THE ENGINE BEHIND 22RE

Dean Levin didn’t intend to start an architecture studio, though he did train as an architect at Pratt. In his twenties, over twelve years in New York, he built a successful career as a visual artist. Then, the pandemic hit. He moved back to Los Angeles — Levin was born in Johannesburg but raised in Southern California — bought a house in the Hollywood Hills, and started pulling it apart. When he started to post fragments of the renovation work on his Instagram, friends began asking if he could build them some furniture or help in other ways with their own spaces. “At first it was one-off things,” he relays. “Then a couple of full homes. By the time I hired my first employee, it was clear this was becoming a studio.” In 2021, the studio was officially inaugurated 22RE. In the years since, the practice has quickly grown into a hybrid practice working across architecture, interiors, and furniture, with a reputation for site-sensitive, detail-oriented work.

That first project — his own house — was almost an accident. When Levin walked into an open house during the height of the pandemic, the broker turned out to be someone he knew from high school. The house had good bones, designed by an architect who had once worked with A. Quincy Jones. Levin took to it with a hammer, less out of necessity — though he does say it required some work — and more because he discovered his own enthusiasm for the architectural process. “I found myself spending all day working on the house,” he says. “At the time, I was still showing art. But I couldn’t stop.”

22RE grew from these origins, the name of which comes from the engine in Levin’s Toyota pickup — the first thing he bought after returning to L.A. “Every surfer’s dream is to throw a board in the back and head to the beach,” he tells me. 22RE engines are durable, unflashy, long-lasting — qualities the studio aspires to in its work. He considers naming his practice as a break from the eponymous naming (and related individualism) typical of the art world but less intrinsic to architecture. “I wanted to build something collaborative,” he says. “Everyone at 22RE has their own projects. It’s collaborative by design.”

When Levin studied architecture before finding success as an artist, he imagined a practice built on sharp edges, something closer to European Postmodernism than L.A. revivalism. “I thought I was going to be doing glass boxes,” he admits. “Instead, we’re working on 1927 Spanish homes.” The shift came from the city itself. “You work with what’s here. And honestly, the Spanish Revival stuff is beautiful,” he tells me, though he insists he’s not doing restoration. What matters to Levin is not preservation but extension, mainly in detail and weight: thickening walls to give them gravity, inserting vaults that feel structural rather than decorative. You’re not supposed to know where the old house ends and the new one begins. “But if you look closely, the conceptual layer reveals itself,” he says. He is not interested in signaling newness for its own sake. “But we do want the work to feel considered,” he says.

The studio builds plaster over 3D prints, layers materials, and emphasizes thickness. “The thicker the wall, the more serious the room feels.” He describes digital and tactile processes as inseparable. Everything is modeled in Rhino: “No Revit. No AI. Our drawings are our contracts. They have to communicate the intention.” These drawings are informed by influences that are wide-ranging but coherent. “I honestly believe the Japanese invented Modernism,” Levin says. “There’s so much in that lineage — proportions, restraint, material logic.” He mixes that with Italian furniture traditions and Californian craft. “It’s not about nostalgia,” he tells me. “It’s about care.”

Furniture plays a large role in how the firm differentiates itself. “We do a lot of vintage sourcing — Italian, French, American. But we make most of it ourselves: tables, chairs, sconces,” he says. Levin treats furniture as an extension of the building. “We design it to live in the architecture, not just to fill a space.” In some projects, the studio designs everything down to the cutlery. “If the client lets us, we go all the way.”

Take for example Day Job, an office project for a creative agency in a converted warehouse, designed as if it were a home. “We broke it up into zones — living room, dining room, bedroom, kitchen. Not literally, but in terms of feeling,” Levin says. The conference room became a dining room. The desk cluster became a living room. “The whole thing is about domestic scale. We wanted to soften the boundaries,” he continues. “People spend more time [at the office] than at home.”

The ghosts of Levin’s former career linger in his architectural approach. He insists that each project is treated like an exhibition. “Every project is a show. Every detail is intentional,” he tells me. This applies as much to a restaurant as it does to a private residence. In one recent project, 22RE extended a 1920s Spanish home by 2,000 square feet, inserting new arches and windows that echo the old without imitating them. “We thickened everything to make it feel like it was actually built in Spain, not just a thin-walled L.A. interpretation,” he relays.

Levin also points out the fiction embedded in L.A.’s built environment as a source of inspiration for the studio. “A lot of people don’t realize how much Spanish architecture in L.A. was designed by set decorators,” he says. “You have to understand the fiction in order to work with it.” For Levin, riding this line is the task for a contemporary L.A. architecture studio. After all, set decorator-designed fantasies are now approaching their centennials; the perennial newness of the city is itself historical at this point.

To enact these fantasies, the studio works closely with fabricators — many of whom are their neighbors. “We know the fabricators. We make the shop drawings. We understand how things go together,” Levin says. The hands-on approach, he believes, protects both design integrity and client expectations. “We tell clients to build in a 20% contingency. Prices change every six weeks. You can’t romanticize the process. You have to be honest.”

This play between real and fiction, old and new tethers the practice together. Levin tells me that he doesn’t want the studio to be reducible to any single gesture. “I don’t want a trademark window detail,” he says. “I want to make rooms people don’t want to leave.” That means light handled carefully, finishes chosen for longevity, spaces designed to slow people down. Asked about a dream commission, Levin is quick to answer: “A church,” he says. “Or a synagogue. Something sacred.”