Designed to clean up his act

Peter Schroff has never had a problem living life to the fullest. For 16 years, the set designer and installation artist turned his orange-and-green bungalow in Venice into an exuberant showcase of leftover props and knickknacks, a place where deer antlers covered the kitchen ceiling, surfboards doubled as shelves and geisha bobblehead dolls danced under gyrating hula lamps.

But when the fruits of his weekly flea market habit bulged out of the house and into the backyard, a city code enforcement team had no choice but to step in. Four citations and the threat of a lien later, tchotchke addict Schroff finally grasped the solution.

He built a second house on the lot.

And not just any house: a gleaming, two-story glass cube with wide-open interiors and ruthlessly clean lines that leave little room for clutter. Building a 2,500-square-foot second home may sound extreme, but so was life in the house of excess.

“There’s a point where you realize that the place owns you instead of you owning it,” Schroff says. “It starts to close in on you.” Yet ditching the tchotchkes wasn’t an option. “I’m obsessed with junk,” he says with a shrug. The best choice, he says, was to start over with a clean slate.

Today, his cluttered yin rents out the overly furnished original house, while his minimalist yang lives in the pristine loft-like space in the rear of the lot.

Finding someone to design a space centered on simplicity wasn’t easy in Venice, known for its artsy edge and architectural experimentation.

“Everyone wants to do those really stylized houses. They’re all trying too hard to do the Frank Gehry thing,” says Schroff, who interviewed half a dozen design firms before finding an architect who understood his needs.

He finally chose Kevin Mulcahey, a recent graduate of the Southern California Institute of Architecture who, as a teenager in Ocean City, Md., had ogled the smooth rails of surfboards that Schroff had designed in the late ‘60s. The two shared a pragmatic approach to design. Nothing over the top.

After other bids came in as high as $600,000, Schroff thought he’d have to settle for rudimentary plywood-and-stucco construction, given his $300,000 budget. But Mulcahey had a plan that would give his client simplicity but also allow for a little architectural drama.

“Peter wanted us to build a house that was the antithesis of the first, one that would force him to streamline,” says Mulcahey, who sketched an open, flowing floor plan with virtually no storage space for trinkets. “The building itself needed to act as reminder of what he needed to do.”

Mulcahey limited himself to four simple materials: glass, steel, concrete and Galvamet, prefabricated siding that provides insulation as well as decent interior and exterior finishes. On paper, the house is nothing more than a cube, elevated eight feet by stilts to allow for parking underneath. But on quaint Brooks Avenue, the floating box is quite the statement: a glass-and-steel spaceship hovering in the stucco heart of bungalow row.

Inside, all those windows capture light and vistas, while the 20-foot ceilings keep the space airy and open. “It’s like living in an aquarium,” says Schroff, whose girlfriend refused to move in once she realized that even the bathroom is on full view to the public. The fishbowl attracts plenty of opinions.

“I was worried the neighbors would be upset,” Schroff says, “but so far everyone seems really into it.”

Zana Alwan, a trapeze artist who lives down the street, liked the work so much she tapped Mulcahey to build a similarly modern home behind the cramped Craftsman she couldn’t bear to tear down. Though she loves the suspended feeling of Schroff’s place, she says hers won’t have as much glass.

“I still want to be able to walk around naked,” Alwan says, “and I wouldn’t want people setting up seats for a free show on my front lawn.”

Schroff, who settled in last fall after nearly three years of construction, hasn’t had any trouble adapting to his curtain-free existence. A blank canvas — a place where he can clear his mind and catch the sunset — is worth the trade-offs. Nevermind that it looks like George Jetson moved in next to Pee-wee Herman. In Venice, anything goes.

“There’s always going to be people who want things to stay the same, but most of the people really appreciate the variety,” Alwan says. “I love seeing a Craftsman, next to a Modern, next to a Spanish. Venice is the anti-tract home neighborhood.”

Eric Moss, director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, says the trend toward neighborhood diversity in design is growing.

“There’s a greater willingness to experiment, and a great willingness to tolerate,” says Moss, who recently delivered a lecture at Harvard University titled, “Schizophrenia Is a Cure, Not a Disease.” “Putting opposing ideas together gives architects, cities and homeowners different ways of looking at the next generation of buildings.”

Moss says easy-flowing residential warehouses such as Schroff’s are perfect for homeowners with commitment issues. They can say, “I don’t know what the heck I’m going to do with this space, and that’s OK. I can change my mind.”

That is exactly what Schroff plans to do. One month he might hang red cotton panels from the exposed beams; the next month he might bring in those kewpie dolls and create a kitschy installation. “It’s like a gallery with rotating exhibits” says Schroff, who also uses the space to create mock sets for work.

The home confirms most, but not all, notions of minimalist living. Floors are concrete. Walls are kept to a minimum, though Schroff uses stacked IKEA cabinets to create privacy between sleeping areas for him and his 8-year-old daughter. His “bedroom” is little more than a blue-sheeted mattress sitting on a frame built from more IKEA cabinets. But in his daughter’s room, he built floor-to-ceiling shelves out of lime green plexiglass so she could display her stuffed animal collection and he could have a place to sneak in a few rescued pieces — a mini Michelin man, a bobbing hula — of his own.

Downstairs the living area, office and kitchen occupy one amorphous space. Furniture consists of little more than a set of stackable, plastic scoop-seat chairs he snagged from a trade show, a groovy egg-shaped coffee table and a shagadelic “lounge” he created by plopping inflatable silver chaise cushions in the corner. A cluster of lights he calls “the lamp garden” hovers in a random configuration on the floor.

The simplicity of the design largely keeps Schroff honest. “It forces me to keep the junk out,” he says, though he’s still not ready to ditch any of it.

By setting the home on stilts, Mulcahey unwittingly gave Schroff a place to nurture his inner packrat. Everything that doesn’t belong upstairs — hundreds of disco balls, mannequins, birdcages — are concealed neatly under the house, in the carport-turned-prop studio. Together the upstairs and downstairs of Schroff’s new digs feed both sides of his personality. The home as a whole is still loaded with junk, he says, “but at least now I can just go upstairs and get away from it all.”