This spare, contemporary house in Beverly Hills—designed by Leonardo Umansky of Arxis Design Studio—stands out in a residential community renowned for traditional design and oversized statement structures. The clients, a mathematician and an artist, own a comprehensive operetta collection and required specific storage for it. Umansky designed 2,600 feet of built-in shelving for such odd-sized items as posters, vinyl records, sheet music, CDs, and cassettes.

Design concept and solution: The house is based on a centralized plan whose perimeter is fragmented by a media wall. Rather than concentrate the collection into one room, like an archive, the architects distributed the collection throughout the house based on item type. Each programmatic element within the house contains specific items of the collection. The media walls are organized into niche, partition, and freestanding walls.