst trees with a distant view in similar fashion to Peter Daniel Frazier’s The Cube (below).

Solar paneling on the roof would provide a modest amount of energy for a lazy fan or ambient LED lighting and the overhang would help reduce the glare on the monitors (alongside the lush garden or tree heavy surroundings). I really love built-in features that were more popular amongst mid-century architects, so the dream desk would be a floating affair, an extension of the interior space itself rather than a separate piece of furniture, complemented with shelving above for books and compartments to hide away clutter.

The floating desk would also feature cable and wire guides underneath and in the back, while hideaway grommet style USB and power port connections would make charging or connecting and peripheral a breeze. And although I currently use a laptop setup and like the flexibility it allows, if I had a dedicated dream space, a more powerful tower model hidden underneath the desk would permit me to use to wall mounted 24″ panels (Photoshop is a hungry, hungry child and it always wants more RAM and a faster GPU).

I’m an avid iPad user, so the option to incorporate the tablet into my desk would be useful when I don’t need it in hand, but I want it nearby for use. If you’re an 80′s kid like myself, you might remember corporate bad-boy, Ed Dillinger’s desk from the original TRON (below). It was a touchscreen dream machine, and till this day I admire how the UI’s graphical presence could easily disappear into the darkness of the surface when turned off. I’ll settle for a flush mounted USB charger and docking solution, with a slide door which would hide the flush docked iPad into the desk.

Basically, I want a space where the tech is deeply incorporated into the space, but hardly noticeable, where quiet and solitude help facilitate focused thought, but with a clear connection to the outdoor world surrounding the small home office. The close proximity of a tub would also be appreciated, but now I’m just getting fantasy-land ridiculous!

Above: Home. From the window systems to the shower enclosure hardware, from the landscape to the lighting, the house is a laboratory with enough creative inspiration for everyone.

My life’s overarching goal has been to build an environment that instills confidence as much as nurtures creativity of my children.  The objective has always been to provide adequate room to grow with lots of choices along the way.

In 1991, for example, as a pregnant architect setting up my own child’s nursery I could not find much in terms of furnishings that respected the intelligence and sophistication I envisioned human beings possessed from day one. Thus, it was only natural to develop a product line of multi-functional modern furniture and accessories for children, some of which are available through New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Above: Modern Easel + Art Cart. Best Toy Award, 2002, Child Magazine

Specializing in design for children enabled me to enlist my daughters as collaborators and expert consultants. For instance, as I worked on the Discovery Carts for the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens, both daughters, Mia and Nastya, were prototyping and learning with me. We playfully gained new appreciation for the beauty of gardens while producing three site-specific portable educational stations to engage children in learning about the institution through age-appropriate hands-on activities.

Above: Discovery Carts For the Huntington Gardens, 2002

When I found our dream house as a run-down distressed cabin with a 200-bush rose garden, my husband was very skeptical. It was quite a leap to imagine the potential weighing in functional and aesthetic considerations.  I completely renovated the home’s interiors, opening the kitchen, creating a dining room and powder room, and expanding the bathrooms. It was an exercise in merging of old and new—in building, design, and attitude. By marrying new with existing elements I was able to create an ideal environment that offers a fluid variety of spaces to enjoy depending on the mood. I saw obstacles and constraints as opportunities to invent project-specific solutions, such as a free-standing swimming pool on sloping land, or an underground bath house.

Above: Table in the rose garden. To learn how to take care of our roses, the family took a seminar on rose-pruning.

And then, it dawned on me that I have been subconsciously designing not only our house, but our life, as if it were an architectural project. Admittedly, being your own client has been extremely gratifying, enabling me to take the time, to experiment, and to correct mistakes while considering every little-yet significant-detail!

Above: We turned the house into a space showcasing our daughters’ artwork.  Here, our daughter Mia’s painting was translated into a mosaic, a focal point on the wall of the above-ground pool.

As my kids grew, I took up Creativity Coaching in order to continue to have influence in their lives. At that point, I became increasingly interested in psychological impact of architecture and began writing a book that pairs self-help and design with a premise that anyone can “construct” their own life or “engage the architect within.”  I began blogging on the Huffington Post to give me the opportunity to regularly share my thoughts on the subject and to test the concepts while gaining a voice.  To me, engaging the architect within is a matter of mindset — openness to begin before knowing the solution, awareness of different scales, and ability to move back and forth from an over-all concept to a small detail while constantly asking questions.

Above: Home studio

However, acknowledgement and validation that I get from my daughters is most valuable. I am lucky; recently Nastya admitted that our garden “is a hugely inspiring place for her.”  And I heard Mia tell someone: “My mother created our house to be a place for our family to live, work, and grow up. Due to her encouragement and inspiration, I grew up as an artist, just like her.”

Above: Mia’s room.

Our house is a 131-year-old navy blue small folk Victorian for which the front door in our three-year ownership has gone bright green to deep orange and soon, maybe, black.  We move and rearrange our things repeatedly and often make unconventional design based pairings based around our different tastes. And then we find the need to constantly refine the uses for our home.  We began home schooling our daughter over a year ago, which is something we thought we’d never do but rather instantly found it a match for our lifestyle and our daughter’s style of learning. Our ideal is a home where a child can wonder and investigate.

Our days are an adventure stemming from an idea, a jumping off point and we go hunting inside our home and out for illustrations and reinforcements; variations on a theme.

We try and keep our lifestyle organic, fluid, often imperfect, and sometimes a mess.  Perhaps our ideal workspace might have a robot solely programmed to clean up after us although surely an example is to be made of cleaning up the fallen confetti of snow-like cut paper from our dining room floor.

We allow our children to explore our work and our studios in the same way we do our yard or any playground. Everyone in the house is entitled to access of books, baking material, puzzles, musical instruments, dress up clothes, art supplies, and science projects, dolls, cars, trains, and fake money.  We like to use children’s art materials in tandem with professional artists materials.  Jaime assembles quilts on the floor of the kitchen, while Jeff has extended the size of his studio desk so our daughter Charlie makes her own paintings beside him. Additionally our idea of studio often extends into the beyond. Nearly every day Jeff reads and does research for his art amongst the fellow riders on the NJTransit train into the City. We work in fits and starts chipping away at projects as time allows.

We are fortunate to be present in our lives and as we have changed so has the work we make. In 2001, we started a New Year’s edition project inspired by Yves Saint Laurent’s annual “LOVE” New Year’s card. Since the arrival of our children, the card has taken on new forms and directions, less about our art and more about the things that make up our children’s lives.

We embrace a collaborative approach to art and project making, thus we have always sought out people and families who work together, create editions and yearly projects.  The Dolphin Studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts creates a calendar designed by several members of their family, including the very young.  We especially love the songs our friend Dan Zanes sings with his daughter, Anna, and his approach to music making. With a wild spirit and assortment of musical friends, young and old, he brings varied talents together from all the distant places of this world.

Last year we used a lyric from one of his songs on one of the posters we produce in our family workshop. Most recently we produced a series of silk screened posters that are meant to embrace and reflect on the lives of those we know who are on the Autism spectrum.

For us, ideal workspace as a term seems problematic as it suggests a fixed outcome or an answer. Our live/workspace extends beyond our home, out into the uncertain world and back again.

“Describing my ideal live/work space is a delightful challenge. In a portable way, it will always be wherever and whenever I have the peace of mind to think and dream—I could be walking a neighborhood, riding a bike, sitting in a café, or lying in my bed.

My indispensable sidekick is a little notebook in which I scribble my notes and draw pictures. Everything that catches my fancy gets scribbled down eagerly without concern for good penmanship. I simply must write it down. This perfect pocket notebook is a portable studio for my mind to wander, brainstorm, keep tabs, and plan. This essential notebook activity comes from years of working full-time at a dynamic little museum and raising a family. When juggling deadlines, projects, and the world of loved ones (and their demands), I find personal refuge in my notebooks where, in constant-quick-small ways, I feel like I am acting on my creative impulses.

Above: Notebooks old and new. Alter-ego character.

I love being at home, working at home, but I am too seldom at home. The children are now grown (16 and 18) and I am able to be an enthusiastic peripatetic in my city; a sucker for stimulation; a voracious consumer of local experiences. In a city as diverse as Los Angeles, I am invigorated, intellectually and creatively, by my urban hikes and I certainly consider them an extension of my live/work space. I finally set up a studio at home but I have yet to really use it. I am too accustomed to considering my studio to be everywhere. Let’s quote Virginia Woolf (author of A Room of One’s Own among other incredible works) “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in”

Above: Studio/Home, sweet, Studio/Home (Photos: Edie Kahula Pereira and Asuka Hisa)

I work at a contemporary art museum called the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Art that embraces diverse aesthetic, cultural, and ideological perspectives comes in a daily dose. Several times a day, my walk through exhibitions from the museum’s front door to my desk inspires and prompts ideas. I encourage people to visit museums on a regular basis. It works.

Above: Exhibition installation view of Michael Asher (Photo: Grant Mumford, courtesy Santa Monica Museum of Art)

In my job as the museum’s education director, I try to get my office workspace and the department’s projects to expand through multi-faceted collaborations that go beyond the walls of the institution.

Above: My desk at work

Wall Works is one of my programs that involve hundreds of K-12 students in the creation of public artwork in partnership with the museum, artists, and the community. The project requires a film shoot; studio visits with artists; coordination with schools; and a professional installation off-site. Most importantly, it gets youth to learn about art and artists in a highly participatory fashion. The projects have turned a rather colorless hallway into an inviting and lively passageway. Students are part of a bona fide public art exhibition viewed by hundreds of visitors.

Above: Zippy’s Nicknacks, Tonics, and Magical Gadgets project with Bari Ziperstein

Above: blik and me (detail) project with blik surface graphics

Above: Listen, Tell, Draw (detail) project with Kim Schoenstadt (All photos, courtesy Santa Monica Museum of Art)

A good life is created by good work, be it professional or personal. The ideal live/work space? Right here, there, and over there.”

Laura: I’ve always gotten my best ideas sitting in coffee shops drawing in notebooks, away from the forced environment of a desk, so I’d like to find a way to free up my mind when I’m in my office. One thing I think would help would be a very large, perhaps 9’ x 9’ blackboard or whiteboard, so that I could design furniture and cabinetry full size. (See photo below).

The idea of getting to draw at that scale really appeals to me. I could stand back and really get a sense of the scale, and wouldn’t be wasting any paper to achieve that. I’d photograph the designs to document them before making working drawings. A number of years ago I visited the John Soane Museum in London. One of the many brilliant ideas Soane, who was an architect, employed, was a painting room where the paintings were hung on panels that hinged open to reveal more paintings behind (picture below). In this way he tripled his wall space. I think that would be a great way to work on presentations…different projects could be opened or closed as needed, and if the panels were magnetic or cork fabrics could be pinned onto the boards as well as drawings. I’d like the front of these panels to be painted cabinetry so it could all disappear. I’d choose a palette of whites to function as a neutral background.

This picture (below) is the fantasy version of the interior I’d like to have…it’s Frederic Mechiche’s home in Paris. I’d keep the furnishings very simple and have large work surfaces for drafting, making models, and sorting materials. I’d need lots of cabinets for samples of fabrics, building materials, books and so on. I’d be happy to have all the furniture resources scanned onto an external hard drive however.

Although this is a fantasy of what I’d like, thinking about it has made me realize that at least the blackboard idea is quite attainable, and I may start with that in my actual office.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to fold them into the Lifework family ever since. Along came the Post Family and the birth of the Ideal Live/Work Space. And it became clear that this was a perfect place to explore the work of BROODWORK.

After a productive meeting with Rebecca and architect Iris Anna Regn (who co-founded BROODWORK with Rebecca) we are now ready to launch the latest Ideal Live/Work Space series. I think you’re going to enjoy it. The first participant is acclaimed philosopher and author Alain De Botton. Look out for his post later today. We will also visit Rebecca’s Eagle Rock home and studio;  the home Iris is designing with her husband, architect Tim Durfee; graphic designer Juliette Bellocq and Families and Work Institute founder Ellen Galinsky and painter Norman Galinsky.

Sam Rosen is designer and photographer. He is also a member of The Post Family.

And this concludes our Post posts. It’s been great hosting this group of guys. I was so thrilled when they agreed to put their collective brain to this task of imagining the ultimate home work space. Thank you Post Family for your generosity, intelligence and time!

David Sieren is a graphic designer and member of the Post Family.

My ideal live/work situation is based on community, shared spaces and a distinct separation between home and work. In this campus, one building is devoted to homes and one building is devoted to businesses both retail and office. Both buildings have shared roof decks and backyards to encourage gatherings. The idea is to rent both apartments and work spaces to people as a package. And ideally these are independent businesses that foster local communities.

By Alex Fuller.”

Alex is a graphic designer and one of the seven members of the Post Family.