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When Susan Nwankpa Gillespie began thinking about designing a home for her family, she faced a problem familiar to many emerging architects: She had big ideas but a limited budget.
“I really think design can be transformative,” said Ms. Nwankpa Gillespie, 43, “whether it’s for a company, a project with a spiritual idea or just making a home more beautiful and connected.”
Beyond having a great place to live, designing her own house would be an opportunity to express her unique take on design. “I benefited from having parents who really celebrated difference,” she said, noting that her father, who was an exchange student from Nigeria, met her mother, who has French-Canadian roots and grew up in New England, while attending college in Alabama, so she was raised in a multicultural household.
“That has informed my design approach, and I try to create beautiful things out of concepts and ideas that may not be standard,” she said.
One thing that was a little more standard, however, was a realization that she needed more living space after marrying Brian Gillespie, 51, a web designer, in 2017, and they began talking about starting a family.
At first, “I moved into his one-bedroom apartment,” she said, so they could save money to invest in a house of their own. “It’s no small thing to pay for life and then also try to pay for construction,” she noted.
In 2019, they added a daughter, Adanna, now 5, to their cramped quarters.
Searching for a place to build a home, they found a rundown house in Inglewood, Calif., that needed extensive work. “The house looked terrible,” Ms. Nwankpa Gillespie said. “We were really just competing against investors because the ceilings were falling down.”
They signed a contract to purchase the property for $720,000 in March 2020, expecting a quick sale. Then the pandemic hit and the tenant living in the house refused to move out. Stuck in their rental apartment, Ms. Nwankpa Gillespie poured herself into drawings of the family’s home-to-be before finally closing on the property a year-and-a-half later, in August 2021.
During that time, Ms. Nwankpa Gillespie completely reimagined the existing house while drawing inspiration from West African textiles, including a dress she owned as a teenager.
When she was able to begin construction, she reinforced the foundation before largely rebuilding the structure with an addition at the back to make room for a more generous kitchen, expanding the house from roughly 1,100 to 1,600 square feet.
She also demolished the old garage, and instead built an accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, of 840 square feet at the rear of the property to serve as her firm’s office and a guesthouse.
In deference to the home’s bungalow neighbors, Ms. Nwankpa Gillespie retained the general shape of the original house and rebuilt its roof of intersecting gables while simplifying its design with cleaner lines.
Where the old house was finished in siding, however, Ms. Nwankpa Gillespie chose stucco and black-and-white brick, which she applied with shifting patterns and high-contrast mortar, similar to her old dress.
With the dress, “the fabric was black, and there was a woven white, blocky, abstract pattern,” she said. “The fabric was a little bit waxy, and there was a bit of texture as well.”
In her house, the brick adds texture and “references this idea of a plain textile with a stitch,” she said. “Then we bring in actual pattern to create moments of feeling within the space.”
Inside, she kept the living, dining and kitchen areas wide open and sunny, with skylights and sliding glass doors. Materials including zellige tile, cement tile, terrazzo, terracotta and different varieties of natural stone all add more texture and visual interest. White oak cabinetry is finished with custom pulls inspired by African patterns.
Ms. Nwankpa Gillespie designed the ADU as more of a modernist box, with a flat roof and three pairs of glass doors that can be flung open to the yard when the weather is nice. To commute to her office, she walks through the garden, which the couple designed with low concrete retaining walls, drought-tolerant plants and a firepit.
The family moved into the house as soon as they could, in June 2023, even as contractors continued work around them. The job was complete at the end of 2023, at a cost of about $700,000.
Mr. Gillespie was happy to let his wife spearhead the design, while serving as a sounding board when she needed one. But even he is in awe of how the renovation worked out.
“It’s far beyond what I ever would have imagined you could do with the home,” he said. “And I’m even a designer.”
For Ms. Nwankpa Gillespie, using a favorite dress as inspiration for a house made perfect sense.
“The power of fashion is that it reflects how you want to feel about yourself,” she said, noting that building a dream home does the same thing. “And I think, frankly, you should feel fabulous.”
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