010 Chalk Hill Residence

A home should offer refuge, a place of rest, and the freedom to be oneself. Our own home is deeply intertwined with our humanity, reflecting our origins, aspirations, and boundless hope. Ultimately, it is a canvas for our creativity and a connection to our ancestral heritage.

Our own home is a portrait of our collected histories and our sensibilities. We looked at it as an opportunity to uncover concepts that are rooted in Eastern philosophy and we worked to unpack some of that in a contemporary design. The challenge became; how do we pull from our Eastern roots in a way that doesn’t feel like a trope? What can we reveal about these cultures that is rooted in concept rather than form? Our mission was to celebrate the ceremonies and rituals of our ancestral cultures while creating a home that felt revitalized. We embraced ceremonial practices as a fundamental in defining a lifestyle of opulence. We embarked on a mission to pioneer a new vocabulary of contemporary design, drawing inspiration from Middle Eastern influences.

The house is set in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, California, a quiet and quaint neighborhood in northwest Los Angeles County, better known as “The Valley.” Notable for its arid weather and its position at the foothills of the monumental Santa Monica mountain range, this region is also known to have many mid-century modern architectural dwellings that are intact and well preserved. Sitting on a half acre property filled with endless amounts of fruit trees and foliage, our home was built in the mid-1950’s during the mid-century suburban sprawl of Los Angeles.

We wanted to embrace our Iranian and Uzbek roots and we found that this was not tied to a specific material, color, or texture, rather, it is a lifestyle and a way of living. We also wanted to make our home an experimental laboratory for the creative work of our studio. The amalgamation of these elements is something that became authentically us.