American Craftsman meets Swiss chalet in Pasadena

A dentist named Francis K. Ledyard paid $10,000 to the Milwaukee Building Co. — the firm best known for Grauman's Chinese Theatre — for his two-story, four-bedroom house. Believed to be the only home like it in Pasadena, it sported furry, bark-on redwood logs, russet-stained redwood shake siding and a white limestone chimney — an American Craftsman with a touch of Swiss chalet.

That was 1909. By the time architect Douglas Ewing spotted the house in 2003, the defining log trim was gone, the house had been painted brown and the kitchen and bathrooms had undergone Midcentury Modern remodels.

PHOTO GALLERY: Log Craftsman in Pasadena

But Ewing, who grew up among Pasadena's Craftsman bungalows and worked for Case Study architect Whitney Smith, had by then designed several Adirondack-style projects, including a Colorado ski lodge for Ralph Lauren.

“I fell in love with log buildings,” Ewing said. So he and his wife, Maggie, decided to buy the house, warts and all.

Negotiations fell through, however, and the house wound up back on the market. Enter Faith Dymek and her husband, Mark, who were moving from Virginia. They brought with them daughter Ryanne; Faith's mother, Sharon McCabe; plus Arts and Crafts furniture that had never looked quite right in their old Colonial-style home.

The couple bought the “falling-down, ramshackle, termite-ridden house” in 2004, Faith said, figuring a little elbow grease was all they needed to fix it up. Then they met Ewing, who explained the difference between making the house livable and bringing it back to life as originally designed. The latter, he said, would require more time, more money and more expertise.

The Dymeks' decision?

“We decided we would restore versus renovate,” Faith said.

To economize, she served as general contractor, visiting the job site daily and gathering leads on local artisans.

Malibu modern: New house makes most of every inch, every view

You could admire the ocean view from the second-floor deck — coastal bluffs covered with wind-sculpted cypress trees to your right, pretty Point Dume off in the distance to your left, 10 miles of prime Malibu beach in between.

Or you could admire the architecture from the street below, looking up at a first floor that juts out from a cliff and hovers over nothingness.

Or you could contemplate the house from the front, where the weathered redwood siding turns out to be planks recycled from olive and pickle tanks.

You could do all of that, but then you might miss part of what makes this house special. This dream of a retreat — set along exclusive Broad Beach, among the mansions that Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford, Goldie Hawn and Steve Levitan have called home — holds smart design ideas that could translate to houses that are miles and miles away, in geography, budget or style.

PANORAMAS: Interactive 360-degree images from inside this house

After all, on paper this house is merely 1,700 square feet of living space: open kitchen and living room, powder room, small office and guest bedroom with bath on the first floor, master suite on the second. That's it.

But as conceived by the young Los Angeles firm W+D, this Malibu house plays out as a case study in the efficient use of space. Wedged next to noisy Pacific Coast Highway and set snugly between neighbors, the house also is inspiration for anyone trying to balance a love of the outdoors with the need for quiet and privacy.

L.A. at Home photo gallery archive open for touring

Our home profiles are collectively meant to represent the here and now, whether that means side-by-side Schindler houses in Inglewood with a shared front yard for an improved sense of community, above, or an architect's Laurel Canyon retreat that delivers a wonderful sense of privacy. A Midcentury Modern residence remade with some Latin American flavor, or a traditional Craftsman bungalow built as a family DIY project. Eames, Wright, Lautner. Santa Monica, Hollywood Hills, Ojai, Joshua Tree. We've been there and covered that. You will find dozens of our most recent profiles in our archive, so check it out. And if you see a cool house with a great story, email us at home@latimes.com.

HOME TOURS: The L.A. at Home photo gallery archive

Photo: Joel Bell helps son James traverse the garden in front of twin houses by Modernist icon R.M. Schindler in Inglewood. Credit: Katie Falkenberg / For The Times

Dwell on Design modern home tours begin Saturday

Tickets are still available for Dwell on Design modern home tours this weekend, in advance of the annual design exhibition June 22 to 24 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

The self-guided East Side Modern Home Tour this Saturday includes Simon Storey's 960-square-foot Eel's Nest, shown above and featured by L.A. at Home earlier this year, and designer-developer Jerome Pelayo's sustainable Sunia Home, both in Echo Park. Farther east, the tour will include OKB Architecture + Construction's colorful addition in Pasadena, shown at right, as well as a Buff, Straub and Hensman home in San Marino and Fer Studio's modern update of a 1980s La Cañada Flintridge residence, which we featured back in 2009. 

A Prefab Plus Home Tour on Sunday will highlight a pair of prefabricated town houses designed by Whitney Sanders, Linda Taalman's Back Yard Plug-in Module, a hybrid prefabricated structure using Blue Sky Building Systems in Santa Monica, a Ray Kappe-designed LivingHome in Santa Monica and a Venice residence by Marmol Radziner Prefab. (A West Side Home Tour on June 24 is sold out.). Homes will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; tickets are $85 per tour.

2012 AIA housing design winners announced

The American Institute of Architects announced the winners of its 2012 national housing design awards, a list punctuated by a Hollywood Hills home dubbed the Nakahouse, pictured above, by XTen Architecture. Other winners include a wood and glass retreat in Carmel, an apartment complex for the formerly homeless in San Francisco and a steel and glass prefab in the Arizona desert. You can see them all in our 2012 AIA housing winners photo gallery.

Photo credit, top: Steve King

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2011 AIA housing design winners

2010 AIA housing design winners

Homes of the Times: California design profiles

Six most-viewed home photo galleries of 2012

Modern apartments and a rammed-earth house. A manse in Santa Monica and a sliver of a home in Echo Park. Shoestring budgets and high-priced dreams. It's always interesting to see which of our home profiles click with readers, and with the following list we present to you the most-viewed home photo galleries from January through April:

1. Lisa Ling and Paul Song's new Santa Monica house, top left. Contemporary design as a prism for Chinese and Korean roots. Posted in December and still at the top of our list for 2012. Full article and photo gallery. Photo credit: Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times

2. Simon Storey's Eel House, top center. Architect makes a 15-foot-wide house feel larger. Full article and photo gallery. Photo credit: Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

3. Alejandro D'Acosta and Claudia Turrent's rammed earth house, top right. Architect couple experiment with reeds, dirt, lime and liquid from nopal cactuses. Cover story to the last stand-alone print Home section. (Sniff.) Full article and photo gallery. Photo credit: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times

4. Centre Street apartments, bottom left. Rental living for a new generation. Full article and photo gallery. Photo credit: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times

5. Mini modern, bottom center. The 495-square-foot house was published in November and is still going strong. Full article and photo gallery. Photo credit: Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times

6. Marmol Radziner's cinematic sweep. Perfectly framed views in a house for a photographer and cinematographer. Full article, photo gallery and 360-degree interactive panoramas. Photo credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times 

 

 

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Montecito house, green to an extreme

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Photographer Jill Greenberg's house in 360-degree pictures

1971 Ojai ranch house remodeled into modern retreat

After living in what they had thought was their dream house — six bedrooms, five bathrooms, 3,900 square feet in Ojai complete with orange orchard and pool — Wanda Weller Sakai and Kurtis Sakai found themselves wanting something different. Something less.

“We realized we’d rather downsize to something smaller and more humble and use whatever money we had left over to make something nice for ourselves,” Kurtis said.

“One of the wake-up calls was seeing how much time and money I had to spend on water, property taxes, utilities and landscaping,” he said, adding that the monthly water bill in summer was $700. “I started to think that, for the long haul, it didn’t make sense to be in a house that big.”

PHOTO GALLERY: Ojai ranch remodel

So they sold the house and bought a 1,700-square-foot, 1971 ranch-house fixer nearby at the foot of Los Padres National Forest, pictured at right, top.

Working with architect Darwin McCredie, the couple created what McCredie calls “a transparent house” by adding 6-foot-wide glass sliders to every room. McCredie also added a master suite and office and rearranged rooms inside the home’s original footprint.

The gabled roof of the garage was altered into a streamlined box, the bookend to the new office for Kurtis Sakai at the other end of the house, right, bottom.

At Coyote House, every day is an Earth Day

Oh, how far we've come from Earth Days past — when the phrase “green home” conjured images of straw-bale structures, when solar panels seemed like such an earnest novelty, when “LEED certified” hadn't yet crept into public consciousness.

With Earth Day 2012 almost upon us, nearly 60,000 homes in the United States are in the process of being certified in the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Education and Environmental Design program, according to Nate Kredich, the organization's vice president of residential market development. Need more convincing proof of just how far we've come? Take a peek at the new home of architect Ken Radtkey and landscape architect Susan Van Atta.

PHOTO GALLERY: 26-picture tour of Coyote House

INFOGRAPHIC: How the garden roofs, cisterns and other green elements work

The husband and wife's three-bedroom house nestled into a Montecito hillside is dubbed the Coyote House, partly after the name of the couple's street, partly after the howling critters in the area. Beyond its abundance of energy- and water-saving features, however, the house is notable for its utter normality: On the most basic level, it is simply a comfortable and beautiful family home.

“Designing sustainably was a given for us,” says Radtkey, founder of Blackbird Architects, a Santa Barbara firm with an emphasis on sustainable design. “But the most important goal was to make a great home.”

To that end, the house starts with a modern take on the veranda, right. A covered room overlooking the front garden has a sliding screen and front and back sets of glass pocket doors that can open to the outdoors or seal it off in various ways, depending on the season and weather.

A dozen highly flammable eucalyptus trees — by coincidence, cut down just months before the November 2008 Tea fire that swept through the region — were used to build the front door, kitchen table, bookcases, stairs and banister. Other materials used for interior appointments were sustainable too: Cabinets are bamboo, the floors are cork or salvaged stone, most of the walls unpainted plaster.

Architect Jon Frishman's Laurel Canyon retreat

Anyone who has remodeled a kitchen or built an addition to a house knows that construction hardly ever passes like clockwork. It takes time — and in the case of a perfection-seeking architect whose dreams soared higher than his budget, lots and lots of time.

Architect Jon Frishman needed just two weeks to design his house but 10 years to build it. For his methodical approach and patience, Frishman’s reward is a three-story, 1,500-square-foot house in Laurel Canyon that is loaded with custom features at an off-the-shelf cost.

PHOTO GALLERY: Jon Frishman's house

By planning meticulously, acting as his own general contractor and knocking out projects bit by bit, the architect said, his expenses were about $150 a square foot, about half the amount often spent to build similar homes today.

His series of low-cost solutions started with his interpretation of the Los Angeles building code, which required covered parking for two cars. Rather than devote space to a two-car garage he didn't need, Frishman designed a one-car garage and an adjacent garden courtyard, which, thanks to a sliding front door that the architect installed and a retractable fabric awning that he has planned, can double as a carport.

‘Community’ funnyman Jim Rash's quirky green room

Jim Rash’s next-door neighbor is concerned. He notices a photographer shooting Rash’s home and wonders if the pictures are for a real estate listing. “Is Jim moving?” the neighbor asks anxiously. “He is such a nice guy. I worry he’s become too famous lately. I told him, ‘Please don’t move.’”

If Rash wasn’t officially famous before the Academy Awards last month, he certainly was afterward. He won an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay of “The Descendants” and, perhaps more famously, he scored rave reviews for his fierce portrayal of Angelina Jolie’s thigh on stage during the ceremony. His TV series “Community,” in which he plays the quirky Dean Pelton, returned to the NBC lineup last week. And he’s busy writing a “comedy-action” film script for “Bridesmaids” star and fellow Groundlings alum Kristen Wiig.

But when he’s not playing a manic community college administrator, mocking A-list celebs in front of millions worldwide or otherwise being famous, you just may find Jim Rash, the nice neighbor, kicking back at home, where he lives and writes with a view of a newly redesigned garden.

PHOTO GALLERY: Jim Rash at home

Rash divides his writing time between a Santa Monica office, Insomnia Cafe on Beverly Boulevard and his West L.A. house, so he said he wanted a calm landscape surrounding his “outdoor office,” also known as his garage. Working with Santa Monica landscape architect Dale Newman, Rash revamped his back and front gardens to create more pleasant environs in which to work and outdoor areas that could accommodate overflow guests when the writer entertained.

The result: simple, beautiful, manageable garden spaces that have essentially doubled the area of Rash’s 1,100-square-foot house. “The gardens make the living spaces feel so much larger,” Rash said.