Hot Stuff
As 5-year-old Calder Scarpa flings himself with joyous abandon into a poured-concrete pool in the enclosed frontyard of his Venice home, water sprays off the raised sides of the structure and into a bed of colored-glass balls. There it seeps underground, where it will recirculate into a solar hot-water system.
Calder’s father, architect Lawrence Scarpa, watches from a nearby garden chair, leaning back against a two-story-high concrete wall marked with fossil-like imprints of eucalyptus leaves. Just beyond, architect Angie Brooks--Scarpa’s work partner and wife and Calder’s mom--steps lightly across a row of pavers that are nearly submerged in a pond that leads to the main entrance of the family’s recently completed expansion, a project that more than doubled the size of what once was a two-bedroom, 700-square-foot Spanish-style bungalow. This is cost-effective ecological living with flair.
Built on a classic Venice through-lot that fronts two streets in the increasingly upscale Abbot Kinney neighborhood, the architects have dubbed their home the Solar Umbrella House to acknowledge its most dramatic feature--a flat canopy of solar panels that wraps the roof and west elevation of the house and provides nearly all of its electricity. The design pays homage to Florida Modernist Paul Rudolph’s 1953 Umbrella House in Sarasota, originally designed with a wood rooftop trellis to provide year-round shade from the searing sun. Early in Scarpa’s career in the 1980s, he worked for Rudolph before moving with Brooks to Los Angeles. “I guess I’ve always wanted to do a house in Florida, and this is the next best thing,” Scarpa says with a laugh.
Scarpa and Brooks have defined their careers by integrating high style with sustainability. “You can’t have a really sustainable building if it’s not good design,” Brooks says. “People won’t want to live in it.” For this pair, who collaborated on all aspects of their home with help from their firm, playful elements are as important as avoiding waste and living responsibly.
Brooks and Scarpa bought their house in 1997 before becoming parents. They began work on the original house, which was mostly preserved, before starting the expansion. It was finished in January.
The kitchen now faces a new living-room area with wall-sized windows that open onto the frontyard, making indoors and outdoors equivalent living spaces. Most of the furnishings are built-in, including cherry bookshelves that enclose and disguise--secret-agent style--an additional bathroom and utility area. Upstairs is a new deck and master bedroom with radiant-heated concrete floors and a bath with travertine counters. Clerestory windows minimize views of nearby neighbors, but a wall-sized doorway gives the bedroom a classic California indoor-outdoor feel.
Matching colored stucco unifies the new structure with the old, but the Spanish touches are gone in favor of a more severe geometric facade. “The existing house had good bones, so we wanted to save a lot of it,” Brooks says. They made it their own with flooring and cabinetry fashioned from compressed wood-waste board usually used for roof sheathing. Sanded and finished to reveal the wood-shard mosaic, the material replaces standard hardwood.
“A lot of stuff we use was never intended to be used as a finished material,” Brooks says. For example, one interior wall is covered with Scotch-guarded homosote, a soft, felt-like material made from recycled newsprint and intended for sound insulation. A wall dividing the bath from the dining room is a two-panel glass enclosure filled with small plastic balls used to clean ocean oil spills.
The hidden is often revealed, but not just for structural honesty, as in the work of some Modernists. “We think the solar panels are really beautiful, so we wanted to use them architecturally,” Brooks says. The horizontal placement of the rooftop photovoltaic panels requires her to clean them three times a year to maintain efficiency, but there’s a big payoff: Not only do the panels keep the house almost completely off the power grid--the architects estimate their annual electrical bill at $300--they also shade the second-story terrace outside the master bedroom. And their initial cost of $36,000 was halved by an L.A. Department of Water and Power rebate program that encourages green building.
Perhaps most impressive is the couple’s shoot-from-the-hip approach to experimenting with materials that turns convention on its side. An exterior panel made from the brushes of industrial brooms provides privacy to the upstairs patio, an effect that is both functional and eccentrically personal. “I hope a bird nests there someday,” Scarpa says. Many people approach sustainable building as a science project, adds Brooks. Much of it can be experimental, a mix of recycling, accommodating new ideas and common sense. But “it’s not rocket science,” Brooks says. “You don’t have to do a million studies. Sometimes you just have to do it.”
