Inside a Couple’s 900-Square-Foot Los Angeles Loft That Functions as Both Office and Home
For Indian-origin, LA-based designers Utharaa Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary, the founders of lighting and furniture design firm Soft-Geometry, humor, slowness and the rituals of everyday life have always shaped their work. Their furniture and home objects tend to favor serenity over sharpness and the handmade over the hyperpolished. So there was a quiet poetry in where they found their apartment: inside a concrete shell, a space almost entirely at odds with their own design language.
That sense of contrast was further heightened by the building’s formidable history. The Elysian was originally designed in 1961 by William Pereira (who was one of the first architects on the cover of Time magazine) as the headquarters of the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles. Engineered as an “essential building,” with 12-foot ceilings and a steel-and-concrete structure built to exceed the city’s seismic code, it was vacant for nearly two decades before the eight-story tower was converted into residential lofts in 2014.
“The building caught our eye our first week in LA, before we even knew its history,” they say. “There were no available units then, so we didn’t think much about it. Six months later, this one unit came up, supposedly passed on by many because it looked out onto an industrial rooftop. But we fell in love immediately.”
Moving in, everything seemed to arrive at once: the scale, the light, the rooftop, and the floating wall between the workspace and living area, which they immediately recognized as “a natural divider between control and chaos,” recalls Chaudhary. As for the floor plan, they had different ideas. The two converted the original bedroom into a workspace, and the home office became the primary bedroom. “We essentially sleep in a nook,” Chaudhary says.
Within the limited square footage, homelife and work life flow easily into one another. “When we moved into this home, we briefly tried separating our work and personal lives into different spaces, and it quickly became a lesson in who we are,” Chaudhary says. “We want to wake up and see exactly where we left off the night before.”
The living room functions as a fluid space—less a room for socializing than a home for their objects. At present, it holds two of their most recent collections: the Long-Haired Sconces and Flower Sconces from their New York launch, Flowers in Our Hair. Beyond these, there is something from nearly every chapter of Soft-Geometry’s practice, including tables, lamps, chairs, and mirrors.
In the workspace, a vintage workbench table is in the center of the room. “One wall holds the screen, the computer and pin-up walls covered in collection notes and references,” Zacharias says. On the other wall, red Componibili storage units by Anna Castelli Ferrierihold hold color samples, swatches and all the small things that resist categorization. The room has also become the place to flip through a book, spread out sketches, and lay out photo prints when they’re editing. Adjacent to this room is the kitchen, rendered in steel and white. Its 12-foot ceiling leaves a generous stretch of space above the cabinets, which is filled with their favorite artworks, plants, and books. The island, used for both eating (and working), is a vintage Neolt Architetto drafting table.
The sleeping nook is a small but darling space. “There’s something deeply satisfying about that compression—like a berth, or a room within a room,” says Zacharias. “It’s decorated only with the first-ever Flower Sconce, our giant elephant ear plant named Haathi, and, on the pillar, one wedding photo and an alarm clock.”
The couple, now preparing to welcome their first baby, are excited to see how the space will soften further, adapting to tiny feet and a little more chaos. Yet one thing remains constant: the light. “Sunrise comes in golden and direct—amazing to wake up to,” Zacharias says. “Sunset bounces off the bronze glass of a downtown tower and returns to us warm and diffused, so we get it twice, in different moods.”
