Simple Addition

“I wanted a place to spend time in, not just a place for plain sleeping,” says actor Colm Meaney about his new master bedroom, an 800-square-foot addition with soaring 141/2-foot ceilings. Unhappy with the dark room that had been set into a dormer of his 1943 Cape Cod-style house, Meaney called on Venice architect and longtime friend Lorcan O’Herlihy to design a bedroom suite that would open to the backyard. “I wanted access to a light-filled space and a connection to the pool and garden,” says Meaney, who plays Chief Engineer Miles O’Brien on TV’s “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and will appear in the film “Mystery, Alaska” next year.

O’Herlihy united traditional and contemporary styles in a single stroke by integrating the addition into the A-frame roof line of Meaney’s one-story Studio City home. For a section of the bedroom floor and the fireplace surround, he picked a colored concrete that echoes the red bricks used for the front walkway, exterior wainscot and patio. “It’s the same color as the bricks when they’re wet,” O’Herlihy says. He incorporated a 12-foot elliptical wall of glass doors to give “the impression that the room is curved as well as to allow more space between the house and garden,” he explains. Douglas fir pivot doors, hinged top and bottom, bring the outdoors in and vice versa. “You can open all four doors, and you don’t have vertical jambs blocking your view,” the architect says. “It gives a sense of openness.” Adds Meaney: “I never use air conditioning. It’s always cool.”

O’Herlihy, who favors custom-crafted furnishings to warm up his modernist interiors, also designed birch built-ins with sculptural flair: the bed is connected to the night tables and a floor-to-ceiling closet ensemble. Cut-outs in the closet doors lend artful detail to the unit and double as door pulls. In the upper corner of one closet, a papier-mache light fixture glows. Says Meaney: “The first time I saw it, I did a double take. The light looked like it was actually growing out of the closet. It’s so organic-looking.” A visitor from Deep Space Nine perhaps?

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In this spacious addition designed by architect Lorcan O’Herlihy, actor Colm Meaney awakes to a sunny view of his backyard through glass doors that pivot open along an elliptical curve.