Covering all the angles
After Steve Werndorf sold the Tuscan-style farmhouse that he had built for himself high in the Hollywood Hills, he moved directly across the street into a classic ranch house designed in 1947 by Wallace Neff. That architect had made his reputation by building period-style mansions, but he was equally skilled at working on a tight budget, as he did with this long, low dwelling.
Although the house was great for entertaining, the bedrooms were cramped and it lacked space for the studio that Werndorf, who designed movie posters for 20 years, needed for his painting and photography. He turned to Patrick Tighe, a Santa Monica-based architect who had launched his practice by doing inventive remodels and additions for art collectors.
“The challenge was to add a structure as large as the Neff [house] without violating it, so we pulled away to create a separate building that’s linked to the house by a glass-sided hallway,” Tighe explains. “We wanted a double-height space for the studio that would step down to reduce the impact on the old house and open a view corridor for the neighbors.”
The studio’s stepped profile was inspired by Italian writer Curzio Malaparte’s villa in Capri. Architects have always admired the residence, but it won wider fame in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 movie “Contempt,” in which Brigitte Bardot descends a wedge of exterior steps after sunbathing nude on a flat roof.
The stepped profile complements the house’s gently sloping roof and forms the climax of the versatile 1,800-square-foot addition, which is anchored on its narrow triangle of land by caissons that extend 50 feet into bedrock. A master bedroom in the new space faces the terrace and pool behind the house, and glass doors in the hallway open onto a vestigial Zen garden of pebbles, wild grasses and a steel water trough with a murmuring fountain that muffles street noise.
Tighe is a master of angular geometry, a skill he honed while working for the avant-garde firm Morphosis. Here he shifts the orientation of the interior to frame views and achieve a sense of drama. A 20-foot-high barn door in the painting studio slides open to reveal the Griffith Observatory, pulling in natural light and providing good cross-ventilation. White display shelves, reached by a sliding library ladder, extend the full height of the room, which has a floor of polished dark-gray concrete. Unrailed maple steps climb a few feet and then disappear behind a white wall to reach the mezzanine office. From here you step outside and climb the exterior staircase to the rooftop terrace.
Werndorf shares the sparsely furnished space with his fiancee, Gisela Marin, who runs a jewelry boutique. “I take the light and views for granted,” Werndorf says, “but many of my guests, even though they’ve seen much grander houses, find this little studio an astonishing experience.”
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Resource Guide
Patrick Tighe Architecture, Santa Monica, (310) 450-8823.
