Masters of Illusion : Designing to Minimize Space Problems

The trick, they say, to designing houses today is to pack it all in so artfully that you hardly notice the tight fit, or, as one architect put it, “so it doesn’t look like you’ve crammed 10 pounds of building into a five-pound bag.”

The day of the rambling ranch house on a quarter-acre parcel is long gone. For architects designing housing for the small lots now the norm here and elsewhere in Southern California, that means an increasingly important trick of the trade is the ability to fool the eye into seeing more space than exists--inside and out.

Illusion is so important that Costa Mesa architect Richard Lewis includes a handbook on visual illusion on a short list of the three key pieces of reference material no architect should be without.

Lewis specializes in high-end custom homes but says that the principles explored when he and other architects do projects where budgets are relatively unlimited quickly find their way into the mainstream.

Sometimes what solves space problems in a $2-million house can work as well in one that costs $200,000.

“Custom homes are the R&D; lab of the industry,” says Lewis, whose award-winning designs range from commercial buildings and multimillion-dollar custom homes to 900-square-foot “snowbird” retreats in the desert outside of Phoenix.

Earlier this summer in San Francisco, Lewis won a Gold Nugget, the top award of the Pacific Coast Building Conference, for his “small” custom home design: a 5,924-square-foot Lido Isle contemporary.

That home and other Orange County projects also awarded Gold Nuggets demonstrate how the use of illusion extends from a waterfront custom home in Newport Beach to production housing at Newport Coast to a high-density apartment complex in Irvine.

Each project created housing for different uses and with very different budgets, but each faced space constraints.

The trilevel house that Lewis designed for Tom and Joan Riach is situated on a 5,500-square-foot bay-front lot that is only 39 feet wide on the street and 44 feet wide on the water. The width of the 100-foot-long house ranges from a 28 feet at street side to 34 feet overlooking Newport Bay.

Some of the same space-stretching techniques used by Lewis were used by architects at McLarand, Vasquez & Partners in its winning designs for a $700,000 semi-custom Italianate villa at its Santa Lucia development in Newport Coast. The firm used them again in its design for the San Paulo apartment complex in Irvine, where a mix of flats and multistory apartments are fitted into a high-density design that mimics a Mediterranean village. And those stretching tools were called upon again by architects at Richardson Nagy Martin in a tract of homes priced from $270,000 to $400,000 in Newport Ridge in which neighbors borrow space from one another to enlarge the usable yard area and to expand the view from the inside out.

The architecture of most housing being built in Orange County in the 1990s has been shaped by these principles. Walls between rooms are likely to have the center cut out of them to allow an uninterrupted sight line; yards are arranged on only one side of a house to give them more bulk; roof lines and facades are staggered to keep them from closing in visually; tall windows and light wells open up a home to the sky--that rare place where space doesn’t come at such a premium.

The entry to the Riach home on Lido Isle has something in common with most Orange County tract houses of the past two decades--it takes a back seat to the garage doors, which monopolize the street view of the house.

The entryway is on the south side of the house about 60 feet from the street. Side yards, which would have accentuated the narrowness of the rooms, are almost nonexistent. Lewis designed to provide a feeling of spaciousness in areas where none existed.

“The Riach residence is loaded with illusions,” he said. “They are what give us the ability to expand space. We trick the eye to make things seem big and wide open, and we do it at all (price) levels. The architect who doesn’t understand and use visual illusion is a handicapped architect.”

Although the Riach house is narrow, it is deep and Lewis needed to separate the rooms while still opening up the interior so each room would not feel enclosed. He did it by using a minimum of interior walls and by incorporating a three-level rotunda, capped by a circular skylight, for the entry.

While the rotunda, located almost in the middle of the house, is open, its curving walls provide separation between the family room at the narrowest end of the ground floor and the dining and great rooms at the wide end fronting on the bay.

The basement level is the most traditional section of the house, with most walls set at sharp right angles. Because it is below ground level there was little Lewis could do on the side walls to open things up, so he carried the 20-foot diameter shaft of the rotunda down into the basement. Light pouring in from the glass dome fills and brightens all three levels while the curving wall softens the otherwise angular form of the basement level.

Upstairs, where the bedrooms and study are located, Lewis placed the master suite at the wide end of the house and the study and second and third bedrooms at the narrow end. He used an open bridge spanning the family room to connect the two halves, and left the entire center section open--turning the family room into an airy two-story zone flooded with light from the rotunda’s dome.

On both floors, there is an unbroken line of sight from one end of the house to the other--which lets the eye “borrow” space from room to room and makes each section of the house in turn seem wider than it really is. Instead of being stopped by solid, right-angle walls, the eye slides off of rounded and slanted wall sections, some little more than stubs that jut out just enough to delineate a space but don’t physically separate it.

“The eye fixes on hard, right-angled surfaces and corners. They provide a point of reference that sets up limits and lets us measure how big or small something is,” Lewis said. “But the eye slides off of curves” and lets the mind experience space that really isn’t there.

Lewis broke up the mass of the building by setting the second floor back from the street and indenting each of the three garage doors into its own separate bay.

Along the south side of the house, where the entrance is located, Lewis incorporated several curving or sharply angled walls to break up the 100-foot depth. The practice is called “articulating” a wall.

From the street, looking along the south side, it appears as if there are three separate structures on the lot rather than a single, monolithic hulk. “You want to break up the expanse of wall as much as possible,” he said.

Because there wasn’t much lot to begin with, Lewis pushed the structure as far to the north side of the property as the building code allowed and minimized windows on that side, saving the south side for a series of small landscaped patio areas that tuck into the obliquely angled indentations.

A final “trick” went into the design of the entry approach to the house--a path that is almost 50 feet long and is squeezed between the two-story home and its two-story neighbor.

When the eye looks down a long narrow vista--a railroad track or highway, for instance--perspective makes it seem to narrow in the distance until it disappears.

Lewis turned that around and angled the south wall of the house so that the space available for the walk flairs out from the entry gate, widening as it flows back along the garage toward the entry. Visitors feel as if they are walking into an ever increasing space instead of into an alley.

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Architects at Richardson Nagy Martin in Newport Beach used many of the same tricks in its production homes in Newport Ridge.

The tract plan utilizes the so-called Z-lot concept to borrow space from each neighboring lot. The borrowed space comes from the opposite side yard, and, as Lewis did with the Riach home, RNM’s architects use only high windows on those walls and orient the views from the house to the other, wider side yard.

The borrowed space--usually a strip five to eight feet long and half the depth of the lot, can’t be built on--no pools or permanent gazebos, but it can be landscaped. The purpose, said RNM principal Les Persohn, is to increase the view corridors to make the houses and their narrow 45-foot lots seem more spacious.

The designs won Gold Nuggets for best single-family detached homes on small lots and best overall detached residential project.

The constraints of designing for a production builder mean that designs like RNM’s for the Montserrat and Sancerre tracts in Newport Ridge must hew to tighter budgets and eschew such things as sliding glass walls and 20-foot glass-capped rotundas. However, the stacked windows that open up tall living room and dining room walls to the outside create a similar effect.

“The tall windows draw the eye to the volume in a room with high ceilings, and accentuate it,” Persohn said. “They also let light flood the room, and that enlarges the space.”

There are glass-filled cutouts in second-story bridges in several floor plans; cutouts or open railings on staircases; wall niches and pot shelves that add depth and texture to what otherwise would be long, enclosing expanses of painted wallboard. All these things have been borrowed from custom home designs and brought into tract homes to fool the eye into seeing more than is really there, Persohn said.

In one model, RNM bolstered the perception of space in the homes by piercing a wall dividing the living and family rooms with cutouts that let the eye travel all the way through the house and out into the rear yard.

In other models, architects used short wall sections set at 45-degree angles to the rest of the interior layout to guide the eye out of an entry alcove and into the most panoramic view possible for the interior.

With production housing, efforts to enhance the sense of space begin long before the prospective buyer makes it to the front door. Because there are many homes close together in most tracts, the appearance of space must start at the curb.

“We started working in from the street. We unified all of the front yard landscaping so that it flows together” and there are no visible property lines to chop up the street scene and show how narrow the lots really are, Persohn said.

The second stories of the homes don’t sit out atop the garages, which was typical throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Instead, the top floor is pulled back so that the garage presents its own, single-story roof line to the street. “It makes the houses look less imposing and makes the small front yards seem larger,” Persohn said.

The architects also incorporated front garden walls and entry gates to create private front courtyards in each house that add to the overall living space.

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Using outside space to make the living space seem larger was a technique used by McLarand, Vasquez in two dramatically different projects--the Santa Lucia semi-custom development at Newport Coast, and the San Paulo apartments in Irvine.

At Santa Lucia--where lots are small but interiors exceed 3,000 square feet, not much trickery was needed to make the homes seem more expansive.

Still, the architects used tall ceilings and curving walls and walls with see-through cutouts to enhance the spaciousness.

And they designed the driveways of the model homes with paving that is duplicated in the entry walk and porch--making the otherwise utilitarian drives seem like part of a huge courtyard and adding hundreds of square feet to the apparent size of each lot.

At San Paulo, where few residents have any yard at all, the buildings are designed around large courtyards to give most of the apartments windows in the front and rear.

The extra light and additional view into the courtyard at the San Paulo apartments use the same space-expanding principles as do the rotunda skylight and unobstructed through-the-whole-house views of the bay at the custom home on Lido Isle.

And, just as a staggered roof line reduces bulk and adds interest to the detached housing projects in Newport Coast, so it does at the apartment complex.