Artifact Studio is an interdisciplinary design studio based in California. Our services span interiors, installation, product, and vintage finds.
Practice
How we work
Memory
Every place already holds a story. We recognize it in the architecture, in worn kitchen flooring or in the markings on a door frame, and in a material's history. We keep what has generational history, and we choose new materials and objects that wear in rather than wear out.
Feeling
We design nostalgia: that sense of having been somewhere before, even on a first visit. From the lighting on the walls to the texture on the door handle, we design for the feeling a guest carries home, not just the photos they take.
The unexpected
Then we add one thing you didn't see coming. It's enough to make you look twice, and never so much that the room stops feeling like somewhere you belong.
Ethos
John Ruskin wrote that a building’s greatest glory is in its age. We would add that age only survives when someone chooses to keep it.
Every building is a relic. Its walls, its doors, its windows, the window seat where someone once sat to people watch: each is an artifact of the lives that passed through. These artifacts were made by hands, and over time they came to hold meaning. Our work is to keep that meaning legible: to preserve what has been and make the old new again.
We don’t erase the past to make room for the present. We make room for both.