Work from Home, Home from Work

Brian Rideout and Jess Carroll, photographed by Aaron Wynia, wake up every morning and walk their dog, which is when the line between home and work already begins to blur. During the hour-long stroll, they talk through their goals and projects for the week, though they don’t work “together together.” Jess runs a digital marketing agency focused on entertainment and television, while Brian is a painter with an eye for interiors and an obsession with art history—a shared obsession that fueled their first conversation about fifteenth-century painting fifteen years ago. “Our relationship was all really about art, always,” says Jess.

Self-proclaimed workaholics, the pair live and work together in their apartment in Toronto (which unbelievably, they note, has two bathrooms) and keep a studio in a converted two- story townhouse, primarily for Brian’s practice. Every day, Brian sends photos of his progress to Jess, who is also his editor and writer for residency applications, grants, and more. “Whenever I work on anything, I'm still just trying to impress you,” says Brian to Jess, who responds, “We think about each other a lot. I think we feel unique in how much we've managed to figure out a way that honors how we want to live.”

The feeling of a collector’s instinct permeates Jess and Brian’s home, decorated with objects that have found their way to them. Looking around, there are 1930s Royal Ontario Museum prints, hand-quilted curtains made by Jess from found textiles, and zines collected above the fireplace. “I feel like our house feels very us,” says Jess. “It's so funny, this apartment, no one wanted it. It sat on the market for a long time. And when we came in, we were like, ‘What? This rules.’”

Unlike other couples, Els Woldhek and Georgi Manassiev, photographed by Yeray Sabandar, don’t need to catch up over dinner at the end of a long day. The two designers live in an apartment with no walls and work out of a studio with no doors that is less than a minute’s walk from home. In the studio they dream up objects for their firm Odd Matter. When asked “the most dreaded question” about what Odd Matter is, they reluctantly call it a design practice (which makes it sound too much like what other designers do). And they’re right that the term doesn’t quite capture their work, which reveals the nebulous emotional presence of objects, in the home and elsewhere.

Space creates a strong separation between work and life, but as they move between these places together, little demarcates the distance between the two. Working so closely together doesn’t feel strange to them, however—they haven’t known it any other way. The duo met in college at the Royal College of Art in London. Just a year after graduating, they reconnected and began slowly collaborating as a couple. “It just makes things complicated for the better,” says Georgi. “Everything becomes more looked at, and more conscious.” They fill in each other’s blind spots in the studio: Els looks to Georgi “for the details,” while he looks to her, only half-jokingly, “for hope.”

The pair have two children, a one-and-a-half-year-old and a six-year-old. While reflecting on their space, they come to realize that both their studio and their home have no doors and therefore no real privacy. They look over at their six-year-old playing across the apartment and wonder if that’s why she becomes so easily engrossed in her own world—perhaps she evolved to creating her own space in her mind, building a mental room of her own. There’s “nowhere to hide,” says Els, prompting Georgi to say, “It’s like our relationship. It’s like, this is it.”