Nestled into a steeply sloping property, this private residence overlooks the Santa Monica Mountains to the North, and the Pacific Ocean to the Southwest. Instead of fighting the challenging characteristics of this parcel, with it’s narrow lot and aggressive steepness, this new, 7200sf single family residence’s design integrates the site’s normally limiting nature. Embracing the verticality of the site became the catalyst from which the footprint of an ambitious program and the home’s organizational framework was defined.
This home is as much a reflection of the owner as it is of the site: technologically savvy, yet timeless and layered in complexity. Tapping into the clients’ collective nostalgia for their Brooklyn roots, elements of old and new are woven together to imbue a timeless and layered aesthetic blending hints of an industrial loft vernacular into a California modern architype. Smooth rift cut white oak ceiling panels on the main level are strategically excised to reveal a patina’d structure of steel beams and rough sawn timbers that float above the kitchen, dining and living areas of the expansive open plan. These glimpses of an implied past are ambient notions, like memories, that help create a delicate yet complex balance of scale, warmth and texture throughout the home.
The entry also reveals a seamless, uncoiled steel and wood circular stair rising from the floor of the basement up through to the 2nd floor master suite in one fluid motion. It becomes immediately evident that this is the backbone of the home and much like the pool, anchors and connects all levels visually and physically. Each interior space effortlessly flows into the next by forsaking defined episodic spatial transitions for layered, overlapping cinematic experiences.
Photo Credit: Jeremy Bittermann
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