Austin Chu admits he is obsessed with Airstreams, those mid-century, sausage-shaped, silver aluminum trailers that are enjoying a renaissance of late, particularly among design aficionados.
Chu works at The Werehaus, a small creative production studio in San Francisco. He says his passion for the Airstream has been growing even more recently.
One day, Chu was browsing through the pages of Dwell.com and saw a story on Andreas Stavropoulos, a landscape architect from Berkeley who went to a derelict horse ranch in the Salinas Valley to buy a 1959 Airstream travel trailer. Stavropoulos parked the Airstream in the yard of a 1880s Berkeley farmhouse near the Gourmet Ghetto, and converted it into a beautiful studio.
Fascinated by Stavropoulos’s ingenuity and his creative DIY attitude, the Werehaus team decided to develop a short video piece around the development of his mobile workspace.
Stavropoulos, who holds a graduate degree in landscape architecture from UC Berkeley, founded Berkeley-based XS/LA Land Architects in 2009. He runs the company with colleagues Patricia Algara and Max Miller. The Werehaus enjoys telling stories about people and their communities. Their clients include Four Barrel Coffee, Bandwidth Publishing, and Will Leather Goods.
