The precision-machined brass bars lining the base of Mimi Jung and Brian Hurewitz’s Pepto-pink sofa? They’re a doggie jail. At least they were, conceptually speaking, intended to be; the couple lives with three dogs in Los Angeles’s Mt. Washington neighborhood, and Truffle, the most diminutive of the bunch, necessitated the arrangement. “If you give her six inches of space underneath anything, she’ll steal things from around the house and drag them in there,” says Jung. “I wanted to make a couch that had prison bars for her, so she couldn’t get in.” Granted Jung started out sketching metal poles and wound up creating a system of stunning, diagonally canted fins that subtly shift in appearance depending on one’s vantage point, but the sofa overall was — like much of Brook & Lyn’s work — designed to serve very specific, very personal needs. Since they moved from Brooklyn to L.A. a year and a half ago, Jung and Hurewitz have been populating the studio’s portfolio with pieces they’ve created for themselves, and their new home.
Even the home itself is an intensely personal creation. When they first purchased the secluded property — partly because, after living in New York, they were craving privacy and yard space for the dogs — it had recently been renovated by its previous owner. But “he didn’t have great taste,” says Jung. “The floors were stained cherry,” adds Hurewitz. “The whole kitchen ceiling was cherry. It was ugly.” The pair ripped out the previous renovations in favor of doing their own, complete with new pale-wood floors throughout and an entirely new kitchen. When they couldn’t find a range hood they liked, they designed their own sculptural, hammertone-finish version themselves, from scratch. They lived without a sofa for more than a year until they dreamed up the aforementioned pink one. And they spent nine months looking for the perfect slab of marble to top their custom dining table, eventually stumbling on a unique variety called crazy ghost. Next, they’re overhauling the landscape design of their two backyards, and possibly redoing their bedroom and bathroom as well.
The process has been long and exacting, thanks to Jung and Hurewitz’s habit of insisting that everything be done right, and precisely how they envision it. But the results, as seen in the slideshow at right, have consistently been worth it — the same can be said of Jung’s separate textile-weaving practice, and of Brook & Lyn’s client work, which includes furniture and interiors for various outposts of the business and tech school General Assembly. Aside from those qualities, there’s one other that not only spans all of Jung and Hurewitz’s personal and professional projects, but their individual preferences as well: an aversion to anything too cluttered or complicated, hence their museum-like home decor. “We like things simple and clean, as cliché as those words are,” says Hurewitz.
The living area of Mimi Jung and Brian Hurewitz, who collaborate on a furniture practice called Brook & Lyn. Each room in the Los Angeles home they purchased a year and a half ago is spare and gallery-like, with a single focal point — in this case, the couple’s newly designed pink sofa, its brass-bar base originally imagined as prison bars to keep their smallest dog from crawling in.
Truffle, the dog in question. He’s one of three that share Jung and Hurewitz’s secluded hilltop house, which they bought partly because it has both a back and side yard for the dogs to run around in. Other reasons: “When we moved in we knew we were going to work from home, so we needed it to feel calm and peaceful,” says Hurewitz. Adds Jung: “I like everything white, a lot of light. There’s a window almost in every wall here, so it just feels really spacious and bright.”
Hurewitz and Jung at their dining room table. When they first met, in New York, Hurewitz was working as an art director for a Swedish digital agency and Jung was a book and exhibition designer hired to freelance on his team (she was also making jewelry, which was the original iteration of Brook & Lyn). “We both had past lives,” he says. “My background was in talking about other people’s products. I never thought about making my own things.”
Not only does Hurewitz now make his own things, most of the things the couple have made together have been for themselves and their home, starting with the Rya Bench, the first piece visitors see upon entering. It’s also the first Brook & Lyn furnishing to incorporate Jung’s weaving. The planter is vintage, but the pair have had so much trouble finding large pots they like that their next project to create one.
The pink vase placed on top of it, just so, is also vintage. “It’s incredibly difficult to find pink ceramics, either vintage or contemporary,” notes Jung. “This piece took me well over 3 years to locate.”
Just beyond the entry hall is the living room, its relative emptiness even more visible in this shot. “I think we would only put in a large sculpture or a big lounge chair at this point and be done,” says Jung. “We like to live very bare.” Adds Hurewitz: “I think in that way we have the same taste. I don’t like crazy things. I don’t like clutter.”
The works they have allowed into their decor all have a highly sculptural, highly considered feel. These two chairs in the living room, for example, are vintage, but Jung and Hurewitz elevated them into something of an art piece by adding sheets of blue insulation they salvaged from a Blue Apron delivery box. “We loved the colors, so we kept it,” says Jung.
A close up of the weaving above it, which is an unfinished test piece from Jung’s solo textile practice. While she initially worked from the house, she recently rented a spacious studio in Downtown L.A. where she’s begun making large-scale weavings on an 11×20-foot loom. Hurewitz doesn’t partake, himself. “I wish you would weave, though,” Jung said to him the day we visited, to which he replied, “I tried. I wasn’t good at it.” Added Jung: “You have to be really patient.”
Another Jung moment in the living room: an installation made from string wrapped around two rows of more than 500 tiny nails.
They also made their coffee table, essentially just a glass box. “We wanted to make a table that wouldn’t cover the brass bars under the sofa, because we put so much effort into them,” explains Jung. “We wanted the most minimal table possible that was translucent.” The cotton basket is by their friend Doug Johnston, who was a guest at the house shortly after they purchased and gutted it. He even helped them relocate their washer and dryer.
A book about the famed textile artist Sheila Hicks, one of Jung’s icons. “Fiber arts are not my background,” she says. “I studied fine art — anything related to craft was less than encouraged in my school. When I came across Sheila Hicks’s work it was the first time I learned how those two worlds could successfully collide. She encouraged my current use of this medium.”
These cones are the first project Jung and Hurewitz ever made in wood. “The rock is from our trip to Colorado,” says Jung. “We fell in love with the place and one day would like to own a home there as well.”
A ceramic sculpture by Masanobu Ando.
A view of the underside of the pink sofa, with its brass bars.
A vintage ceramic vase next to the sofa, one of the home’s few midcentury moments. During our visit, when we complimented Jung and Hurewitz on its interiors, a modicum of skepticism slipped out. “Well, everyone’s into midcentury everything in L.A.…” said Jung, and Hurewitz finished, “So when people come to our house and say ‘it’s nice,’ sometimes we can’t tell if they really mean it.”
Jung also demurred when we complimented the mobile that hangs over the sofa, asking whether she’d ever considered making multiples for sale. “The first jewelry collection I had was made with those agate pieces, and it’s a nice reminder of how it all started, but they’re, like, drycleaner hangers,” she laughed.
In general, the pair haven’t quite come up with a business model for what to do with the custom pieces they’ve made for themselves. “Are we interested in repeating them? Or is each just a one-off? We’re still figuring it out,” says Hurewitz. Pictured: Truffle and “her lover, the pig,” says Jung, along with a horse-shaped Frederick Weinberg birdcage from the ’50s.
One of the most interesting custom-made moments in Jung and Hurewitz’s house is their range hood. They searched for months for an existing model they liked, but nothing seemed right, so they created their own. “When Mimi said, ‘Let’s make it,’ I thought she was crazy,” says Hurewitz. “But then it became super fun to figure out how to make a range hood. What do they do? How can you hide it?” The design they settled on is asymmetrical and coated in a hammertone finish. “Making something really sculptural felt right, versus something you’d see and say, ok, that’s a range hood,” he says.
The hood was only one small part of their complete custom kitchen overhaul. “The old kitchen was like one of those Home Depot… it was just horrible,” says Hurewitz. “We totally ripped it out,” says Jung. “Everything was the opposite of where it is now.”
A sculpture the pair commissioned from ceramicist Linda Lopez.
The dining room, again. The pendant lamp is by Johnston and the painting by Michael Eudy, who did a residency at Cooper Union, where Jung went to school. The table was another custom creation — it’s topped with a 500-pound slab of rare marble called “crazy ghost” that’s so soft, if it’s placed on a surface that’s not perfectly level, it will crack instantly. The pair recently created a more saleable version of the table with a Corian surface.
The underside of the table features wooden legs that were inspired by surfboards they saw propped in the sand at Huntington Beach.
Another Johnston light hangs over the small room behind the kitchen, which used to be Jung’s weaving studio before she took the space Downtown. Now it’s in limbo. “We’re thinking of putting a TV there, because we don’t have that cozy frumpy room,” says Hurewitz. “Or designing our own gym.”
One of the only things in the room when we visited was this. “I collect natural elements from different parts of L.A. to use them for my Shadow Series,” says Jung. “I’ve created three woven pieces thus far, one for every year I’ve lived in L.A. I hope to finish the series with ten total, as an homage to my life here.”
Every corner of the house seems to feature some kind of small curated installation, like this vintage ashtray placed next to a large cluster of air-filtering binchotan charcoal.
Hanging on one wall in their kitchen is this metal hook, which was a gift from one of their metal fabricators.
Two of Brook & Lyn’s hand-turned walnut Hand Mirrors, which they created last year in an edition of 18.
A ceramic object by the couple’s good friend Julianne Ahn, of Object + Totem. Having pieces made by friends around the house makes it feel even more personal, so much so that Jung admits: “If I could work from home forever I would,” she says. “I basically never want to go outside my house.”
If you were familiar only with Uhuru’s work, it would be enough to surmise that the Brooklyn-based furniture designers are experts at creating something beautiful from practically nothing. (The formal term for this, we’re told, is up-cycling.) In the half-decade since RISD grads Jason Horvath and Bill Hilgendorf have been designing their own line, they’ve produced chairs from Kentucky bourbon barrels, loungers from the Ipe wood planks of a demolished Coney Island boardwalk, and scrapwood stools so stylish they were recently picked to decorate the café at New York’s SANAA-designed New Museum. But while it's true Uhuru are a resourceful bunch, step into their sprawling Red Hook studio and any assumptions you might have about their bootstraps process all but disappear.
When Egg Collective launched their debut furniture collection at ICFF in 2012 — snagging a Best New Designer award in the process — they seemed to the design world to have come out of nowhere. And in fact, though the three — Stephanie Beamer, Crystal Ellis, and Hillary Petrie — met and began collaborating as 18-year-old freshmen at Washington University's architecture school more than a decade ago, the truth is they had formally joined forces and had begun crafting an ICFF plan only six months earlier. "I remember the three of us sitting outside the Javits Center in our Budget truck, about to move in furniture that we’d been working on with no one having seen for six months," says Beamer. "I was like, you guys, this is it. People could just walk by us the entire fair. But thankfully we seem to have struck a chord and the work resonated."
Brian Eno is playing, green tea is brewing, and there are half-finished projects and prototypes stacked up ’round the place. I could be in any East London live-work space. But as I talk more to my hosts — Marc Bell and Robin Grasby of the emerging London design firm International — I realize there’s something simple that sets these two Northumbria grads apart from the thousands of hip creatives populating this corner of the city. They started the studio a year or so back, with the intention of doing something a little out of fashion in the design world: “Our approach is quite commercial,” admits Grasby. “We are looking to create a mass-produced product.” Yes, he’s used the c-word — and it wasn’t crafted. By opting for production, rather than taking advantage of London’s buoyant collectors’ market, the two are aware they’re taking a tougher route. Bell puts it plainly: “Rather than shapes we enjoy making or colors we like, our designs really are function-led.” Their work always seems to boil down to intended use, and at this stage they aren’t interested in seeing their pieces in galleries. But while there have only been a handful of designs released to date, International have been getting the right kind of attention.
