The “good couch,” in Sol LeWitt’s studio. 
Sol LeWitt’s Italian studio has three rooms, including this one, primed for napping. 
Eva LeWitt could walk to her father’s studio from their home in Spoleto, Italy. 
Eva LeWitt making art in her father’s studio.
Eva LeWitt is an artist based in New York.
“The space that I’m talking about is my dad [Sol LeWitt]’s studio, located in Spoleto, a city in Umbria, where my sister and I were both born. It was my home base, and my dad’s home base. We spent every summer there growing up, and we’d go to the studio every day. It’s where we would spend the majority of our time.
We could walk there from our house—my dad never learned how to drive, so that was important. I used to walk to the studio with him in the morning, with our dog and our family of four. That’s kind of my happiest home memory.
The space was big enough so that we could all be there at the same time, but all have a measure of independence as well. We weren’t all on top of each other, and we were definitely not in each other’s way, but we were together.
It had three cavernous rooms and a little apartment-loft upstairs: tall ceilings but very simple architecture. Very minimal, but with generous proportions. The first room was my mom’s office. The second room was a wild card, and the last room, with three big windows, was my dad’s. (The space is now used as part of a residency I’m running, and the rooms are still used in relatively the same ways.) That’s where he had his desk and everything set up.
He also had the good couch, the ultimate green leather couch with really good arms that you could rest your head on comfortably, for lying down and reading on—that’s where I wanted to read. My dad was always working, doing his own thing, so he would set me up with my own table. I’d use all of his scraps and just make stuff if I wanted to, or bring a book.
Big, empty tables to put things out on were key features of Sol LeWitt’s studio. 
Exhibition signage and other posters in Sol LeWitt’s Italian studio.
The studio still strikes me as the ideal space, because of the specificity that we used it for but also, of the beauty of the scale and how you could really use it for anything. Somehow it still feels like the perfect space to be productive in. It seems like you could get anything done in those spaces.
There was an ease of being there, and of being able to get there on your own: Get there, leave when you want. The sheer physical scale of the space was impressive: You could fit a bunch of really big, long tables in there and hang things really high. I’m a sculptor, so space to me is really valuable.
Always having one big, empty table to put stuff out on is a real luxury, and something I can’t work without. That was sort of the foundational design of those spaces: It was just space, table. Do with it what you want.
What gets in the way of people making spaces like this today? The pure scale of building. The studio building itself is really humble, nothing fancy at all. It’s old, maybe from the eighteenth century. If you were to build that now, it would reek of opulence in a way that these spaces don’t, where it’d be so simple, but so grand. It would feel done to death, over the top.
The materials—stone, plaster, wood—they’re all very humble. They’re not too precious. You get some paint on the floor. Who cares? Spill something. It’s not the end of the world. So it feels luxurious to be there. Not in a ‘I’m going to pamper myself’ way, but in a ‘I’m going to work really hard’ way.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. (Photos: Courtesy Eva LeWitt)