Hood’s childhood home on Moretz Avenue in Charlotte, North Carolina. 
“Haints in the House” (2023), an oil painting by Hood of his childhood home. 
A young Hood, in cap and gown at far right, on his graduation day. 
Hood in Washington, D.C.
Walter Hood is the founder and creative director of Oakland’s Hood Design Studio.
“I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, on a street called Moretz Avenue. It was a small, three-bedroom brick house, probably seven hundred and fifty square feet.
Inside, there was this amazing feeling of family, and of ownership, because we had lived in the projects before moving there. I understood that my father and mother had to work really hard to purchase this house. They both worked two jobs.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, it was a segregated neighborhood. All of my neighbors were Black. My school teacher lived down the street. Across the street was a doctor. I had no sense of the larger world out there. But I was aware of this smaller one.
There was this sense that our house, that my family, was on the come-up. That’s why a sense of care was there. Whereas in my neighbor’s house, you didn’t see that kind of care. They would hire someone to come and cut the grass.
So our house was precious in that sense. We felt a kind of kinship to take care of it, even as little kids. Every Saturday, my mother cleaned. I had a list of chores to do around this house, this place they had invested in. It really etched that moment in time for me.
Living in that house taught me discipline, which helped me when I started to own things. I never thought I’d be a landowner. Today, I own three buildings. My dad, who was a sergeant in the Army, used to say things to me—like, I had a bicycle and someone stole it. He made me go and find the bike, get it back. The guy who took it was bigger than me. When I came home, I had a bloody nose because I had to fight for the bike. My dad said, ‘No one will take care of your stuff better than you.’
People are not going to see the things you care about in the same ways you see them. So you are responsible at the end. That’s something I’ve always thought about with that house: My parents took care of it, made sure it wasn’t someone else’s responsibility. That, in a way, began to create this set of values for the world we lived in, a respect for our place of habitation.
I think about care all the time now. [My practice] works in a lot of places that are undervalued. I believe in environmental determinism: that if you’re in an environment long enough and you have no access to anything else, you become part of that world. A lot of people live in places where they’ve never had opportunities to be disciplined in caring, or they think they don’t need to. As a designer, I’m constantly trying to get people to see that they should.
Caring is [manifested] through how we look at others and how we have empathy, but also through how we think about equity. Right now I’m writing about the American landscape and the dualities that we live with: I can go to a place where we don’t care, and we’re okay with it. Why is that?
A lot of it has to do with the backdrop. If you see someone, let’s say a Black person, walking down the street in the middle of a bombed-out neighborhood, they will look completely different than if you see that same person walking down a tree-lined street. How we begin to think about the backdrop of care—that’s why I said the house I grew up in was small. It doesn’t matter how meager the place is. It’s not about scale. You can still take care of it and value it.
My studio recently moved into a new office. It’s in the same neighborhood, just around the corner from the last place. It’s a pretty blighted area: There’s a [sex worker] always across the street, there’s a car wash. There’s a lot of murals.
This is California, so the building cost a lot of money. When we moved in, we started planting trees and things like that. A man ran across the street when we were outside and said, ‘You own this building?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘You better put a mural on it quick.’ ‘Why?’ ‘People will graffiti it.’ I just looked at him. I said, ‘There will be no murals on this building. We’re going to paint it, and we’re going to paint it black.’ He looked at me like I was crazy.
We painted it this dark charcoal color. We have vines growing on it. And we had these windows—they’re kind of vitrines—where I put in a set of large photos from one of my colleagues, who had photographed the neighborhood some twenty-five years ago. I had the prints, so I just blew them up and put them on the side of the building, with a little tab that says who the artist is.
No one has graffitied our building. We’ve been there more than a year and a half. And that man later painted his building the same color as ours.
This is what I mean by the [backdrop] of care and the false narratives that we buy in to, particularly in neighborhoods of color. It’s like, ‘You need to put a mural up to stop this,’ versus thinking, Why are people graffitiing my building? That’s the first thing. When you look at where people graffiti, it’s normally in places that are not cared for. Or they’re in places where there’s too much care, in a place where there was no care. It’s a form of rebellion [that says], ‘No one’s caring for us.’ It creates this crazy cycle.
People see care—but it seems we’re moving away from that these days. So whatever I do, it’s not going to simply hit metrics. It’s going to have a projection out into the world.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. (Photos: Courtesy Walter Hood)