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Every time he’s in New York, designer Andreas Stavropoulos makes a point of stopping by the Noguchi Museum to admire the multi-disciplinarian artist’s work. “I’m
inspired by the degree to which he was able to work in a lot of different media: landscape, architecture, sculpture. He was also an incredible collaborator with artists
from many genres,” says Stavropoulos. But Stavropoulos might as well be talking about his own work, which runs the gamut from designing landscapes and interiors
as a principal of XS Land in Berkeley to building aesthetically pleasing chicken coops and teaching design at Yestermorrow Design Build School in Vermont.
A landscape architect by education (his MLA is from UC Berkeley) and trade, Stavropoulos was frustrated with the limitations conventional offices had on his
profession. “I had this idea that I should be spending more time on the actual site, looking at the land and getting to know it in a way that’s different from ‘billable
hours,’” he says. “There was a significant mental and physical difference between the office and the site, to the extent that I felt it was hampering creativity and
morale.” In turn, he devised a plan, stripping and customizing an old Airstream and trailer to serve as his living and working spaces, tricking them out by hand with
solar panels, Myfi, nontoxic paints and custom cabinetry. The mobility allows him to linger at sites and consider their rhythms in a way that occasional visits never
could. The trailer has won national notice and inadvertently doubles as a portfolio piece: on the merits of his immaculate and thoughtful renovations, Stavropoulos
has been hired to design the headquarters for Twilio in San Francisco.
Stavropoulos’ appreciation for enduring craftsmanship dates back to childhood, when his family spent summers in a small village in Greece. “Running around these
8,000-year-old streets I experienced a tactile, rich and quality-built world that created a social atmosphere very different from what we typically have in this country,”
he says. “It came from an era with different values, when the life expectancy of every project was forever.” As an undergraduate at Dartmouth, he began building
things that engaged directly with the environment: a pair of snowshoes, a boat, and a teepee in which he took up residence during his senior year. “In retrospect, one
of the reasons I was so happy was because that structure allowed the outside world to come in,” he says. “I could see exactly what time of day it was, what the trees
were doing, if they had leaves, what the sky was like. It had a proximity, transparency and permeability that I really appreciated.”
A pair of current projects illustrate Stavrapoulos’ philosophy of applying slow-design tactics to very different challenges. A landscape job on a site formerly occupied
by the Southern Pacific railway trail will repurpose old basalt, steel and heavy timber into new elements like seating arbors and a seesaw made out of an old rail line.
And for the Twilio gig, he’s collaborating with a local artisan to fabricate lighting out of salvaged phone equipment, a riff on the company’s telephone-web business.
“I’m incredibly excited to show that the design skills I have aren’t limited to one particular medium,” Stavrapoulos says, pointing out that considerations like lighting
and circulation are the same in both outdoor and interior projects. “It’s worthwhile to have expertise in one thing, but the fun is really in the learning of new things.”
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Story: Caroline McCloskey
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