Home tour: Expanding a little bit at a time in Atwater

This story begins nine years ago when architect Rebecca Rudolph and her designer-builder husband, Colin Thompson, bought a cottage in Atwater Village. It was cheap ($139,000) and tiny (500 square feet). Someone else might have seen a tear down, but they saw opportunity for a modest expansion.

First came a stylish 300-square-foot detached office, followed by a remodel that more than doubled the size of the house while keeping most of the yard intact. The result is a swoon-worthy home filled with lots of fresh ideas -- a wall of salvaged wood fencing in the living room, a translucent curtain that blocks UV rays but not the view, plus low-water landscaping and a green roof.

To read more about the house check out Lisa Boone's story, or click through a photo gallery of the home.

-- Deborah Netburn

Photos clockwise from top right: Rebecca Rudolph pulls a curtain that blocks UV rays; Colin Thompson waters the roof; the couple's daughter Rei Thompson watches television in the living room. Photo credit: Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times

Pulp nonfiction: Architect Shigeru Ban's paper buildings fill pages of new book

There are architects whose work exists only on paper. Then there is Shigeru Ban.

The architect (pronounced she-gay-roo-BAHN) has gained fame partly from work made of paper. The new Rizzoli book "Shigeru Ban: Paper in Architecture," edited by Ian Luna and Lauren A. Gould with essays by Riichi Miyake, shows how Ban has brought new meaning to architecture with his use of recycled cardboard paper tubes.

"Paper is made out of trees," Ban says. "Humans create architecture out of trees, so it must be possible to create architecture out of paper."

Projects profiled in the book include the architect's weekend residence, the Paper House in Lake Yamanaka, Yamanashi, Japan. Built in 1995, it was his first permanent structure approved by the Japanese government using paper tubes as a structural material.

The book covers public spaces as well, including Ban's 2006 Vasarely Pavilion (photo at top), a temporary outdoor seating area in Aix-en-Provence, France. The structure, up for one week, evoked the ideas and forms of geodesic dome designer Buckminster Fuller. Closer to home, the book also shows us the 2006 West Coast version of Ban's temporary Nomadic Museum, whose checkerboard exterior was created with shipping containers in Santa Monica.

-- Jeffrey Head

Photo Credit: "Shigeru Ban: Paper in Architecture"

A 1913 Long Beach Craftsman, relocated and revived

When Wendy Harn rescued a 1913 Craftsman from the wrecking ball in 1989, she didn't know much about it -- except that it was free. A developer had planned to demolish it to build condos, but first the city of Long Beach insisted that he offer the house to anyone willing to move it. Harn stepped forward, and the following year she relocated the two-story, five-bedroom behemoth from its Ocean Boulevard site opposite the Long Beach Museum of Art to her lot in the Bluff Park Historic District.

Twenty years and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, Harn and her partner, Sasha Witte, are nearing the end of a painstaking renovation in which stained glass emerged from behind plywood panels and the Craftsman's true beauty was discovered under layers of old paint.

That's the home in its current location, and that's it below in 1990 -- raised in preparation for the move. Read the full story and click through the 14-picture photo gallery.

-- Emily Young

Photo credit (top): Christine Cotter / Los Angeles Times

Photo credit (center): Christine Cotter / Los Angeles Times

Photo credit (bottom): Wendy Harn

RELATED:

Brad Laner's restored Eichler in Granada Hills

John Bertram's 900-square-foot Neutra

Ruth Handel's vintage Gregory Ain

Architect Victor Cohenca to discuss the Jewel House and Frank Lloyd Wright today at DWR

Los Angeles architect Victor Cohenca of VC Design will discuss the renovation of the Jewel House, which he purchased in 2008, tonight from 7 to 9 at Design Within Reach.

In the slide-lecture "The Spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright," Cohenca looks at the historic home's previous owner, Louis Mosbrooker, who himself was an architect and Wright disciple.

The event is free and open to the public. Guests will also get a sneak peek at Cohenca’s forthcoming book, “Oak Pass Road,” which documents how the Jewel House relates to Wright's Usonian homes.

Design Within Reach, 8070 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. (323) 653-3923. Thurs., 7-9 p.m.

-- Lisa Boone

Photos: Danielle Larsen

Architect Aaron Neubert's cozy indoor-outdoor family home in Silver Lake

It's always interesting to see what architects design for themselves or, in Aaron Neubert's case, his family. Although being his own architect was a "conflicted" process, his goal remained consistent: creating an open living environment that connected to the outdoors at every opportunity.

To make the interiors of his Silver Lake home feel larger, Neubert organized the spaces around what he calls a “vertical pinwheel” central stairwell, shown in the photograph above. “This allows all the rooms to open to each other with almost no hallway circulation,” he says. The stairs also work as a screen, differentiating rooms in an otherwise open space.

Here, Neubert romps with Checkers outside the third-floor master bedroom while wife Stacy Horth-Neubert, son Penn, 4, and daughter Quinn, 7, hang out below. For two years, while juggling work for clients, he constructed an open yet cozy family home in which every room is connected to the landscape outside. “It's all about the yard," he says. "I wanted the kids to have a jungle.”

You can take a tour through our 17-image photo gallery.

-- Lisa Boone

Photo credit: Ann Johansson / For The Times

Restaurant design inspiration: Rippou-Tai wall at Sugarfish

When the first Sugarfish sushi restaurant opened in Marina Del Rey in June 2008, brand designer Clement Mok worked with architects to create a space that would feel bright and vibrant. But when customers began to compare the results to Pinkberry, Mok knew he wanted something different for the Brentwood location, which opened in July.

Enter the Rippou-Tai wall -- an undulating wooden wall that runs the length of the restaurant. The oceanic symbolism is obvious -- especially with those glass bubble lamps hanging in front of it. The wall itself is gorgeous, at once intricate and simple, watery and earthy.

The restaurant and the wall were designed by Glen Bell of Studio Dex. He calls it a "Rippou-Tai" wall because the phrase means "3-D cube" in Japanese. It is constructed from more than 3,000 individually cut 3-by-3-inch cubes of Douglas fir that vary in depth.

The scale of Sugarfish's wall made it time consuming to assemble, but Bell says the construction is simple enough that anyone could do it. "It's like color by numbers once you have your piles of cut wood ready to go," he said. Bell screwed each piece of wood into a piece of backing (in this case, plywood). The only unforeseen difficulty? The lumber was so heavy it nearly tipped over a forklift.

-- Deborah Netburn

Photo credit: Studio Dex

Escher GuneWardena house in Glassell Park balances city with nature, the formal with the casual

A new house by noted architects Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena rises to great effect in the Glassell Park neighborhood of L.A. The architects created a promenade that leads visitors down a tunnel-like hallway lined in plywood, above, and then up stairs to a top floor that's something else entirely: an open, airy room, at right, whose floor-to-ceiling windows and doors at both ends allow for views of Burbank to the west and Elyria Canyon Park to the east.

"When we first went over there 10 years ago, we had a picnic on the site," GuneWardena said. "We identified two wonderful but distinct views -- one urban, the other natural. We wanted to highlight this contrast for those inside the house."

You can read the whole story or click through the 15-image photo gallery.

-- David Hay

Photos: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

Overnight trip at Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater? Kinda sorta

When the education department of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater announced an overnight tour of the landmark house, architecture fans and bloggers got in a lather over the prospect of weekending at the historic 1935 structure in western Pennsylvania. 

"We were delighted albeit somewhat overwhelmed by the response to the program," says director Lynda Waggoner. "However, there has been a lot of misinformation: People are not going to be renting Fallingwater as if it was a hotel, nor will they be staying overnight in the house." 

As someone who's taken the one-hour tour of a property so famous it has become a Lego set, I can assure you that the decision is not only in the best interest of the house, but also its visitors. The stone-floored bedrooms are a bit chilly and have twin beds, and the cork-lined bathrooms are tiny. Though the living room, above, has a glass-covered hatch over a stairway leading down into Bear Run, the river that inspired Fallingwater's name, tourists would find no spa, no restaurant and no pay-per-view. 

Instead, the Insight Onsite program includes in-depth tours and a meal on Fallingwater's terrace. Each 32-hour tour is limited to eight participants, who will stay in a home once owned by the lawyer for the Kaufmann family, who commissioned Wright to build Fallingwater. 

The house is a half-hour walk to the main attraction, adds Waggoner: "Not within sight of Fallingwater although it has lovely views of the mountains." 

See what it looks like after the jump.

Scheduled programs in May, June and September 2010, have already sold out at $1,195 for per person, double occupancy. For additional information and applications for the waiting list, contact Edna King at (724) 329 7802 or eking@paconserve.org.

Weekend estate sale in a 1958 John Lautner house

As someone who has been suckered by handmade signs proclaiming an "estate sale" only to discover a garage and yard filled with junk, I was thrilled to get a heads-up from Lloyd Gordon of LG Estate Sales about this weekend's moving sale. It's at the 1958 Hatherall House that modernist architect John Lautner built in Shadow Hills, a neighborhood north of the Burbank airport. As a fan of Lautner designs and a midcentury decor hound, I have just three words: See you there.

First, you've got the historic concrete block house, which was recently listed as a Home of the Week by the real estate editors at The Times. Then you've got the sale, which features possessions from the owners' "lifetime of collecting," Gordon says. That means an array of period-correct vintage and reissued midcentury designs. The circular great room, above, features two sets of designer Warren Platner's classic wire base dining table and armchairs and a Boomerang sofa from Futurama. (See more items after the jump.)

Fair warning: With a mailing list of more than 1,500 names, including designers, set decorators such as Ellen Brill of  "Nip/Tuck" and actors such as T. R. Knight, the estate sale has prices that start on the high side. The Platner sets will start at $8,000 each and the Boomerang sofa is $850, but offers are encouraged, particularly toward the end of the sale. 

Hours are 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at 10160 Maude St. Off-site parking signs will be posted, and a shuttle van will run to the property. An independent trucking company will be on hand to offer bids on moving furniture. 

Check out the prices on Verner Panton, George Nelson and Arne Jacobsen designs after the jump.

'Frank Gehry: The Houses,' a thoughtful retrospective

BOOK REVIEW

Frank Gehry: The Houses

Mildred Friedman

Rizzoli: 320 pp., $85

Since curating Frank Gehry’s first major retrospective, an exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1986, Mildred Friedman has written extensively about the master architect. For her latest book, she has selected 21 of Gehry’s most significant, mid-career residential buildings from the 1960s to the late 1980s. The houses predate Gehry’s best-known works and, with a couple of exceptions, are free of computer-aided-design structures.

Friedman’s choices underscore the organic nature of Gehry’s early experimentation with form and materials, and they illustrate the creative spirit of the houses. As UCLA architecture professor Sylvia Lavin writes in the introduction, “every inhabitant of a house by Gehry becomes an artist as they are called on not merely to use its spaces but to perceive its architectures.”

This connection between art and architecture is part of the subtext, evident when Gehry says, “the biggest influence  on the design of my houses was Robert Rauschenberg.” It is an invitation to consider Gehry’s use of chain-link fencing, plywood and corrugated sheet metal as objects in a life-size, residential collage or assemblage. Each house is a three-dimensional canvas made from Gehry’s raw materials, unconventional shapes, unusual angles and exposed structural framework.

“A structure in process is always more poetic than the finished work,” Gehry says, and indeed, in many of the houses, a rough, informal precision conveys vibrancy and energy. By leaving certain aspects undone, the architect reveals his materials and exposes more of his canvas to let it live and breathe. The houses presented here bolster the argument that Gehry is an artist who happens to be an architect.

Friedman starts with Gehry’s own house in Santa Monica (1977-78), pictured in the model at top and in the photo above. It's a home that started life as a 1925 California bungalow and has become internationally known. New interviews offer surprising and deeper insights. Discussions with former Gehry associates and residential clients give perspective and context.

The book continues, project by project. The Winton Guest House in Wayzata, Minn. (1983-87), Gehry’s only house built outside Southern California, is a thoughtful and impressive chapter, with photographs showing the setting of the house and its surface details. The Sirmai-Peterson House in Thousand Oaks (1984-86), pictured above, and the Schnabel House in Brentwood (1986-89) are also well presented.

Credit for the profusely illustrated, large-format design goes to Jessica Fleischmann. “Frank Gehry: The Houses” is a fresh combination of interior and exterior photographs, plans and Gehry’s signature action drawings. The details from numerous scale models give an immediate and holistic perspective. In one meaningful and ironic layout, photographs of Gehry’s Easy Edges cardboard furniture (1972) are placed opposite scale models of the Gehry House (1977). One house model is made with corrugated cardboard painted silver to simulate corrugated metal.

Although the book’s focus is Gehry’s early houses, it does include occasional references to his nonresidential projects. The only omission from an otherwise comprehensive review is a timeline to show how Gehry’s commercial and institutional designs ran parallel to the houses.

-- Jeffrey Head

Above: The master bedroom in Gehry's personal residence in Santa Monica.

Photo credits: Gehry Partners, LLP / Rizzoli