Love in Wood: Jean-Louis Boudreau, Josette Murphy and the fine art of redesigning a home rather than tearing it down
Jean-Louis Boudreau and Josette Murphy outside About:Space headquarters in El Segundo. Photo It all began, somewhat fatefully, one day in early 2004 at what would become a massive teardown site in the heart of El Segundo. Josette Murphy and Jean-Louis Boudreau had been neighbors for 10 years but they’d never met. She lived and worked in a 400 square-foot cottage on Grand Avenue. He had a woodworking and general contracting shop about 60 feet away, around the corner on Arena Street. Murphy was a young designer who’d spent the first seven years of her career with the revered architectural firm Gensler. During a 2001 sabbatical, she’d taken on a few home design projects for acquaintances, something apart from her regular work, which was all workplace design. She discovered three things: there was a growing market in the South Bay for home design, she loved the work and, perhaps most significantly, she was very good at it. So she launched her About:Space from her cottage. Boudreau was a self-taught carpenter and woodworker who’d discovered he also had a knack for general contracting. He’d hitchhiked from his native Montreal to the British Columbia coast as a young man with a guitar, a…
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