The Deep Dive: A New Southern Gothic

As any issue of Dwell proves, the choice of material or joinery method can transform a good project into a design for the ages. The Deep Dive is a forum where design and building pros can obsess over those details. Here we ask expert colleagues to share the inspiration behind house elements that delight clients—as well as the nitty-gritty information about how they were built.

"We’re not trying to have an aesthetic," architect Jennie Cannon West says of Studio West, the architecture and interiors studio she founded in 2018. "We try instead to work with really good people who have a vision for what they want."

Thanks to her base in New Orleans, West has found plenty of imaginative people who meet that criterion. Studio West helped two burlesque dancers open a snowball stand during Covid-19, and a trapeze artist recently inquired about a potential project. Then there’s "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" creator John Cameron Mitchell, with whom Studio West rehabilitated the 19th-century home featured in Dwell’s January/February issue. 

The author of that feature, Madeleine Davies, explains, "While the New Orleans Historic District Landmarks Commission has strict rules regarding alterations to historic buildings, the regulations…apply only to building exteriors and what can be seen from the public right-of-way." Although John and Studio West initially envisioned updating his Italianate building’s front gallery, West says the actor, writer, and producer quickly realized he wouldn’t spend much time so close to the street. The team instead considered attaching an indoor/outdoor space to the rear of the structure which, she adds, "could be an unexpectedly expressive moment" due to the limits of preservation mandates. 

"We started with a rear porch that was slightly smaller and a little more traditional," West recalls. "But as we realized there was also interest in putting a hot tub [farther to the rear], we wanted that hot tub to feel like an extension of the porch." Studio West sliced a crescent from a corner of an 18-square-foot footprint, compressing the porch interior to encourage movement toward the hot tub. "Then, as we started to lay out the roof beams in a radial pattern, the structure had this great rigor in the interior, which lent to a more playful nature in the panels themselves."

West and architect Jason Richards, who joined Studio West as a principal in 2021, regularly looked to John’s decorative arts collection for inspiration for the rear porch. The designers drew from the multi-hyphenate homeowner’s Art Nouveau furniture to create parlor doors, for example. "Then we used that language for the porch panels," West says. She adds, "Most of our work is about the user’s experience from the inside," explaining why she and Richards veered from the convention of referencing historical exterior details.

Modeling the porch panels in Revit, Studio West tested the placement and dimensions of wildly curving muntins to strike the right balance between openness and privacy. West and Richards also wanted the screens and occasional glass pane to capture interesting views to John’s garden and neighboring sites. "Everything is framed in the panels, like capturing a photograph," Richards says. He and West unfolded those models into two-dimensional diagrams to confirm the scheme.

The collaborators sourced Sapele lumber for the structural members and wall panels as well as Cumaru for floor and roof decking. The roof assembly also includes extra-thick plywood, so that it can bridge the widest spans between sunburst-arranged beams without sagging. The porch is founded on CMU piers that sit atop concrete footings, and its floor joists attach to the main house via a ledger to accommodate differential settlement between old and new volumes.

Richards says John had "a lot of trust" in Studio West, and he attended just a few presentations of the screened-in porch before signing off. "We worked through the porch a lot internally and only showed it to John when we felt confident. We pushed and pulled on it a lot," West notes. In addition to iterating the muntins, for example, Studio West went back and forth on color-blocking the porch, though the designers ultimately returned to a monochromatic image so the organically-shaped panels would appear as a unified composition.

Studio West approached execution in a similar spirit. The Sapele panels were entirely hand-routed by carpenters who work exclusively with New Orleans–based Arch Builders, the project’s general contractor. "They are able to sample and mock up pieces for us, and it’s very collaborative," West says, noting, "If our drawings stopped at a detail, then we’d work through that node or connection point with an actual sample." During construction, Studio West and the millworkers would remove and revise components to maximize the seamlessness between lines or to ensure the rigidity of elements without cross-bracing them.

"In a city that’s incredibly historic, where we don’t want to disrupt the traditional fabric, this allowed us the ability to have creative freedom and put John’s mark on New Orleans," West says of the final product. "It’s your own piece of architecture, and we love that we can do something like this for clients." Richards concurs, saying he’s also reminded of early modernism, in which buildings had conventional fronts, while architects did their exploration in the back. "Today, this is a great technique for working within a restricted environment," he says, "where regulators have say over what we do up front but not in the back."

We welcome your thoughts and illustrative projects. Reach out to pro@dwell.com.