Venice Beach Residence

Architecture, Interior Design, Residential —

Refined materials, details, and proportions create a feeling of spaciousness, harmony, and peace. The dream of the Californian indoor-outdoor lifestyle comes to reality with carefully detailed motorized doors that allow the house to be fully open to the lap pool designed to animate the building exterior with dappled reflections during the day and create a gentle glow at night.

The perceivable boundary of the house is not the glass walls of the building but the blue green Podocarpus trees that were added to define the edge of the property and expand the boundary of inhabited space while offering privacy. A visual axis through the property is created from the front entry to the sculptural black staircase in the guest house volume, with the black kitchen island as a central focus.

The polished dark concrete ground floor is carefully matched to the exterior concrete to enlarge the visible floor plate. The cladding of the main house was designed in dark wood with soffits returning to the interior ceilings to draw the eye outwards. A patio extends visually as a zen rock garden under the sculptural guest house stairway.

The kitchen is designed as a backdrop to the black center island, made of composite stone, and a black dining table that can be added to and expanded all the way into the outdoor patio to seat thirty.

The library at the entry of the house doubles as a guest room with a retracting translucent panelite wall, while the primary suite on the upper floor continues the Japanese feeling of the house with quarter sawn bleached oak cabinets, and a spacious primary bath with a hinoki bathtub.