In Los Angeles, a creative design collaboration yields a custom home studio for blind potter
The ceramics studio, designed by Knowhow Shop, behind Don Katz’ home in Los Angeles. For Don Katz, a typical day begins with a light breakfast at his home in Los Angeles before he heads to his backyard pool to swim a few laps. After a therapeutic soak in the spa, Katz prepares to go to work on his ceramics.
At 25, Katz lost his sight after bacterial meningitis put him in a monthlong coma and left him paralyzed. Doctors told him he would never walk again, but after years of rehabilitation and occupational therapy, Katz relearned how to walk, feed himself and adjust to his sightless reality. He even picked up some new hobbies along the way.
“I am mobility-impaired on top of my blindness, but I knew I could navigate the layout independently, and I thought I could replace the detached garage with a ceramics studio,” he said. “So I bought it sight unseen.” “Because we have our own fabrication studio, we could build models and communicate with Don in ways typical firms might not be able to,” Justin Rice, who founded Knowhow Shop in 2010 with Kagan Taylor, said on a video call. “We started with a generalized idea of how a blind person might communicate with us, but we quickly learned that Don has a very specific way of navigating and understanding the world.
Though they typically use drawings and physical models to render a design scheme, the partners worked only with media that Katz could feel and touch. Their first step was to build a model of the property that was 5 1/2 feet long — 75 percent larger than the scale they usually use. This ampleness allowed Katz to reach into the model and move around blocks representing his pottery wheel, kiln and furnishings to test different layouts.
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