Floored by the view

JONATHAN SEGAL likes to think big about small lots. The 43-year-old architect has become a master of urban development in San Diego -- designing, financing and building places to live and work on vacant, under built and unwanted odd-shaped plots in the downtown area. Other developers dismissed these sites, known as infill, as not worth the trouble. But Segal is drawn to them. He has fit eight lofts where there once was a Circle K convenience store, 37 inside a warehouse next to the city’s oldest bar and 22 in a once-gritty neighborhood next to the San Diego Freeway.

During two decades, Segal has covered four acres of the city’s core with 227 apartments and condos tucked into 13 steel-and-stucco or wood-framed buildings. A fellow architect once christened Segal “the Sylvester Stallone of urban development.”

And now he’s turned his talents to his own house.

Where others saw only an abandoned lot that used to be a gas station on a noisy corner in downtown La Jolla, Segal envisioned a place to build his family’s new home: a contemporary perch with a view of the ocean and office buildings, protected by vine-covered concrete walls, sound-softening hedges and a lap pool that stretched across one side.

And the surprise element from this committed urbanist? Buried beneath the ground would be the ultimate private space, a basement with a glass ceiling that let sunlight in during the day and captured the starry sky at night.

Segal calls his new home “the Prospect,” not because it’s on one end of Prospect Street, which leads to La Jolla’s shopping and restaurant district, but because he says he found it while prospecting. “It was a worthless lot that had been vacant since 1992,” says Segal of the triangular parcel at the intersection of two busy streets that used to hold a gas station. He bought it, old buried gas tanks and all, for about $800,000 in 2003.

“No one else would have taken a risk on that piece of property,” says architect Rob Wellington Quigley, who has been designing affordable housing in San Diego’s downtown area since the 1980s. “But now that Jonathan’s done it, it’s easy to see that the site is better suited for a house than a gas station.”

SHOEHORNING much-needed housing into pockets of available land is a reality that architects and builders are increasingly forced to embrace. In many established cities, infill is the only opportunity for new construction.

“Small developers have led the way for infill development because 10 years ago the big producers didn’t want to be limited by tearing down an existing structure, using that structure or finding a vacant lot downtown,” says John McIlwain, senior fellow for housing at the Urban Land Institute. “Infill is an opportunity to turn a bleak street into a walkable, lively one with houses and stores.”

To Segal, working with eyesore property is a matter of finances, opportunity and a driving need to turn areas that “were a mess” into safe ones with salable housing. “Our architecture is about reducing the building to its bare essence -- no frills -- and we try to create spaces that seem much larger than they really are,” he says. “All great architecture should be beautiful and graceful but at the same time affordable and appreciated by all walks of life.”

Such is the case with his home, but first it took a little work.

Segal had to clean up the 7,200-square-foot site and overcome noise and privacy issues, the city’s height and setback restrictions and anxious neighbors who worried that an egomaniac could erect an overblown mansion on a very visible, limited lot. When construction finally began, his banker said someone hoped it was an In-N-Out Burger. Others thought the rectangular structure behind 9-foot-high walls was a museum.

Segal would spend a year designing, overseeing construction and even installing some of the 200-pound glass panels with his son Matthew, 19, an architecture student at USC. By doing a lot of the work himself, including making the furniture, he spent $195 a square foot, about half the cost of a comparable house.

Inside, the home is warm, wrapped in panels of reddish-brown sapelli wood on the ground floor and jarrah wood in the upstairs bedrooms. The master suite, which encompasses the entire third floor, has a view of La Jolla Cove.

From the street, the house is distinguished by an 8-foot-wide stainless-steel wall relief that was installed above the massive steel front door. “The Broach,” as Segal calls it, was designed by noted artist Malcolm Leland.

In the end, Segal had the home he wanted as well as coveted national recognition: the American Institute of Architects’ best single-family housing award in 2004 for creating a “sanctuary for the human spirit” with inventive use of resources.

But Segal is no stranger to such awards.

His other contemporary structures, which have earned three national AIA awards and four honor awards from Residential Architect magazine, are well-placed rectangles, arranged in unexpected ways. Landscaping with leafy trees deftly conceals the hard realities of urban life: cars whizzing by and views of railroad and trolley tracks, billboards and chain-linked work yards.

Other trademarks for Segal, who was named a fellow of the AIA when he was 40, include expansive windows, wood ceilings, concrete floors and exposed supports.

One of his two-story apartment buildings has a modular section with a tall window rising from the flat roof, almost as if a kid with a Lego kit stuck a piece on top to add interest, just because he could.

Segal is that kid and he can indulge his design fancies because he has been his own client, developer and property manager since setting up his firm in 1989 with his wife, Wendy. His previous house in downtown San Diego was carved out of a site that once held an auto repair shop.

“He gives hope to many of us,” says Frank Harmon, an architect in Raleigh, N.C., who specializes in sustainable buildings and who serves as a judge for national AIA competitions. “The market he’s working in is conservative, traditional and dominated by what has sold in the past. Instead of a sentimental design trying to look like a Victorian building, he creates well-planned, fresh, beautiful, open buildings that are modern and economic to inhabit.”

WHILE horizontal-thinkers brushed aside this nugget of land that would become Segal’s new residence, he saw the benefits of building up to city height restrictions -- 30 feet -- and down into the ground for a basement, an increasingly popular option in California cities.

When he looked into the expense of removing the gas tanks embedded 12 feet in the ground, he found that it would cost $70,000 to take out the dirt, clean it and put it back, while it was only $20,000 to have the dirt carted away. He then made the best use of the newfound hole by designing a 2,000-square-foot basement that he first used as an office and now as a giant playroom.

With a basement, Segal said, he could put a third of the house’s 6,200-square-foot usable space below ground level without making the dwelling look like an overbuilt “puff mansion.”

As with his other homes, he wanted an office on the bottom floor, only this time it would be subterranean. To avoid a dark workspace, Segal, Wendy and their firm’s employees came up with the idea of building a basement that is 10 feet wider than the footprint of the house and putting a glass ceiling on that extension.

Panels of glass 1 1/8 -inch thick -- “you can drive a car over them,” says Segal -- were laid into an I-beam structure that is level with the backyard. This sturdy pad of glass is the patio outside the living room.

The Segals can now lounge in chaises on their patio and look down into the basement. Of course, there’s no privacy, but that seems the point. When their daughter Brittany, 17, is having a slumber party there, Wendy can easily check in to see when the girls are awake for breakfast. When son Matthew hosts a computer party, Wendy says she watches them without interrupting.

Most basements aren’t finished as grandly as the rest of the house, which reduces their expense. But the Segal basement has fine wood finishes and custom furniture identical to the rooms in three above-ground levels.

“Traditionally a basement has been a throwaway space, but the urban environment is the new frontier,” says Segal. “It’s a good opportunity to put the comforts that don’t need exposure to the exterior, like a TV room or meeting area. It doesn’t have to be a dreary dungeon.”

The 40-foot-long glass ceiling allows light to pour in, but the problem with the glass on the ground level is that it unnerves “about 20% of people,” says Segal. Some don’t feel secure stepping on it. Women in skirts don’t like the thought of people below looking up at them, so when the Segals have parties, they lay carpet on top of the glass. “And some pets get freaky,” says Segal. “But it’s a great conversation piece.”

On a recent Saturday night, the Segals entertained friends, first in the glass-walled living room, with water on one side -- a lap pool -- and fire on the other, a steel fire pit in the backyard.

Below, the basement is divided into two distinct styles. One side is decorated in black, the other white. The white side, carpeted in snowy Flokati shag and one wall draped in milky canvas, is underneath the glass ceiling.

“We call it ‘the love in,’ ” says Segal, evoking its 1960s styling. A few of the female guests sat down on the white leather chairs and talked. On the other side, visible through a shelved divider, the men played billiards, the music blasting bossa nova tunes. Black velvet covers the walls.

Wendy Segal says she enjoys spending time in the basement because the glass ceiling adds a poetic quality. “The rain sits on the glass and it reflects on the drapes like artwork,” she says.

“The feeling of the room would have been different without the glass. It would still be a fun room, but you couldn’t see the sky. Everyone likes that we’re here.”

Except, perhaps, the passerby in need of that former gas station.

Janet Eastman can be reached at janet.eastman@latimes.com.