HIGH TIDE
While most attics are home to spiders and dusty castoffs, the pitched roof of one 1920s apartment tower in Pasadena conceals a sparkling white abode. Margery Wheaton, who writes grant proposals for nonprofit organizations, spent much of her life on boats and yearned for a place that would have the same simplicity and sense of freedom as a yacht. A lofty pied-a-terre presented the perfect opportunity. She hired a demolition contractor to strip the attic to its reinforced concrete shell, and serendipitously met architect Padraic Cassidy as she contemplated her next step. For four years Cassidy had been with Frank Gehry’s office, working on the designs of Walt Disney Hall and doing presentation drawings for the Bilbao Guggenheim--both huge and complex structures. However, he quickly shifted gears and produced a minimalist masterpiece: a living space that feels much larger and more interesting than its mere 900 square feet.
“I worked out a solution using a scale model as I had at Gehry’s office, and that made it easy to adjust details before building them,” explains Cassidy. He added two concrete columns to the existing 14 to create a grid that defines bays and brings a sense of order to the loft’s irregular space.
A porthole in the door to the entrance hall evokes a ship’s galley. An open kitchen leading out onto a roof deck occupies the east bay, and the bed is located in a window gable to the south, with storage concealed within the walls. The north bay houses a sitting area, and a glass-walled bathroom is tucked in beside the entrance, with a curtain that can be drawn inside for privacy. At the center of the room is a wood bench, table and chairs, which can be reconfigured for dining or as a home office.
Wheaton picked a few favorite Los Angeles artists, such as Helen Pashgian and Eric Zammitt, who arrived early in the creative process so that their work could be integrated into the space. Roger Feldman’s welded and enameled steel-tube sculpture wraps around the central bench like a symbolic anchor and reaches up toward the pitched skylight. Andy Cao installed a “sea” of tumbled blue-glass pebbles beneath the slope of the attic roof--an deceptively difficult project that required two tons of material to be hauled, one sack at a time, up stairs and in an antiquated elevator. A mirror set in the angle where the floor meets the roof creates the illusion that an indoor sea is extending out to the horizon.
“The space was too small to play tricks with the geometry,” says Cassidy. “My inspiration came from the Barcelona Pavilion, an early modern classic in which Mies van der Rohe defines space with planes and uses polished stone, metal and glass to obtain different degrees of reflectively.” Lacking Van der Rohe’s budget for travertine and marble, Cassidy achieved a similar effect with a polished black concrete floor, chalky white walls and a polished concrete kitchen counter, with mirrors strategically placed to enlarge dark corners. To maximize the sense of space, he has opened the main area by eliminating vertical interior walls, so that the eye travels across the room without interruption.
Wheaton is the first to admit that it takes discipline to live in such a confined space. She treats the local library as her bookshelf and has learned, as she did while sailing, to bring only the bare necessities to this apartment. The payoff is a feeling of serenity that is enhanced by the bare white walls and the infinite vistas of the sky.
