Venice Beach
family home
Two plots had recently been combined, leaving a bungalow, a cottage and a garage on one site. The new house takes the roof of the original as its starting point, and the ground between the buildings becomes a series of rooms, some indoors and some not. The client had inherited a scheme they could not read from its drawings, and with the permit lapsed the project was restarting regardless. The first request was for two views of a stair. What followed was the design lead: the elevations recomposed, the interiors reconfigured against what the client actually wanted, the garden and the outdoor rooms designed from scratch, and a local architect of record found, appointed and handed the work.
- Location
- Venice Beach, California
- Year
- 2019 to 2021
- Scale
- Building
- Role
- Design
- Completed
- Architect
- Appleton Architects
- Interiors
- Studio Hessian
- Photographs
- Billy Bolton
The process
As inherited
Two plots, a bungalow, a cottage and a garage, and a scheme for a new house between them that had reached this point when work stopped. The first request was for two views of a stair, to see whether images could move the design on. They led to a review of the whole house, beginning with how it would look from its own courtyard.
Arrival
The gate sits between the garage and the cottage, off the line of the front door, and the path was made to wind in any case: a small tree in each turn, five arches of climbers, a herringbone brick floor with wide joints, dense planting that closes the view ahead. The house is reached the way a secret courtyard is, down a garden path, and arriving feels private from the first step.
The entry hall
Where old meets new, in plan and in section: a double-height room under the pitch of the original roof, with the stair wrapping round and over the kitchen door to reach the bedroom above. It was the room worked out first and the hardest to resolve, the stair drawn against a curved wall and an open corner, the floor tested in tile after tile, until it felt right and the rest of the house could be brought up to it.
The kitchen
The room least clear at the outset and the one that would be used most. It went through a sequence of versions, each drawn from the feedback on the last, until the room was found: dark boards of uneven width, reclaimed beams, painted cabinets, and every door to the courtyard operable.
The outdoor rooms
The outdoor dining room sits between the cottage and the kitchen under a trellis built to carry vines, with an open fireplace on the boundary and every kitchen door operable so the two rooms become one. The pool keeps its two-foot rise above the lawn, a seat along its whole edge, with reclaimed stone troughs in the border as the water feature. The stair to the guest apartment became a blade wall holding the outdoor shower, the storage and the projector screen.
The elevation
The original house keeps its weatherboard. A wider board across both read as plain, so the new house takes treillage, the French latticework, in off-white over a warm, uneven render: a scale of texture to sit beside the boards, something distinct on the street, and in time a frame for climbers. Arched openings run across old and new alike.
Inside
The living room takes most of the original bungalow, and the furniture gives it its structure: a pool table under a small loft, the piano between two built pieces, a nook for a desk looking down the pool, the seating gathered on the fireplace. The bedroom was kept the brightest and calmest room in the house, and the bathroom takes its neutrals and adds a layer of hand-painted tile and unlacquered brass. The interiors were designed to establish the layout and the feel of each room, for the interior designer to follow with the final design and specification.