David Michael knows that environments shape well-being. Alongside a team of highly skilled artisans, Michael—the chief creative officer at San Diego–based multidisciplinary design studio Tecture—custom-crafts immersive spaces fueled by feel-good materials and meaningful accents. “We’re obsessed with intentional detailing and thoughtful contrasts,” he tells Business of Home.
Raised in Southern California, he was taught to be hands-on with repairs from an early age. By the time he was teenager, he was fixing cars and handling small renovation projects around the house, and eventually landed a job working at a local boat carpentry shop. “The figure-it-out mindset my parents instilled in me has shaped the way I’ve worked ever since,” says Michael.
He went on to earn a master’s degree from the NewSchool of Architecture & Design in San Diego, where he met friends and future business partners Slade Fischer and Kyle Preish. “We started Tecture in the summer of 2012 in Slade’s garage,” he says. “At the time, the architecture and fabrication worlds were still deep in a post-recession slump, so we began by building small pieces for our former instructors and friends.”
Within a year of launching, the firm scored its first major project—a trendy restaurant in Pacific Beach—and more commissions came flooding in, including an installation for the San Diego International Airport. “We started with wood and metalwork, and with every new project, we’ve expanded both our tools and our capabilities,” says Michael.
Today, Tecture is a 33-person operation, complete with a technical design team and a project management arm. “We have a full woodshop, a metal fabrication shop, CNC and fiber laser digital fabrication, a dedicated upholstery team, and a full finishing booth with an adjacent prep space,” says Michael. “We also have an in-house team that specializes in complex installations—especially in high-end hospitality and commercial environments.”
The team at Tecture can dream up and build just about anything. The zero-waste restaurant at Fox Point Farms in Encinitas, for instance, is constructed from locally reclaimed woods and features everything from a greenhouse-inspired glass-paneled ceiling to a stone bar with dried herbs infused into the resin countertop. Meanwhile, in nearby Torrey Pines, they fashioned a custom three-dimensional paper wallcovering from cut-up investors’ reports for the lobby of a real estate equity firm.
Another memorable installation was for a local waterside restaurant in the upscale La Jolla neighborhood. The clients wanted the backsplash of the bar to evoke the soft, fluid movement of seaweed, so Tecture steam-bent strips of white ash wood into a wave-like structure that supports hundreds of pounds of liquor bottles. “We keep pushing the idea that the more control you have over the details, the better the end result,” says Michael. “By combining design and fabrication under one roof, we maintain creative control from concept to completion in a way that keeps the details sharp and the work inspiring.”
Currently hard at work on a handful of restaurant builds, Tecture is also in the final stages of installing a large-scale wall art display inside a San Diego office building. “Growth comes from trying new things, and we’re not afraid to experiment in new processes, so long as we can still deliver the quality we expect of ourselves,” says Michael.
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