Renovating the ‘Pointy House’ gives designers a chance to try out their ideas in a real-life setting
Since furniture and home accessory design requires extensive testing and tweaking, Gaurav Nanda decided to integrate the process with his work environment.
"We needed to be in a house for a while," explains the founder of Bend Goods. He set out to create a studio where his team could explore ideas and refine prototypes in an actual residential setting.
It also helped that Nanda was up for a daunting challenge.
"I'd never renovated a house before," the Michigan native and former GM employee says. "This was a fun project for us."
After the renovation was complete, he dubbed the compact home with two prominent front-facing gables the "Pointy House." The structure measures nearly 1,000 square feet and was built on its tight lot in 1928.
Bend Goods' colorful and practical metal wire seating quickly found fans when he launched the line in 2010. (The chairs and stools, for instance, can be seen at restaurants including Trois Mec, Tallula's, Orsa & Winston and multiple Sweetfin Poke locations.)
From the new Hancock Park area base, his staff designs seating, tables, modular art pieces, cheeky wall-mounted wire animal "trophy heads" and as of this season, a new upholstery collection. Everything is manufactured locally.
Nanda relocated operations to the Pointy House late last year to keep most everything, well, in-house. As far as the location, his basic parameters were, "What's a house we can renovate in a nice area?"
He wound up finding something near his own home.
"This house hadn't been touched for 30 years, so we knocked down some walls and opened it up," Nanda explains. He transformed the interior of the two-bedroom, two-bathroom house without altering the basic floor plan.
The nine-month construction project included a pre-demolition party during which surfaces of each room were slathered in a single color. (The kitchen was entirely pink, for example.) Original wood floors that had been covered beneath carpet were exposed, the living room ceiling was dramatically raised and skylights were added.
Every room of the Pointy House features a different accent color and textural contrast, such as a wall of ombre Calico Wallpaper in one of the former bedrooms that now functions as a photo/design studio, and a plywood ceiling in the master bedroom. "For some reason, I don't like flat ceilings," Nanda says.
Other details are subtle but make a big difference. He created custom flush doors to look like "part of the wall, kind of a hidden thing." The sleek bathrooms feature custom-made stone sinks and Clé tile surfaces.
The bright kitchen opens to the dining and living room areas, where most of the staff sits around the dining table but can migrate over to softer seating or to other areas of the house. Nanda selected quartzite kitchen counters that are incorporated into the sink basin.
"I like this horizontal grain that's really muted," he says.
The appliances, plumbing fittings and hardware harmoniously blend in so that other details can stand out, such as the zigzag patterned woodwork on the ceiling and the island base that required extensive trial and error.
The Pointy House showcases a cactus garden by Nobel Truong and pieces from fiber artist Nathan Vincent and sculptor Jeff Morrical, among others. Because while the overall focus is on his own company, the commissions speak to another core element of Nanda's and Bend Goods' philosophy: collaboration.
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