Original Home Ideas Still Seen in Remodel

Breathes there an owner of one of those flat-roofed, Spanish-flavored tract houses so popular in the 1930s who doesn’t dream of a two- or three-story house rising from the structure’s foundations?

Craig and Lorena Rawlings certainly did when they purchased their 864-square-foot house at 4357 Chase St., just south of Washington Boulevard in the Mar Vista district of Los Angeles.

The house was obviously too small for their growing family, but the price--about $80,000--and the location--a couple of smog-free miles from the Pacific Ocean--were both on the money.

They knew that they wanted a contemporary house with a hint of Spanish architecture. Architect R. Mark Fuote, principal of Arkineto Architects, 21515 Vanowen St., Canoga Park, gave them all that, along with a strong flavoring of updated nautical moderne in the 2,000-square-foot remodel pictured here.

An idea of the look of the original house can be had from the front view (top photo). The house looked very much like the unremodeled house to the left, right down to its 40-foot-wide lot. The arches in the front elevation were present in the original house, but that’s about all that is left of the original facade.

Fuote, a Santa Monica resident, designed a clerestory transom above the arched front windows to let light pass into the upper part of the two-story level of the living room through a sloped skylight.

A long, diagonal wall from the entry to the midpoint of the dining space enhances and expands the floor plan by diagonally connecting the space. The dining, open kitchen and laundry areas are combined into one space at one end of the house, wrapping around a central den.

The first floor is connected to the upper gallery, which is wrapped in glass block, by a double, open-ended staircase. This results in a spectacular transition from the first floor to the second. A stairway should be dramatic, if possible, and the stairway in the Rawlings house certainly qualifies as dramatic.

The second floor contains a large master bedroom/bath suite, and the third bedroom, which overlooks the high-volume space of the living room.

Large openable roof skylights in the upper floors help control the ventilation and lighting for each space. Future solar panels are provided for in the southwest-facing diagonal wall (bottom photo).

The project came in for under $100,000, not including the pool and spa that were already in place when the remodeling began.