Shanna Gatanis spent fourteen months turning a 1950s block in Winter Park into a studio that behaves like a house. It stands in the same district where her practice began twenty years ago.
The address is 1318 Palmetto Avenue, in the Palmetto Grove district of Winter Park, Florida. The shell dates from the 1950s. Until recently it held three separate businesses. It now holds one, and the conversion took fourteen months.
Shanna Gatanis started her practice in this district about twenty years ago, then spent two decades working between Florida and New York. The new studio brings her back to the same few streets. She has said the return was a decision about energy as much as address.
The entrance is a circle. A round door is cut into a white curved wall, the house number set into the render beside it, a screen of breeze block running the length of the facade. Painted across the entry is a line borrowed from Nirvana, an invitation phrased as a permission. The geometry settles the terms before anyone speaks.
Inside, two thousand square feet are organized as rooms rather than as an open plan. A Drawing Room. A Record Lounge. A Kaleidoscope Conference Room. A Furniture Gallery. The naming is not decorative. Each room does one thing, and the sequence carries the argument.
The Record Lounge is where the logic reads clearest. A Technics turntable, Steinway speakers, an open fireplace, and a seating pit set low enough that visitors take their shoes off without being asked. The records run from The Clash to Nina Simone to Tupac. Before she designed anything, Gatanis worked as a roadie on tour with John Mellencamp, and what she took from those years is that music dissolves the distance between strangers faster than conversation does. The lounge is that observation, built.
Past the entry fireplace there is an upright piano painted the pink of a 1957 Chevrolet, and above it a neon sign carrying a Madonna line about dancing. In most interiors this would be the joke. Here it is the thesis, stated in the plainest material available.
The palette holds the rooms together without flattening them: curved breeze block, warm oak, lacquered millwork, blues and burgundy deep enough to absorb light rather than return it. Gatanis has described the balance between the 1950s shell and the sculptural work set inside it as the hardest part of the build. That tension is the reason the rooms do not read as a set.
The bar continues the same refusal. It replaces the presentation table with coffee and whatever happens to be playing, under a chandelier made for the room by Avram Rusu, above stools topped in sheepskin. Conversations there happen sideways rather than across, and that changes what gets said in them.
The Drawing Room is her own office and the room she names as closest to her point of view. It is also the room where the process is deliberately left open. Ideas start on paper and stay visible while they move. Clients see design before it resolves, which is a harder thing to offer than a finished rendering and a harder thing to sit with.
Twenty years is a long way to travel in order to arrive back on the street where you started. What Gatanis brought back is a building that declines to present work and asks people to spend an afternoon inside it instead. Coffee, a record already turning, shoes by the door.
1318 Palmetto Avenue, Winter Park.
Sources: Home&Decor, 12th Edition cover feature, text by Ana Beatriz Barros, photography by John Dantas and Michael Scott; Florida Division of Corporations; Shanna Gatanis Studio; Marie Claire Maison Arabia.
— The Home&Decor Editors