The Artful Lodger

Photography by Keeney + Law

Only a few tenets govern Compound 21, a small artists’ complex in the Mission District (somewhere, as the residents describe it, between an El Tonayense taco truck and Atlas Café), but as I wheel my bicycle through the bright-red barn doors, I don’t realize that I am about to break cardinal rule numero uno.

However, I refuse to take responsibility for the infraction. When I greet Andy Diaz Hope—the conceptual artist who founded Compound 21 in 1998 after the dot-com insanity forced him out of the 10,000-square-foot live/work SoMa warehouse he shared with close artist friends—he fails to tell me that, after much strife among the members of this community, bikes parked in the tiny courtyard are a no-no, along with ignoring a dirty community sink and leaving dog poop or cigarette butts unattended (more on rules of the unspoken variety later).

“May I lean my bike here?” I ask, pointing to a small bench next to the algae-thick fountain where Hope and his girlfriend, sculptor Laurel Roth, “reintroduced” California’s native tree frog into an urban environment using tadpoles embezzled from a top-secret location otherwise known, Roth says, as “a pond in Northern California.”

“Sure, there’s fine …,” Hope mumbles, as he gazes wistfully through the doors at the vacant bike rack he installed eight months ago on the sidewalk. Fargo, Hope’s aging blue heeler, releases a canine groan. (“That bike rack isn’t a city thing,” says Hugh D’Andrade, a resident of Compound 21. “It’s an Andy thing.”)

The very concept of “an Andy thing” implies that the Stanford-educated engineer and award-winning furniture designer might have tyrannical tendencies, as artists who suffer madly for their craft often do (hello, Van Gogh!). In fact, tyrannical is hardly the word that comes to mind—handsome and easygoing are more on target, as well as, D’Andrade observes, “emotionally stable.”

Even when Hope tells me of the “communist period” at the aforementioned warehouse—a few short months when the resident artists worked to rebuild the formerly ramshackle structure in exchange for cheap rent—no visions of Stalin dance in my head. Instead, I get a sudden urge to live on a kibbutz in Israel.

“It’s good to start with a strong central government,” says Hope, who initiated a revival of the communist mind-set to rebuild Compound 21’s creaky 1890s Edwardian bones, including the addition of a roof deck and an overhaul of the central courtyard. “It helps everyone cultivate a sense of pride and ownership in the place.”

Of Compound 21’s ten member artists, four actually live on the premises in two stacked apartments: D’Andrade and his wife, painter Mati McDonough, have lived below Hope and Roth since 2004, when they answered a Craigslist ad that required them to produce, along with the usual application and references, their portfolios. “I want to make sure I respect the work of the people I live and work with,” says Hope. In an odd twist of fate, the apartment for which D’Andrade and McDonough were planning to sign a lease—before Compound 21 had surfaced on their radar—burned down the day after the couple decided to forgo it for a love nest and shared workspace (which they democratically divide using a strip of blue tape on the floor) behind the bright-red barn doors. “I’m the messier one,” McDonough laughs, “so if one of my canvases is even just a few inches over, Hugh will push it back.”