BARBARA BESTOR
By Susanna Salk

“I used to love visiting my Tanta Anna’s weekend Gutle (ITALICS with an umlaut above the “u”) growing up,” recalls architect Barbara Bestor of her childhood summers in Germany. “It was a tiny plot of land outside the city with a little wooden shed where we’d spend the day picking fruit, gardening and relaxing alongside the adults.” Ever since, Bestor has tried to capture idyllic moments like those by creating architecture and spaces that allow peaceful human interaction and play.

And while serenity is a design goal Bestor constantly strives to achieve with her LA-based firm, it doesn’t mean she shies away from making a statement. Her projects highlight simple and unit-based materials like concrete panels, plywood and even plastic sheets- ideal for building up into something unique. Spatially, the volumes are simple but there are bold and unexpected highlights. “I remember building and painting a farm structure back in kindergarten,” she says. “ I used lots of glue, bold colors and big chunks of wood. I am still trying to get back to that kind of looseness and expression with the materials and spaces I create today.”

Bestor grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the Seventies, which at the time had a disproportionate amount of architects as residents. “I think growing up in an old (by American standards anyway!) city gave me an appreciation for older things and their eccentricities that has weirdly meshed with a Seventies appreciation of color and modern form,” says Bestor. “And I guess on top of that hybrid there may be an Eighties kind of rebellious attitude. I don't discriminate against the old, rather I try to reinterpret it or take inspiration from previous periods or different cultures, and use it all to question authority.” As a teenager, babysitting in “super graphic” modernist remodels of Victorian and early 1920 American houses proved fertile inspiration for this budding architect. After tucking in the children, Bestor poured through hundreds of design and theory books and drawings and knew she wanted to become an architect one day herself.
At fifteen she committed to Harvard’s GSD “career discovery” program which in her mind, “only sealed the deal” and then she went on to intern at the “Cambridge Seven” firm (“they were doing very cool aquariums at the time”) before attending Harvard as an undergraduate and majoring in visual and environmental studies. Her junior year she went to London’s Architectural Association which she describes as being “a radical hotbed of design” and then after graduating, Bestor moved to Los Angeles (“I love the literal and social openness about living here- it is the very best city to practice architecture!”) where she garnered even more experience at avant-garde design firms (picking up a Masters Degree at SCI-Arc along the way) before opening up her own firm at the ripe old age of 25. “One of the first projects that started me on my own,” says Bestor, “ Was a great house commission I won together with my mentor Norman Millar- now the dean of the Woodbury School of Architecture- for a really adventurous couple of TV writers who had a fun and extreme vision for their family life together.” As the projects kept coming in, Bestor added not only custom furniture designer to her list of accomplishments but author as well. Her 2006 ode to Los Angeles’ design culture entitled “Bohemian Modern: Living in Silverlake” is a manifesto for the recognition of a repressed strain in modern domestic architecture that, as she puts it, “ is inherently Californian but achievable anywhere.” (Bestor lives in the neighborhood herself in a hillside house she built across the street from Frank Loyd Wright’s Ennis house.) “Bohemian Modern is definitely about favoring raw materials, colors, creative spaces,” she explains, “And the natural flow between the indoors and out.” Currently Bestor’s firm is working on projects including a Malibu house/surf-lodge for one of the Beastie Boys, a Trina Turk store in San Francisco, the rebranding and roll out of a new line of artisanal pizza parlors, offices for Dangerbird records in Los Angeles and an experimental concrete house on its own hill in Santa Barbara for a film studio president. On most of her commercial projects
(and a few residential) she works both as architect and interior designer. As a natural extension of her creativity, Bestor has started doing her own furniture pieces but putting together a line has proven challenging as her big construction projects demand so much attention. When she isn’t working, down time is spent with her two young daughters and heaven is the few weeks every August they spend on Block Island, Rhode Island communing with nature and old New England architecture. And when she returns to work, she effortlessly embraces the old and the new as if for the first time. “Our work motto here in the office is: Everyone should experience strange beauty every day,’’ says Bestor. “It helps define what we do. I like to make spaces and things that are beautiful in an everyday way but with a suprising twist.”
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Q&A WITH BARBARA:
Q: What's the best design mistake you've ever made?
A: Building a chair without doing a full prototype beforehand- it was super uncomfortable to sit on! Now we always do mockups and test the ergonometrics of any pieces we make- it was a crucial lesson learned.

Q : What kind of travels do you do?
A : I love to do three day trips all over the place. I go to New York Paris, Tokyo for these very intense sensory jaunts throughout the year.
Q: If you could design a room for any person from the past or present who would it be?
A: I would like to design a room for the artist Viktor Muniz.
I just saw this brilliant small show he did at MOMA called ‘REBUS’ and he selects works from the museums collections that he has organized in a linear form where each piece is connected visually or imaginatively to the piece that proceeds it.

Q: So what would the room look like?
A: It would have all sorts of associations that either interconnect pieces or that, like Magritte’s “C’est ne pas un Pipe” painting, actually undermine the traditional notion of what something is. A chair that is also a turntable, for instance. Wallpaper that is also an optical examination or interactive in someway.

Q:What designers from the past inspire you and why/how?
A: I love Lina Bo Bardi- she made several beautiful, strong, colorful and sort of rough buildings and interiors all over Sao Paulo. Also Charlotte Perriand, Gio Ponti and Achille Castiglioni. Alvar Aalto was a huge inspiration for me when I was a student- I loved the scaling up and down he would do in his architectural and furniture explorations. These days I am a big fan of Patricia Urquiola and I like Jasper Morrison’s new ‘super normal’ movement.

Q: What inspires you on a day to day basis?
A: I did a huge OBAMA in Christmas lights on my office billboard and it remains there to this day.