This Bicoastal Design Duo Marries Architecture and Landscape Design
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Jonathan Chesley and Alexandria Donati were life partners prior to becoming business partners—but their creative pursuits always paralleled. Before launching KTISMAstudio, which is based in Brooklyn, New York, and Ojai, California, he worked at Selldorf Architects, she at Miranda Brooks Landscape Design. Now, the husband-and-wife team says, "Every design we engage with is considered through the lens of architecture and landscape. Together, we imagine merging the built and natural worlds to bring beauty and connectedness to people’s lives."
Their creative pursuits started at a young age. "My grandparents had a very special terraced San Francisco garden that I helped with—I called it “my secret garden,” recalls Alexandria, who found landscape architecture in college. "The design education crafted my process but continually coming back to my childhood in gardening keeps me rooted in plants, the medium with which we paint." Jonathan, for his part, always loved drawing but followed a more "circuitous route, studying the classics, literature, philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics, and finally fine arts—back to drawing as well as finding passion in photography and spatial art." Eventually, he found architecture.
Their aim, as a professional couple, is to create spaces that are "comfortable, beautiful, meaningful, and joyous." And their working relationship supports this goal: "We are one another’s greatest critics and deepest admirers."
House Beautiful: What project are you the proudest of and why?
Jonathan Chesley and Alexandria Donati: Our house addition and gardens in Sag Harbor, because it captures all aspects of our practice, the thoughtful union of old and new architecture, building and landscape.
HJ: What’s your favorite room—anywhere, of all time—and why?
AD: My favorite indoor room is Monet’s kitchen at Giverny, and my favorite outdoor room is the Teatro di Verdura verde at Parco Villa Reale Marlia in Lucca, Italy.
JC: My favorite room is the main reading room at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. The scale and proportions are perfect, the integration of materials—books, wood, cast iron, masonry and glass—into the form and function of the space is a beautiful example of the overlapping elements of design.
HB: What’s your favorite... item to collect?
JC & AD: Plants, pottery/ceramics, books
HB: ...paint color?
JC & AD: Farrow and Ball Ammonite for interior, Strong White for exterior painted furniture.
HB: ...travel destination?
JC & AD: Italy—for family, food, design, fashion, and of course gelato.
HB: ...decor item you buy from Amazon or Etsy?
JC & AD: We tend to buy a lot of vintage lights and unique hardware on Etsy
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