Open to Interpretation

When architect Glen Irani set out to design his own first home on a lot along the Venice canals, the plan was to embrace the outdoors and recapture a sense of the site’s past as an unofficial neighborhood park. “I wanted to tie in with the fun side of the canals,” he explains, but even more important was creating a feeling of openness--”as if the inside of the house were the park.”

To do this, two years ago Irani created a three-story structure with a front wall that is almost entirely glass. Large windows, doors and panels slide, swing or pivot to invite in natural light, fresh air and a view of the water. In the west-facing bedroom on the top floor, light streams in through clerestory windows, which Irani calls “my natural alarm clock.” The rest of the day, shadows shrink and grow to reflect the passing hours. “I can look at the living room and tell what time it is,” says his fiancee, artist Edith Beaucage. At night, the entire house becomes a light-filled beacon marking the gateway to the canals.

A former project architect for Richard Meier on the Getty Center, Irani used his house as an opportunity to employ materials that maximize energy efficiency. For example, he opted for poured-in-place concrete floors to harness the warmth of the sun and installed a wind tower over a stair shaft to release excess heat. More than three dozen custom windows of varying shapes and sizes open to channel cooling ocean breezes. And in a move that reduces the need for environmentally unfriendly chemicals, Irani left interior walls unpainted, finishing them instead with a hand-troweled gypsum plaster sealed with beeswax or water-based acrylic. “There’s no carpeting to replace or walls to repaint in five years,” he says. “We need to make core things beautiful and appreciate them for what they are.”

Only one end of the narrow house could take advantage of the water view, so Irani made certain the space would be multi-functional. In the glass-enclosed foyer he refers to as the “everything room,” he and Beaucage can eat, sleep, work or simply take in the sun. A daybed with a built-in cabinet stows a pop-up desk that, with an extension, becomes a dining table for six. In addition, half of the wood deck lies in the garden while the other half, protected by a sliding glass door, borders the sunken living room. “The idea,” Irani explains, “is that you can see and enjoy the garden outside but from a warmer, indoor environment.”

The geometric lines of the modern home stand in contrast to the fanciful creatures Beaucage has painted on the front walk. Her artwork calls to mind children’s chalk drawings and was intended as a kind of welcome mat. So far, it has succeeded surprisingly well. One day a flock of ducks--perhaps recalling their old park--waddled up the multicolored path, onto the deck and into the living room. “They walked around inside for a while,” Irani says with a smile, “then went back to the water.”