Artists have long turned to the residency as a way to make work away from the pressures of the daily grind. There are coveted mainstays such as Yaddo and the American Academy in Rome; quirky outliers like Monteverdi Tuscany, a two-month sojourn in an Italian hotel; and innumerable pay-your-own-way programs, with their fair share of exploitive con jobs. Collector and art advisor Sarah Elson, however, has recently initiated a residency that is quite a bit more focused, and uncommonly personal. Dubbed “Launch Pad,” its ambition is to give emerging artists new to London a time to shine on the city’s stage — by bringing them into her private home to conceive and install their work. In many ways it’s less of a traditional residency and more of a choreographed professional relationship. “Collecting is one thing,” said Elson, “but commissioning is another, more intimate thing.”

Those relationships are forged in varying ways. In the case of San Francisco-based Josh Faught, who installed his text-and-textile pieces at her Holland Park house this summer, Elson had purchased one of his works through Lisa Cooley Gallery in 2009. The pair didn’t actually meet until March of this year, when Faught traveled to London to spend a few weeks living at Elson’s home, a circa-1860s structure whose interior was reimagined by architect Seth Stein. “One of the most fascinating aspects of my visit was understanding the inherent psychological and architectural conundrums surrounding Sarah’s house and the neighborhood,” Faught said. “I loved thinking about the shifting ways that one could assert their identity through decoration, particularly in a neighborhood like Holland Park, which is historically preserved and architecturally regulated.” Ideas and inspirations percolated, ranging from the implications of the color mauve to Faught’s own struggles with his allergies. The works conceived and installed as part of Launch Pad “conflated my own history, the history of Sarah’s house, and the history of London at the turn of the 20th century,” he said. (Part of his time in London included personal research trips to the V&A’s textile department.)

While Elson encourages the commissioned artists to address their temporary home, she doesn’t want that to be limiting. “I encourage them to use the space of my house as a starting point,” she said, “but it’s not my intention to create a whole collection of site-specific works. I want each work to stand on its own, independent of its context, so that it could exist anywhere.” Elson, whose collection includes pieces by Robin Rhode, Isaac Julien, Do Ho Suh, Rose Wylie, and Philip Lorca di Corcia, relished the opportunity to move beyond simply acquiring art. “It’s very satisfying to play a role in the creative process, and it’s obvious to me that the best way to support artists is to give them time and space to make work,” she said.

Elson came across the next Launch Pad resident, Brooklyn-based Rachel Foullon, at the NADA New York booth of her gallerist, Halsey McKay. (Foullon’s sculptural installation will be installed at the house in October.) Their relationship has grown along exceedingly 21st-century lines: Conflicting schedules made an in-person visit to London impossible, so Foullon got to know Elson’s space through FaceTime tours. The artist plans to install “Choker,” a massive fabric-and-metal sculpture, in the house’s mezzanine. (That work’s shape riffs on the contours of a collar, which Foullon thinks of as “a personal architecture of the self.”) The sculpture, she said, was partially inspired by the “duality between the house’s Victorian exterior and modernized interior.” Like much of Foullon’s sculpture, it will possess equal amounts elegance and cool, quasi-violent minimalism. “The piece consists of a gargantuan-scaled black velvet ribbon I’ve been constructing using theatrical stage-curtain fabric,” she said, “hung from an intricately cut steel form that resembles architecture as much as lace. The 40-foot length of velvet will be wrestled into a bow, on-site — hopefully appearing conflicted between being “perky due to tension from the knot, and morose due to gravity’s exhaustion under its own weight.”

Elson pays the production costs and a commission fee to the artists, and often buys the resulting works. She also provides a number of opportunities for her artists: Appointment-only viewings of the work; a celebratory dinner; visitors from Central St. Martin’s, the South London Gallery, and other London institutions. (Faught’s residency featured a roundtable, organized by Elson, which included Whitechapel director Iwona Blazwick.) The goal is clearly to develop long-term relationships, and also to build upon what is often only an economic exchange. Through this framework, the collector becomes both a facilitator and a connector.

“It’s often the case that collectors only see work in a splintered form — through art fairs, online, or a show here and there,” Faught said. “I love that Sarah’s so committed, in this kind of old school way, to understanding the motivation and spirit behind the artists she supports.” That commitment and investment doesn’t come without its attendant anxieties. “The most challenging part of this process,” Foullon said, “is the inherent self-consciousness one feels while making something that you want this one particular person to love so deeply.”