Concrete Cantilevered Desk

Architectoid · Los Angeles · Sheats-Goldstein Residence

Concrete That Cantilevers

A Custom Commission by Nicholson Architects for the Goldstein Residence

James Goldstein in his office at the Sheats-Goldstein Residence. Magazine spread, photographer unknown. Desk and office by Nicholson Architects.

There is a particular kind of discipline required when you are asked to add something permanent to a John Lautner house. Every line you draw is in conversation with the original — and with one of the most demanding architectural minds of the twentieth century. When Duncan Nicholson commissioned this cantilevered concrete desk for James Goldstein's office at the Sheats-Goldstein Residence, the brief was straightforward. The response was anything but.

I served as Project Architect on this commission, working under Duncan during Conner & Perry's early years of stewardship at the residence — a responsibility we have held since 2015. The desk is not furniture in any conventional sense. It is a structural installation, cast in place, designed to read as an extension of the architecture rather than an object placed within it.

One Pour, One Idea

The desk was executed as a single, continuous pour of board-formed concrete. No joints, no seams, no apology. The decision to pour monolithically was both structural and philosophical: any break in the material would have registered as a moment of doubt, and this piece does not doubt itself.

The cantilever rises from the floor — not from the wall. The base is the anchor: a heavy, textured mass that transfers load downward and allows the desktop slab to project into the room without any visible wall connection. It reads, at first glance, as an object that simply refuses to fall. Structural Engineer Andrew Nasser worked closely with the design to calibrate that relationship between base and span — the kind of calculation that disappears entirely when the work succeeds.

The cantilevered desktop in extension. Board-formed concrete, single continuous pour. Photo: James Perry.

A custom stainless steel credenza, fabricated by Breakform Design, runs alongside the concrete. The pairing is deliberate: the cool precision of the steel reads against the rough warmth of the board-formed surface, and together they establish the room's register — raw material handled with exacting intent.

Furniture as Architecture

The lineage here matters. Wright insisted that furniture was not ornament but organism — that a room was incomplete if the objects within it did not share its structural logic. Lautner extended that insistence into his interiors, where built-ins and integrated elements blur the line between what a building contains and what it is. This desk belongs to that tradition. It does not sit in the room. It grows from the wall.

Goldstein has never treated the residence as a museum piece. He commissions work, lives in the house, and expects it to continue developing. This desk is evidence of that approach — a permanent addition that holds its own in one of the most architecturally charged rooms in Los Angeles.

Detail: board-formed surface texture. Photo: James Perry.

View of the full assembly. Concrete and stainless steel. Photo: James Perry.

The Team

Architect
Duncan Nicholson

Project Architect
James Perry

Structural Engineer
Andrew Nasser

Contractor
Ostermann Construction

Metal Fabricator
Breakform Design

This desk is one chapter in an ongoing creative partnership — between a patron who demands that his house remain alive, an architect who knows it as well as anyone, and a team of fabricators willing to pour concrete where other designers would reach for a catalog. Conner & Perry continues to serve as architects of record at the Sheats-Goldstein Residence, and work like this is a reminder of why that stewardship matters: not to preserve the building in amber, but to keep it growing in the right direction.

ARCHITECTOID