Cliffside
House
Pt. Dume, CA

A second home designed for a family with two active teenagers. They intend to be outdoors as much as indoors. They wanted a courtyard house with private zones for the parents and children with one large communal zone for the family.

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"We spend a lot of time together as a family, when we are at our spring-summer houses, but still, we will all need our private zones, to work and re-center," the mother told us. "On this large piece of flat land, where should we place each of our zones?" This was an important question. We built temporary 2 level platforms, at three unique site locations, for the family to camp and experience the land, the climate, the views, and the spaces, prior to beginning concept design. They developed an intimate understanding of the site, realizing that they would live on the entire site, so the house had to allow fluid movement indoor and out.

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The L-shaped house is situated to create two big outdoor areas. Three two-story pavilions, parallel to the street and ocean, are connected to each other by a bridge. One is for the children, one for the parents, and one, which extends back to the street, is for the whole family. The main entry gateway, at the street is connected to the living room entry at the second level, 200 feet towards the bluffs edge, will be accessed by a very long, wide, ramped roof, conceived as a dune with living shoreline dune scape.Upon entering the house, the long dramatic views to Pt. Dume, the Santa Monica Mountains, Channel Islands, and downtown Los Angeles begin to unfold. "Also, we want to house to open up with drama, when we arrive on Memorial Day, and close down when we depart on Labor Day. This is reminiscent of my childhood," she said. Large sliding exterior wall sections will serve this purpose.