Partnership info
Overview
- Type
- Brand Campaign
- Year
- 2023
Kelly Wearstler views a room and its contents as a single, indivisible design opportunity. Give her a vehicle and she begins to think of the room that holds it. When GMC introduced the HUMMER EV with LeBron James as its ambassador, Kelly saw a chance to build a house around a vehicle with James as the client, the truck as the room's sculptural centerpiece.
The Partnership
GMC invited Kelly to imagine the home a HUMMER EV would live in. Their design team walked her through the supertruck first, the premium interiors, the lighting, the clean architectural lines of the body, and those details became the starting point for the house she drew around it.
What we Created
Kelly ultimately designed a virtual garage in the Southern California desert, built to be lived in. It brings Brutalism and mid-century modernism together with a retro-futurist edge drawn from the science fiction of the 1960s and 70s: Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bronze meets desert on the outside. Inside, travertine, delta wood, and sand-colored plaster clad a room lit by angular skylights and anchored by a water feature. Cast glass carries the science fiction note on the elevators and the stairway, and aluminum on the columns refers back to the vehicle itself.
In the concept film, the HUMMER EV passes through bronze gates, down a sensor-lit canyon, and up a turntable lift into a living room furnished with Kelly's own Echo bench and Monolith side table, a Drill Vase by Erik Olovsson, a Loop Chair by Willy Guhl and an Etcetera Chair by Jan Ekselius. Vintage pieces sit alongside new ones, and the truck lives among them, parked in the room the way a large sculpture would be.
The quality of virtual design is so high now that you are starting to lose the boundary between the virtual and the real.
