Modern Venice home designed for two couples with space to share

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Don and Lisa Dimster, in the foreground with their dog Charlie, share the newly designed duplex with Don’s brother, Dennis, and Dennis’ wife, Noreen. The floor plans of the two units are mirror images of each other, including dramatic staircases that form a funnel of steel and glass rising toward the rooftop deck. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

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Don Dimster walks away from one end of the new building, where a ground-floor home office faces a small front garden with drought-tolerant grasses, rosemary bushes and melaleuca and olive. The architect’s future plans include a steel enclosure with opaque acrylic panels. The staircase in his unit, at left, makes a visual statement outside as well as in. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

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Both units of the duplex have two bedrooms on the ground floor, including this one in Don’s unit. German-made pivot-tilt windows capture cooling ocean breezes. “Pivot-tilt windows are interesting,” Dimster said. “You can tilt them open a little bit or you can close them and open them wide like a conventional casement window.” Although the architect installed air conditioning, he said, “we never use it.” (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

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Charlie, a German short-haired pointer, leads Lisa Dimster toward the second floor. The dog likes to catch morning rays in the sunlit stairwell. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

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The staircase consists of half-inch tempered glass arranged in a sculptural configuration that catches the eye, inside the house as well as from the street. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

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Don and Lisa Dimster on the landing of the second floor, which contains the living and dining areas as well as the master bedroom. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

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The living room has a lofty 11.5-foot ceiling and a concrete floor scored in large rectangles. Fiberglass powder was added to concrete poured 2.5 inches thick. “The thicker-than-normal concrete helps minimize cracking,” Don Dimster said. A leather sofa from Design Within Reach faces a pair of contemporary chairs and a George Nelson-like coffee table. A 9-foot-wide sliding door in white oak hangs from a ceiling track and can separate living room from bedroom, at right in the distance. “The large door can be moved with a single finger,” he said. “There’s no weight to speak of.” (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

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In the kitchen, Don Dimster designed a 12-foot-long upholstered bench with a built-in end bookcase as a place to sit, work or linger over a breakfast coffee. Part of the white-oak plank table can rise to bar height when Dimster — pictured with wife Lisa, left, and sister-in-law Noreen, right — wants to entertain. Dimster added reveals, spaces around the doors, so the inexpensive Ikea Appläd cabinets had a custom look. They’re complemented by the Carrara marble counter. Above the counter, the 7-foot-long back splash of obscured glass streams light into the adjacent master bathroom on the other side of the counter. “It’s a bit voyeuristic,” Dimster said, “but you can really only see shapes.” (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

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The master bathroom, with light coming through the kitchen’s obscured glass and a skylight above. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

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The view from the master bedroom, looking out toward the living room. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

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Don and Lisa on the custom stairwell. An electrified exterior vinyl mesh shade by North Solar Screen “cuts out glare and dramatically reduces heat gain,” Don said, “while still allowing us to see out during the day. At night you can make out shapes on the stairs, so we don’t run up and down in our skivvies — although we could, because you really can’t see that much.” (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

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The rooftop deck is shared communal space, a place where the two couples can gather under triangular charcoal-gray shades on hot sunny days or a string of carnival lights at night. The couples can enjoy ocean sunsets and wine around the fire pit, or they can host parties for up to 100 people. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

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The deck is made of Mangaris planks that float 11 inches above the roof. Architect and owner Don Dimster cut openings to install planters of drought-tolerant Mexican feather grass. Other irrigation and electrical systems can fit in the cavity below the deck planks, the architect said. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

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The concept of sharing a house is fitting for brothers who lived together for more than a decade. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

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The brothers started out sharing a modernist playhouse built by their architect father, Frank Dimster. (Laurie Gottlieb / Los Angeles Times)

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The boys and their playhouse, as featured in the Los Angeles Times on July 30, 1972. (Laurie Gottlieb / Los Angeles Times)

By Barbara Thornburg

Feb. 22, 2013 7 AM PT

Architect Don Dimster and his brother, filmmaker Dennis Dimster, lived together for more than a decade, migrating among a 1924 bungalow on Electric Avenue in Venice that they renovated, two apartments in back of the house as well as a pair of cottages on San Juan Avenue they also fixed up. “It was a bit like the musical chairs game — only with houses,” Don said.

So it wasn’t a surprise when the brothers moved together into new 3,800-square-foot Venice digs designed by Don — only this time with their wives, Lisa and Noreen.

Houses designed for extended families are a phenomenon of the times. Whether for siblings splitting a mortgage or baby boomers taking in an aging parent, the idea is the same: communal spaces where family can come together easily as well as private spaces where they can escape one another.

PHOTOS: Inside the Dimster home in Venice

The new Dimster house comes with a twist: Though it appears to be a single structure, it consists of two independent buildings, separated by 6 inches and bridged by a trio of expansion joints. Each unit has its own foundation, firewall, water meter, garage, yard and floor plan that mirrors the other.

At street level, each couple has a two-car garage, laundry room, two bedrooms and a bath. (Don turned his front bedroom into his home office.) The second floors have a combined kitchen-dining space, living room with an adjacent powder room and a master bedroom suite.

Both units have dramatic stairwells, focal points inside and out, that lead to a spacious rooftop deck linking the two homes. It serves as the main thoroughfare when the couples get together.

“It’s a nicer experience to go next door without ever leaving the house,” said Lisa Dimster, Don’s wife, director of fashion for Aether Apparel. “We can see the sunset and the rooftops of Venice as we walk across.”

For Don and Dennis’ mother, Dagmar Dimster, the new living arrangement is reminiscent of a time when little Don built cities out of Legos and the brothers would play for hours in a Modernist playhouse designed by their architect dad, Frank Dimster.

“The brothers were always very close,” Dagmar said.

Dennis remembers coming home more than once to find something of his — a tape deck, a telephone, a TV — in a thousand pieces.

“He always wanted to know how things worked,” Dennis said, adding that his little brother’s penchant for technical precision and accuracy can be seen in the new Venice homes’ artful staircases, which unfold like corsets. Or as Don, the pragmatic architect, put it, “an inverted funnel” that grows wider as it ascends to the roof terrace.

Those stairwells each have more than 600 pieces of glass and steel that were custom cut, shop-welded, then brought to the site and bolted and welded together. The entire assembly — like huge Erector sets — took three weeks.

The property is jointly owned, but if one couple ever wants to sell, Los Angeles’ 2005 small lot ordinance offers the possibility to subdivide the project into two independent properties, Don said. Until then, the couples get together to have dinner and watch movies and football games, borrow an occasional cup of sugar and baby-sit one another’s pets.

“It’s wonderful to have people you love and can count on for anything living right next door,” Lisa said, “while still having your own privacy, of course.”

Don Dimster’s modern duplex will be among more than two dozen homes and gardens on this year’s Venice Garden & Home Tour, an annual fundraiser benefiting the Neighborhood Youth Assn. The self-guided tour runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. May 4. Tickets are $60 in advance and $70 the day of the tour. For tickets and information, call (310) 821-1857 or go to www.venicegardentour.org.

home@latimes.com

Corrected: An earlier version of this story said Dennis Dimster is the brother who uses a first-floor bedroom as an office. Don does.

Modern Venice home designed for two couples with space to share

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