Johnston Marklee

Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, founders of Los Angeles-based architecture firm Johnston Marklee, are as fascinated by the history of furniture as that of architecture. Their work takes a contextual approach that is attentive to the dynamic between a structure, the rooms within it, and the elements within the room.

“Design is about scale, orientation, and proportion,” says Johnston. “We always like to test that relationship between the body, the furniture, and the architecture as a kind of conversation.” The formal design language Johnston Marklee uses to shape that conversation revolves around sculpted forms—how space structures itself into volumes, voids, and curvatures, and how light and shadow animate them.

Since founding their firm in 1998, Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee have taken on projects of varying scales and uses, from cultural and educational institutions to private homes and commercial spaces. These include the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas; the UCLA Graduate Art Studios campus in Culver City, California; Vault House in Oxnard, California; and Dropbox Global Headquarters in San Francisco, California.

Their work is collected by international museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Architecture Museum of TU Munich. Johnston Marklee has been recognized nationally and internationally with more than 40 awards, including the Richard Neutra Award for Professional Excellence in 2024. A monograph on the firm’s work was published in 2016 by Birkhauser.