OFF THE TRACT : Cutouts, Rounded Corners and Vaulted Ceilings Bring a ‘30s-Era House Firmly Into the ‘90s

THE “BEFORE”photos reveal all: This 1936 tract house was a sorry hodgepodge of Formica kitchen counters and imitation-wood-paneled walls. The front door opened directly into the living room; the formal dining room, with its crystal chandelier, was pint-sized, and the pool house was simply a clapboard lean-to.

Once they’d saved enough money, the renters here spent most of their Saturdays and Sundays looking for a place to buy. But as is typical of housing in older areas of suburban Southern California, every house they saw in their price range also needed an overhaul. So the young couple, who work in film and television, looked beyond the residence’s shortcomings and decided to buy and renovate the L-shaped, stucco house. The result: an airy, sun-filled showplace that proves there’s hope for the thousands of similar dark, boxy homes constructed in the area in the years before and after World War II.

Though the overall size--1,390 square feet--was small by current standards, the “bones” of this residence were good. The rooms were nicely arranged, with a cozy living room to the left of the front door and three bedrooms and two baths off a hallway on the right. Location was another plus: The house sits on a sunny, tree-lined street in a neighborhood swept lightly by sea breezes. And the lot proved large enough so that, even with a sizable addition at the rear, the back yard would retain its large, heated swimming pool and a gracious patio area, a visually satisfying patch of green lawn and a new pool-house/garage.

The renovation budget was handsome--about $220,000. Even so, the new owners found that hiring an architect was not as easy as they had anticipated. “Many architects didn’t want to do the house--it was small potatoes to them,” explains the owner. The couple offered architects photographs clipped from a magazine as reference, but most still insisted on proposing fancy second-story additions that didn’t suit the couple’s aesthetic sense or blend well into the mostly single-story neighborhood.

“Then it dawned on me,” says the owner. “I was showing everyone pictures of a house that we liked, and all of a sudden I wondered why I hadn’t just picked up the phone and called the designer who did it.” Enter Santa Monica designer Nick Berman, who worked on the project with his associate, Mitchel Moore. Berman, who was simultaneously designing a multi-million-dollar home for producer Irwin Winkler in Malibu, found the project interesting.

“The owners were willing to let me put a little bit of spirit and whimsy into the house,” he says. “Basically, it was a case of turning an ugly duckling into a swan--the premise was making a limited space look spacious.” To accomplish that, he opened up the space by repeating such elements as rounded walls and square, cookie-cutter-like openings in the front door and wall, the dining room and the kitchen door.

“The puncturing of one room into another adds light, and that light pulls your eye through the opening,” Berman says. “It creates a sight line of movement so that on entering the front door, you see all the way through the living room and dining room and out to the pool.”

Bleached white-oak floors also helped link one room to another, and a skylight over the dining table--a consolation for a ceiling height lower than the owners had hoped for--adds an airiness to the center of the house. Major structural changes--kitchen and master bedroom bays at the back of the house--added 600 square feet.

The new kitchen, almost four times the size of the original, is now located on the opposite side of the house adjacent to the dining room (a hallway of floor-to-ceiling closets leading to the master bedroom now occupies the site of the original kitchen). Berman designed ribbed-glass see-through cabinets and topped them off with a cache of ‘30s-era Bakelite door pulls (he also used them to add panache in the master bathroom). He finished the edges of the white Corian countertops with periwinkle-blue bullnose tile; a row of small confetti-colored tile adds interest to the back splash. Halogen lighting hangs from a ridge beam disguised in oak, and the vaulted ceiling is painted a barely perceptible jet-stream blue to imitate the sky.

Berman made only subtle changes to the front of the house. Most notably, he enclosed the porch to create a foyer. It became a major point--but the only one--of disagreement with the owners. “I wanted to do a separate floating element as an introduction to the house to show something had been done, but the owners wanted the facade as nondescript as possible to conform with the neighborhood,” says Berman.

In the end, the owners won, and the vestibule is unobtrusive. But from the inside, it serves as both an introduction to and a microcosm of the entire house--all the elements used (the cutouts, textures, colors, angles, vaulted ceiling) are repeated throughout: “It gives you a taste of what’s to come,” Berman explains.

Other exterior changes include the removal of shutters from the bay and French windows--”to clean it up and revitalize it,” he says, “like sending it to a design spa.” The new streamlined facade, painted white with touches of pink and green, brings the house firmly into the ‘90s.

The strongest theme in the design of this house is in Berman’s use of rounded forms. Every corner was replastered to be curved, the fireplace opening was rounded, and the yellow, aniline-dyed shelves in the foyer, as well as the crescent-shaped buffet in the dining room, are bow-shaped. “It relieves all the squareness you find in a tract house,” Berman says.

No need to worry. This house couldn’t be square if it tried.