Ayers House

The Ayers house combines expansive mountain views, grand interior space, and a profound experience of its beautiful woodland setting, all accomplished within a relatively modest floor area. Designed for an American historian and educator and his wife, it replaces a much larger traditional house where they raised their family. Their challenge to the architects was to design an intimate retreat that is comfortable for two but spacious enough to entertain visiting family or colleagues. The house opens up to the panoramic woodland and mountain views and opens up internally for visual connections between spaces, but is sited to maintain visual privacy from the road, entrance drive and neighbors.

A generous circulation gallery extends through the house and is anchored by views of Dudley Mountain to the west and Carters Mountain to the east, visually linking the heart of house to its genus loci. Along the south side of the gallery are an entry porch, support spaces and a studio for with direct access to the garden. An open steel and oak tread stair rises up the gallery to a second level balcony, a master suite and office. The gallery is defined by a stone clad wall, with openings to the living spaces and views beyond. A living room, dining room and kitchen open to one another and are poised above the north facing slope, with expansive views through the tree canopy towards the mountain ridge in the distance and downhill towards a creek. Wrap around windows give the feel of a treehouse.

In addition to capturing views of the surrounding landscape, capturing daylight at all seasons shaped the design of this house. Early in the design process Ayers asked for “a window in the study that allows the sun to come in throughout the day, especially in the winter, a sort of wrap-around window that captures the wonderful arc the sun follows along that side of the house.” In response, the major rooms of the Ayers house are each shaped to catch light from multiple orientations, including morning light even in winter. A light monitor centered over the gallery allows afternoon light to flood the gallery and dining room, especially during the winter.

Acanto Residence

As an extensive renovation with small addition, the opportunity for the Acanto residence was to transform a well-built, but outdated, mid-century LA ranch style house into a contemporary home that could accommodate a newly formed and large blended family.

The nestled site in a Bel Air valley, with only one adjacent neighbor, offered opportunities for framed views of landscape, both near and far. The guiding concept was to capture the site’s shifting qualities of light throughout the day to create a dynamic openness. Since the original 1950’s floor plan was compartmentalized with small rooms and little connection to the landscape and views, the goal was to open the plan to connect living spaces to each other, and blur the visual and physical boundaries to the exterior. Simplified forms and materials, clean lines, and carefully placed openings to the sky and landscape work together to accomplish these goals and create spatial clarity. The streamlined and neutral aesthetic gave the house a renewed sculptural quality and expansiveness while supporting the client’s minimal lifestyle and allowing the art, furniture, and quality of light to define the space. Spaces both indoor and outdoor were created in a variety of scales and privacy levels so that the house would both function and feel intimate whether only the couple was there, or when all six children and other family members came together.

Moir Residence

The design concept of the Moir House in The Santa Lucia Preserve is informed by the landscape it inhabits. Indigenous California Oak trees serve as a frame surrounding the building as it opens to key focal elements – ridges, valleys and rock outcroppings – and allows their forms and palette to permeate the residence. Two primary design elements infuse the home with natural beauty: light monitors admit filtered northern light, while the H-shaped building layout forms a communication between two courtyards and draws a landscape path between the hilltop and stream.

The overarching woodland-inspired aesthetic is applied to the Client’s request for a hacienda-style home. To achieve this, several central hacienda design elements were identified, distilled and merged with natural modernist style in a perfect synthesis to form the contemporary hacienda.

While open beamed ceilings and exterior overhangs recall the traditional Mexican ranch vernacular, the interior color, materials and furnishings reflect the surrounding environment. The qualities and textures of oak moss, rock outcroppings and wildflowers enter the home with a poetic arrangement of aged tree trunk slices that climb up the fireplace wall of the great room. Tanned leather recalls hacienda ranch days, while blending seamlessly with the earth-tone palette. The residence functions as a unified whole; traditional forms are imbued with organic qualities in a synthesis between structure and nature.

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