Esther Howard

Esther started the studio in 2008 out of a converted garage in Echo Park, with one client and a borrowed plan chest. The practice now runs around thirty projects a year and she still takes the first meeting on most of the large ones.

What she works on

Her own project list leans toward adaptive reuse: buildings with a previous life that need a new one without erasing what was there. Warehouses into workplaces, a mid-century clinic into apartments, a 1920s bungalow brought up to how a family lives now.

• Adaptive reuse and heritage-sensitive renovation
• Whole-house projects where structure and interior are one problem
• Design review and the studio’s internal critique sessions
• Mentoring, which she treats as the actual succession plan

The founding argument

The studio exists because Esther got tired of projects where the interior was treated as a layer applied after the building was finished. Her position is that the plan, the structure and the finish are a single decision made at three scales.

You cannot decorate your way out of a bad plan. Fix where the walls are and the rest of the job becomes almost easy.

She chairs a fortnightly critique where every live project is put in front of the whole studio, including the ones going badly. It is the practice she is most protective of, on the grounds that a scheme nobody has argued with has not been designed yet.

Esther sits on the board of a local housing nonprofit and takes one pro bono community project a year.