Northern California-born architects Peter Harper and Michael Breland didn’t follow a straight path back to the Golden State. They spent years moving across the country and abroad before returning to the West Coast, where the long-time couple started their eponymous architecture and design practice, Breland–Harper, in Los Angeles back in 2016.

Despite their training at New York firms, Columbia GSAPP, and, for Breland, a stint in Marfa, the duo’s practice resists the latter-day Modernist or minimalist tendencies that such an arc might imply. Their work spans eras and scales. Interiors are resplendent in both antique and contemporary fixtures. Residential revamps range from a low-slung, 19th-century adobe house to a floating multi-story mid-century pavilion. And while they often work with extant structures or on large-scale conversions, they’ve also undertaken plenty of new builds, including a 69,000-square-foot Santa Monica office building that’s a study in rawness and refinement, concrete and glass.

Throughout, classic materials like untreated wood, linen, and even concrete reveal themselves alongside luxe but never fussy furnishings and decor. Even in their most traditional projects, rigor and reduction remain at the core. Breland–Harper is driven less by a single aesthetic sensibility or design dogma than by a studied orientation toward richness in restraint and history as an always-circulating aspect of the present.

Adaptive reuse and preservation anchors many of their projects. But they’re not interested in fixing a moment in time, perhaps best evidenced in their landscape work, including the garden for their own 2013 home, which shifts with the seasons, welcoming weeds and other plants typically forced out. PIN–UP recently grabbed coffee with Breland and Harper to inquire about some fundamental terms.