An Ocean Park House With an Outdoor Feel, Butterflies and All
“We both wanted a house that was open and engaged the landscape,” says architect Kevin Daly of the two-story Ocean Park home he shares with his wife, Dana Cuff, a UCLA professor of architecture, and their two children.
Although they purchased the lot with its small postwar bungalow in 1987, the couple waited 10 years before building. “We went through several scenarios,” says Daly, of Daly, Genik Architects in Santa Monica, “from adding on to the existing structure to building a series of townhouses.” They decided to build a new home to the rear of the existing house. “It made good economic sense to keep it,” says Cuff, who acted as project manager. “We could live in the front house while we supervised the construction, then rent it out as an income property when we moved.”
They contained costs by installing radiant heating throughout the house, assembling their own cabinets and doing their own landscaping. “It may be the last $100-a-square-foot home built in Santa Monica,” says Daly. The result of their combined efforts is a long, narrow home with side walls that slide away to open the house to the outdoors. “Butterflies occasionally pass through,” observes Cuff. In the summer, the open walls cool the house and capture sea breezes. In winter, the radiant heating and a fireplace take the chill off. On one side, translucent plastic paneling opens to a garden with a courtyard and a stand of 25-foot-high giant timber bamboo. The Bambusa oldhamii, planted a year ago, has doubled in size and become “visually the outdoor wall of the house,” says Daly. The opposite living room wall, which has large steel-and-glass doors, opens onto a terrace. Lined with Italian cypress and a long, built-in redwood bench, it is used as an extended living room when the couple are entertaining.
Throughout the home, exterior building materials are used inside and out. Indoor rooms have poured-in-place concete floors as does the adjacent terrace, while concrete blocks act as both exterior and interior walls in the kitchen and study areas. At night, the translucent indoor-outdoor plastic paneling that makes up walls in the living room and study areas resembles a glowing box. Upstairs, the family’s bedroom area is wrapped both inside and out in birch-plywood panels, whose underside forms the living room ceiling--”think of a cigar box,” says Cuff. The seamless blending of indoor-outdoor life has only one drawback, according to Cuff: “Our 3-month-old yellow lab, Riley, still can’t tell inside from out.”
Downstairs, the home of Kevin Daly and Dana Cuff features indoor-outdoor polycarbonate sliding panels that open the living room and corner study to a courtyard on the east side of the house, left. Poured-in-place concrete floors in the living room extend out to a terrace on the west side, where the couple frequently entertain, right.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Dana Cuff’s Modern Muses:
* Otto Rothschild, Leonard Nadel and Dick Whittington, whose photographs of lost L.A. will be featured in Cuff’s upcoming book, “The Provisional City.”
* Architects Albert Frey and Richard Neutra, for relating site to materials.
* Charles and Ray Eames, for their utilitarian leg splints and molded chaises.
* R.M. Schindler, for the garden at his Kings Road house.
* D.J. Waldie, for his memories of Lakewood, Calif., in the book “Holy Land.”
* Thelonious Monk, for his jazz; Chopin, for his etudes.
