Here in Tieghi-Walker’s Los Angeles home, the materials that surround us shape a sense of place – the matter that binds the elsewhere to the here and now. On the kitchen table, a seaweed-shade glass vase by Dana Arbib, produced in Murano and currently containing vast stems of overgrown geraniums. A line of 18th century Delft tiles above the bathroom sink, blue capillaries preserved within an eggshell-thin glaze. A hinged box installed on the wall, designed by Jeff Martin and faceted with ruched and pleated stoneware tiles, as though imitating the textiles throughout the house – nomadic surfaces sourced from Welsh woollen mills and Japanese flea markets, unrolled in preparation for imminent arrival or departure.
As we sit in the kitchen – English Breakfast tea steaming and butter quickly disappearing into unfrozen hot cross buns – there’s a sense of dislocation, of living in multiple time zones. It’s a feeling that suits the architecture of Echo Park, where houses lightly pitched on the hills appear ready to fold inwards and be transported like tents – lightly traced frameworks that quickly succumb to clematis and bougainvillea. “This is the first time that I’ve lived in a house with white walls,” says Tieghi-Walker almost apologetically, descending from the mezzanine to enter a sunroom where a painted vine unfurls across a wall. It’s here, looking back through the vertically stacked levels of the interior, that the logic of the house becomes apparent: it is a frame for everything that enters.
On the kitchen table, a seaweed-shade glass vase by Dana Arbib, produced in Murano and currently containing vast stems of overgrown geraniums. A line of 18th century Delft tiles above the bathroom sink, blue capillaries preserved within an eggshell-thin glaze. A hinged box installed on the wall, designed by Jeff Martin and faceted with ruched and pleated stoneware tiles, as though imitating the textiles throughout the house – nomadic surfaces sourced from Welsh woollen mills and Japanese flea markets, unrolled in preparation for imminent arrival or departure.