Library is a minimalist interior project created by San Francisco-based architects Garcia Tamjidi Architecture Design. The designers made a breathtakingly minimalist project, visually spare and materially luxurious. A world of respite, rest, and repair. It was built for an entrepreneur. He wanted a library, and they gave him that: an unusual typology in our ever-connected world, but one that shows how a fundamentally essential program—learning, slowing down, reading—was front and center. The details: a geometrically evocative fireplace provides a visual anchor for the barn-like structure.

Built-in bookshelves offer a continuously-gridded backdrop (think Rosalind Krauss; Donald Judd; Richard Serra; the simplicity of the line) for the client’s carefully-curated collection of books, journals, and sculptures. Roughly-hewn floorboards provide a textural counterpoint to the seamless whiteness of the rest of the library, where modules of shiny and matte, slick and textured, create a rhythmic sense of musical counterpoint. Light is everywhere. It comes from above, the sides, below. The fireplace draws the eye in, and away. The shelves pull in, and deflect. The space is seamless, ethereal, and yet grounded. It is about the leveraged clarity of material, the play of light and shadow, the almost-disappearing detail that produces a space at once visually soothing and intellectually alive.

Photography by Joe Fletcher Photography