The Deep Dive: Some Assembly Required

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.

While Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans are numerous and frequent, Crescent City architects and homeowners Emilie Taylor and Seth Welty sync their calendars to the Société de Saint Anne marching krewe. "It’s a hot-glue-gun competition," Emilie delightedly says of the parade. "There are thousands of people in wild handmade costumes."

Since having kids, Emilie and Seth no longer walk alongside the Saint Anne krewe. Now, they pedal. "You don’t want to lose your toddlers in a crowd like that, so we made a bicycle-pulled float," Emilie explains. "Our children can be in a protected little zone with snacks and books but also be part of the party." The couple costume the traveling show differently for each Mardi Gras; recent themes have included The Lorax, a flea circus, and a space-age Conestoga wagon. Of the annual effort, Seth adds, "It’s finding what’s around and making stuff out of it."

Reuse and improvisation are front of mind for the March/April cover subjects throughout the year. Indeed, some of the most memorable elements of Emilie and Seth’s 2,800-square-foot residence were plucked from the waste stream and given new life, such as the terra-cotta roof tiles that wrap the exterior of the first floor. "It was worth it to us to spend time with these things, tinker with them, and detail the house to accept them," Seth says of the salvaged materials and components that he and Emilie would often assemble into place themselves. 

Sweat equity didn’t figure so largely into their original vision for their home in the Black Pearl neighborhood though. "Then the pandemic hit and we were all stuck inside, and it was kind of maddening," Seth recalls. "We have two kids we love dearly, but also they were a two- and a four-year-old and it was hard to be inside for months on end." For relief, the parents would swap childcare and construction tasks on alternating days. "It was therapeutic, scrubbing off a tile or hammering blocking into a wall," he adds.

For the terra-cotta wall, Emilie and Seth sourced the tiles from a resident of Houma, Louisiana, who had removed them from his roof and advertised them on Facebook Marketplace. After carting approximately 3,000 mold- and moss-covered pieces back to New Orleans, those that didn’t endure the trip were set aside for crushing into driveway and garden substrate. The survivors underwent dunking and scrubbing, and because these tiles were not uniformly sized, Emilie and Seth sorted them by width and height to arrange them in a stacked-bond pattern. The rows mounted to the building like a typical rainscreen, with the spacers separating terra-cotta from the weather barrier fashioned from discarded polypropylene yard signs.

Near the front door, the terra-cotta tiles appear to pull apart, creating some visual communication across the entryway. "We cut the tiles in narrower strips so we could play with that porosity idea," Emilie notes, and they were subsequently installed in a steel frame whose horizontal members aligned to the existing courses. For screen and rainscreen alike, Emilie and Seth reused holes that had been pre-drilled into the tiles for roof applications.

 "The terra-cotta was cheap on its face, but it required a heck of a lot of time, labor, and intention," Emilie reflects. "I think a lot of reuse, or even using new materials in unique ways, requires a lot of love."

Which didn’t stop her and Seth from repeating the process elsewhere, at scales large and small. The couple, who also run the creative studio Colectivo, discovered a spiral staircase on the site of a renovation project elsewhere in New Orleans. Looking past the treads’ unappealing shag carpet, Emilie and Seth found that the stair could fit the vertical space between their backyard and second-floor balcony almost perfectly. They dismantled the stair into parts, transported it to Black Pearl for stripping and repainting, ingeniously reassembled the stairs via rotation, and rewelded the spiral back into a whole. Meanwhile, they also repurposed 1860s-era barge planks from their former residence into a record cabinet. 

"We’re constantly costuming—and looking at stuff in a scrapyard definitely engages the same part of our brains," Seth says. Emilie further likens it to an homage to New Orleans inventiveness overall.

What the architects don’t claim? That intercepting the waste stream represents the next must-have in sustainable design. "I hear a lot of questions about sustainability and the cost of reuse. How can we get to a more universal adoption of reuse when it requires so much individualized attention and care?" as Emilie explains. "The way I think about it is that everything we do through the design process is meant to repair or improve a site and have a larger benefit. If others were to do the same, then there would be some collective good."

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