HOMES OF THEIR OWN : When Architects House Themselves, They Too Face Budget, Site and Design Hurdles
“A good house,” wrote architect Charles Moore, “speaks not just of the materials from which it is made, but of the intangible rhythms, spirits and dreams of people’s lives. Its site is only a tiny piece of the real world, yet this place is made to seem like an entire world.” Moore died last year while planning his seventh house, but each of his six previous residences, designed while he taught at UC Berkeley, Yale, UCLA and the University of Texas, tells a story of the man and the place where it was built.
Few of us can afford our dream house, but we might all benefit if more of us followed Moore’s advice to expose our dreams and fantasies. Self-expression once abounded in Los Angeles, but today, invention and exuberance are often crushed by censorious committees, a fear of what the neighbors might think or simply hard times. Architects from Thomas Jefferson to Frank Gehry showed the way when they took chances on their own houses, responding to site, surroundings, needs and personal tastes.
For John Ruble, a partner in the Santa Monica firm of Moore Ruble Yudell, the Venice bungalow he bought seven years ago was “all I could afford, but a little too funky.” The rooms were tiny, the structure decayed. His plans to remodel it were inspired by the light, breezy houses and lush gardens he saw during a vacation in the Caribbean.
The remodel became a rebuild that preserved only a couple of walls and a few windows but stayed within the original footprint. “I wanted to show how you could add to a little house like this without destroying its role in the neighborhood,” Ruble says. A pedimented porch embraces the street front, playing off the mix of styles to either side, and the narrow addition is situated to the back and crowned with a balustrade of the same Chinese latticework that fills the pediment.
“I wanted a few colonial touches and a suggestion of a plantation house to remind me of my home state of Virginia,” Ruble says. He has created a house that is playful without being cute, a mix of East and West coasts. The wood deck serves as an entry hall, from which visitors step into the main room with its pitched ceiling. Wood pilasters and a low divide define an intimate sitting room. A conical skylight gives it the feeling of a conservatory. Two more pilasters frame the stair hall, which is flanked by the kitchen and his son’s bedroom. Space flows around these divisions, which make the room feel much larger than it is.
Ruble and his wife, Cecily Young, are still adding to the house and discovering how to use it. “Sometimes we’ll spend weeks living upstairs, treating the bedroom-study as a one-room house,” he says. “A house should have a rich series of places, and not force you to live in just one way.”
Raquel Vert was challenged by her husband, Chaim Meital, to enlarge their ‘50s ranch house in the foothills of Encino. Born in Tel Aviv, Vert worked for several radical architects in Los Angeles before setting up her own practice in Santa Monica and winning commissions for ambitious houses. Rough masonry and daring angles are combined in this fusion of old and new. Like Ruble, she extended the house upward, raising the height of the hall and living areas, and inserting an upstairs office and new master bedroom.
The goal was to add as much usable space for her, her husband and their two children as could be squeezed from a tight budget. Split concrete-block walls conceal the steps that lead down from the street, enclose the forecourt and flow through a sheet of glass that lights the lofty entry hall. An entrance that was formerly cramped and exposed is now spacious and private. More concealed steps flow up to the gallery-like office that is lit by big corner windows and screened by mature trees. The hall leads back to the central dining room with its 20-foot arched vault of fir studs. A living room that used to be dark and claustrophobic is now flooded with light from a window wall that faces north over the San Fernando Valley, and from a skylight tucked into the angles of the old roof.
Vert is proud of the economies she achieved by using industrial-grade oak and bulk-rate Italian limestone for the floors, birch ply for the cabinets and steel-troweled stucco to tie together old and new. The concealed lights that play off rough textures and dramatize the lofty rooms were $3 each at a hardware store. The simple practicality of these materials enhances the impact of a glass-topped dining table by Carlo Scarpa, the legendary Italian designer, and a few favorite chairs and artworks.
“I wish I could have gone further,” Vert says. A lot of her custom furnishings remain unfinished, but she is pleased by how much she was able to do and how well the house survived the earthquake that shook down several of its neighbors.
“The first house you build for yourself is always overloaded with ideas,” says Barton Phelps, “and the experience of building it is a mixture of paranoia and catharsis.” Phelps, who worked for Gehry and Moore before setting up his own varied practice in mid-Wilshire, bought a small kite-shaped lot halfway up a steep canyon in West Los Angeles. He wanted a house for himself and his wife, Karen Simonson, that would open up to the sun and allow one to look out or step out into the landscape at every level. It also had to bridge a ravine that can flood during heavy rains. Phelps’ success made his reputation as someone who could master “unbuildable” sites.
He decided to abstract a traditional Spanish colonial house, creating a pair of two-story pavilions with stucco walls and red-shingle roofs. These are fanned out to the south and separated by a patio that serves as an outdoor room (with a bamboo canopy in summer). A stairway winds up the slope--its shiny green vinyl coating suggesting the ripples of a creek--linking carport and kitchen-dining at the base, to the master bedroom halfway up and the living room at the top. From here, a deck (now enclosed as a study for his wife) leads back to his study and their daughter’s bedroom above the entrance.
The simple volumes generate an effect of great complexity as visitors move around and through them. The whimsical, cut-away entrance facade turns into a sheer north wall that bows with the slope and is pierced by tiny openings that trace the line of the stair. The south face is open and irregular. Additions and a new standing-seam roof of lead-coated copper have given the house a crisper look.
Each room has a distinct personality. The deeply coffered ceiling of the dining room contrasts with the bowed wood vault of the master bedroom and the coved, skylit vault of the living room. Says Phelps: “As you walk up, you feel you are leaving the city for a civilized place in the woods.”
Buzz Yudell studied with Charles Moore at Yale and joined him and John Ruble as a partner in Los Angeles; his wife, Tina Beebe, is a colorist, a graphic designer and a passionate gardener. They had been living in a 600-square-foot bungalow in Santa Monica and looking along the coast until--in 1982--they found an affordable site in the Malibu hills where they could live, as Yudell describes it, “in close partnership with the landscape and the climate.”
The buildable area was 600 feet long and, with setbacks, less than 40 feet wide. Inspired by the simple, linear forms of Mediterranean and Californian farmhouses--and by an elongated greenhouse next door--they decided to make the most of the skinny site. A detached studio and citrus orchard anchor the north end. Visitors enter the house through a walled courtyard. Entry hall, guest bedroom and study are stacked to form a tower. A succession of carefully proportioned rooms step down the slope, opening off a gallery that is large enough to entertain in. This layout is mirrored outside by a stepped path and a series of pergolas. These outdoor rooms form a green wall for the garden, which descends into a dry creek.
The house, like Phelps’, takes its cues from the site and traditional buildings and is tailored to the personalities of its owners. The silvery metal roof plays off the faded terra-cotta walls, gray-green trim and native plantings, achieving the timeless feel of an old Mediterranean villa. Space cascades down the path and gallery and through the French doors at each level, weaving together indoors and outdoors.
“A house is for people and the things you do in it,” says Julie Eizenberg, who heads a flourishing residential and institutional practice in Santa Monica with her husband, Hank Koning. The couple graduated from the university in their native Melbourne before coming to study and later to teach at UCLA. The house they built for themselves and their two small sons, a mile from the office, was conceived as basic shelter, ranged along the north side of a lot and opened up to nature and sunlight. They were inspired by Australian homesteads in which shady verandas give depth to plain brick boxes and by the “flounder houses” of Virginia that turn away from the street and face sideways over rectangular lots. Neighboring houses were set back from the street, but the architects were determined to make the best use of their plot.
“Hank and I are pathetic romantics,” Eizenberg says, “who make houses that feel right, are moody, shadowy and have places to hang out.” Their own house has those intangible qualities and a loose-fitting practicality that accommodates messiness and change. Kitchen, dining and family room are one space, opening through the porch into the garden. Stairs lead up to barrel-vaulted bedrooms that open off a well-ventilated gallery.
A glass “hinge” links the trunk of the house to its head--a studio over a living room--which looks out to the street. “We weren’t sure we were ready for a grown-up place,” Eizenberg acknowledges now, “but it’s worked out well for us and the children.” Trumpet vines and roses have grown over the green block, and the metal veranda, inspired by Claude Monet’s at Giverny in France, has become a soft sculpture.
We can all learn something from what these architects have done, whether or not we’d like to live in their houses. One lesson is to please yourself without annoying others. Building a house for resale or to show off is like buying art for investment rather than the pleasure it brings. A house can be very different from its neighbors but still fit in, and its interiors can be as personal as the clothes one wears. Even with children, there’s no need to divide the space into little rooms or shut out the sun. Architects are inventive cheapskates when it comes to decoration, saving their money to maximize light and space, good proportions, a sense of movement and surprise. Over the years, these intangibles are likely to enrich life much more than a lot of fancy trim.
