STYLE : ARCHITECTURE : A Loft in the Sky
Called in to check out a modest, one-story bungalow huddled on a hill above West Hollywood, Santa Monica architect Michael Folonis kept looking at the view instead. Standing in front of his client’s closed-in stucco box, he could see all the way from downtown Los Angeles to the ocean and up into the adjacent canyon. So he cleared away most of the walls in the house, wrapped a ribbon of windows around three sides, set steel columns in the middle of the space left over and placed a master bedroom on top to catch the view.
The renovation is, says Folonis, “a loft with a roof deck.” The concrete-floored, light-washed space, which is owned by a lawyer, is a rather luxurious bedroom, dressing area and bathroom. To achieve this, Folonis also had to remove a massive fireplace and dropped ceiling. All that remains of the original house is the roof, the kitchen, a spare bedroom and a bathroom. Even these relics have been stripped and painted white.
In the middle of the house is a striking steel staircase. Says Folonis: “I like to do three things in my houses: to pit the old against the new so that you know what’s what; to reveal the materials I’ve used, especially the structural ones; and to have a staircase that acts as a kind of built-in piece of furniture.” In this case, the stairway leads past a bowed glass wall into the master bedroom. There, the black steel sharpens into a triangular balcony, a prow that sets this modernist ship sailing off into La-La Land below.
In the adjoining bathroom, black tiles and birch plywood cabinetry set off the white walls and ubiquitous sunlight. “I kept the materials to a minimum because I don’t want to follow any style,” Folonis explains. “I don’t want the house to have a dated appearance.” The result is a very pared-down look, a sensibility that continues to the plain gray stucco outside.
Though Folonis, who teaches architecture at Cal Poly Pomona, is eager to point out the subtle differences of form and color between new and old, the house is really about the cleverness of finding rooms and spaces where there were only boxes before. Once liberated into the landscape, this modest dwelling becomes bold modernist statement, a machine for catching views housed in a clean package.
