Alejandro D’Acosta’s La Escuelita -- a wine school and olive oil factory in the Guadalupe Valley.
D’Acosta sorts through a mountain of plastic bottles at La Escuelita. “They make good insulation,” he says. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)
D’Acosta used olive oil filters in a concentric circle pattern on the exterior of a building at La Escuelita in the Guadalupe Valley. “Garbage can be something really beautiful,” says D’Acosta. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)
D’Acosta inspects a rusted box spring and thinks of its next life. “The material already has a soul. When you transform it to the next step, it has its original soul and also gets a new one, so you maximize its use,” explains D’Acosta. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)
Advertisement
D’Acosta recycles rusted box springs, creating a magical open-air building where mescal is distilled at La Escuelita. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)
D’Acosta used recycled barrel staves for the walls of the new wine tasting room at La Escuelita in the Guadalupe Valley. “When I look at basura -- trash -- I see proportions ... geometry. I see its soul,” he says. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)
Wine-making students hold a tasting to sample their latest efforts in D’Acosta’s building, whose facade is composed entirely of old wine bottles. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)
Although everyone else see piles of trash, D’Acosta -- like a modern-day Don Quixote -- sees only treasures. Here, he inspects a piece of discarded plastic and imagines what it will become in its second life. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)
Advertisement
The architects’ signature fence of palos — discarded pieces of wood from construction sites — resembles so many pick-up sticks. The fence marks the entry to the El Viento site and models of the property. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)
Architect Claudia Turrent arranges bottles in a recycled trailer on the El Viento property that showcases wines from the Guadalupe Valley. The interior of the trailer is covered -- floor, walls and ceiling -- with oriented strand board. Turrent is designing a series of trailers -- outfitted with different products from the wine valley -- in a deli market by the sea. The compact trailer store is inexpensive at $1,500, took only one month to transform, “and it’s recycled,” says Turrent. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)
In a colorful adaptive reuse, D’Acosta and Turrent recycled a former hotel and brothel into their current office, Tac-Arquitectos, which overlooks the port of Ensenada. The Bar del Pacifico just below their offices is still open for business.
To see Part I of this package, a tour of D’Acosta and Turrent’s bohemian coastal home made largely of salvaged materials, click to our photo gallery. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)
