HAT TRICK

Neighbors call it “the hangar.” Architect Brian Murphy calls it a “schizophrenic Tupperware Palladian villa with a Sears, Roebuck patio cover.” Whatever the description, the Topanga Canyon home Murphy built for artist Nicki Huggins and Emmy-winning producer Scott Sternberg has become an instant landmark to passing motorists and pilots, thanks to the 9,000-square-foot steel and fiberglass roof that appears to levitate over corrugated plastic walls.

Murphy thought of the canopy for the single-story, 4,500-square-foot building in 1991 when Sternberg invited him out to the 31/2 -acre lot, which is adjacent to Santa Monica Mountains Conversancy parkland. “It was 114 degrees that day, and I was wearing a hat to protect myself,” Murphy recalls. “The idea of a house with a protective cover like a big sombrero came to mind.”

Now, when canyon temperatures skyrocket in summer, Murphy says, “the roof acts as a passive cooling agent. Breezes blow over the house, then eddy underneath, creating a 10- to 15-degree cooler temperature under the roof.” The central atrium’s four sets of double French doors also channel air flow. In fact, the house is so well-ventilated, Huggins says, that “it has to be 100 degrees for three days in a row before I feel the need to turn on the air conditioner.”

For days when air conditioning is unavoidable, Murphy laid out four separate zones (kitchen, dining and family rooms; living room and office; master bedroom; children’s rooms), all connected by cross-axis hallways that converge under the atrium skylight. “There are heating and cooling systems in each area,” he explains, “so if the kids are away, that section of the house doesn’t need to be turned on.”

The remote canyon setting also raised concerns about wildfire. (Sternberg lost a residence in the 1983 Malibu blaze.) So Murphy used noncombustible materials such as the poured-in-place concrete floors and the steel canopy. The plastic siding, however, required extra salesmanship. “When the first inspector came out, he didn’t want to approve it because it was too unconventional,” Huggins remembers. But after contractor Menelaos Saridakis held a blowtorch to the material in a demonstration--”It just got a little brown,” Sternberg says--the siding passed muster. Still planned are water reservoirs that will resemble a shallow moat around the house and feed a backup fire-sprinkler system.

Interiors are deconstructivist exercises in white, which Murphy likes for its reflective qualities. Sternberg, a fan of the industrial look, wanted the house’s inner workings to be visible; Murphy obliged, exposing plumbing vents, air-conditioning ducts, heating registers, sprinklers and electrical conduit. For main areas of the house, he used $7 clamp-on lights from Home Depot attached to electrical conduit. Mercury halide lamps mounted above each of the four sets of atrium doors bounce light off the underside of the canopy and back down into the interiors.

Ultimately, though, no one could anticipate every aspect of living so close to the wild. One day a small snake was found napping in the living room, Sternberg says. “I think he liked the feel of the cool concrete floor on his belly.”