Spare closet turned into hidden home office

Small home offices are big right now, according to the National Assn. of Home Builders, and when my colleague Lisa Boone wrote about the trend two months ago we invited readers to share photos of their pocket offices. Among the photos that rolled our way was this design sent by Katie McAuliff, a Chicago designer whose firm, LB Interior Design, converted a client's spare closet into a space-efficient work area.

The project was a reminder that anyone with a guest bedroom, kids playroom or TV room could equip the closet as a pocket office without losing the function of the rest of the room. It's an idea we saw done well when profiling the Studio City home of furniture designer Reza Feiz a few years ago (photo below).

For those DIYers among us, we posed some additional questions to McAuliff, who worked on the project with business partner Lindsay McDonell. We asked for specifics about how they put the space together for this edited Q&A:

Could you tell us a bit more about the doors? Are they powder-coated metal or painted wood? And is that a strip of wood delineating the colors?

The doors were made with three Wilsonart laminates and a raised piece of wood trim to separate colors. Laminate is a little tricky for the DIYer (and requires routers, files, etc.). To achieve this look, my advice would be to paint the colors onto existing doors, then add the trim pieces using glue and small nails. [McAuliff credits the doors pictured here to Brian Haughey of BH Woodworking.]

Bubbletecture: Step inside CasaBubble and Airclad inflatables

A pair of exhibitors at next weekend's Dwell on Design show will have a new take on living in a bubble. AirClad, a British company that makes an inflatable pool house, and CasaBubble, a California firm that designs pneumatic backyard guest rooms, are trying to capitalize on the outdoor-living and small-space trends with structures built using little more than lightweight PVC and air.

“The idea was to be able to spend the night under the starry sky as comfortably as in a hotel bedroom,” said Frederic Richard, a native of France who splits his time between Paris and Santa Ynez, where he began distributing CasaBubble in April.

CasaBubble, pictured at right, is a sphere that holds its shape with air blown by quiet turbines, which use less than 100 watts of electricity per hour to run — roughly the equivalent of a light bulb. The sphere is fully pressurized in as little as 15 minutes, and the air inside is refreshed as often as seven times per hour, preventing humidity and condensation from clouding the bubble. The design has two doors, but only one can be open at a time or the structure will collapse.

CasaBubble was designed by Frenchman Pierre-Stephane Dumas and is manufactured in France. The portable living space is designed to be used as an outdoor guest room, a dining room, a children's play area or a pop-up shelter at the beach. It's available in 30 colors and five sizes, weighing 53 to 190 pounds.

Sheditecture: Vote for your favorite cabin design

  Minutes before the three cabins were to be unveiled, 17 exhausted architecture students in Woodbury University's design-build program raced to finish like a construction crew awaiting a city inspector. Ladders were still propped against the structures. Tool belts and Skilsaws lay about. "They were drawing and redrawing until the end," said architect Jeanine Centuori, chairwoman of the undergraduate program.

As we reported earlier, the challenge had been daunting: Take the components of a hardware store shed kit and build a cabin that can sleep two, with light, ventilation and insulation. Read our full story on the process and click through a photo gallery of the finished projects, then tell us: Which team created the best cabin?

 

 

Vote! We'll keep the poll open for a week and will share the results.

ALSO:

Small-space stories

Homes of the Times archive

Eames House moves into LACMA: Time-lapse video

Marmol Radziner house: 360-degree interactive panoramas

Photos: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

Woodbury architecture students turn sheds into cool little cabins

The challenge for three teams of architecture students from Woodbury University in Burbank: Design the coolest, smartest cabin that you can dream up. The catch: Your building materials have to come from an ordinary, not-so-cool shed kit from Lowes.

“There was a lot of grumbling at the beginning,” said Jeanine Centuori, chairwoman of the undergraduate architecture program at Woodbury. Each 10-by-10-foot shed had to be transformed to accommodate two people for sleeping. The template had to be tweaked to provide light, ventilation and insulation. And though the teams each had a budget of $1,500 for additional supplies, they also had a mandate to experiment with one assigned material — paper, plastic or wood.

PHOTO GALLERY: Woodbury students tweak shed kits into mini modern cabins

POLL: Vote for your favorite cabin design

Just how much can a simple shed be transformed? The answer becomes apparent before you're even off the driveway at the Shadow Hills Riding Club, the San Fernando Valley equestrian center where the three cabins were built.

The paper team's bright orange cabin practically glows, its exterior pop-outs borrowing an idea from motor homes (imagine dresser drawers left open). The pop-outs provide seating on the outside and space for luggage racks on the inside. Two beds are cleverly hidden under removable floor panels. Colorful hammocks from Craigslist hang from the ceiling, prompting student Sunny Lam to claim (as only a college student could) that the cabin “sleeps four.” (That's Lam in the photo hanging out, with Colin McCarville holding a floor panel that, when lifted up, becomes a privacy screen.)

Petite prefab: Six designs for a backyard office

Small prefab structures are near-instant backyard work spaces, a corner office that feels separate from home but still provides a commute measured in steps instead of miles.  We put together a photo gallery detailing six options, including the KitHaus modernist mini-manse, the Verana assemble-it-yourself studio from Summerwood and British OfficePod trying to make its way to a garden near you. For details on concept, materials and prices, keep reading ...

PHOTO GALLERY: Small prefabs as backyard offices

 

RELATED:

The pocket office

Separating work from home

House remodeled for live-work efficiency

Photo credits, clockwise from top left: OfficePod, Modern-Shed, Summerwood, Nicolas O.S. Marques for Kithaus, G-Pod, Studio Shed

 

Coming soon to California: the prefab G-Pod

The world of prefab has a new entrant with G-Pod, a prefab sphere designed as a living or entertainment space for backyard gardens. The G-Pod is designed and produced by Farmers Cottage Lamps in Birmingham, England, and it premiered at the Chelsea Flower Show in Britain last year. For the U.S. market, the G-Pod will be transported by the UK firm Leisure Shelters and distributed through Mars Lab in Redondo Beach beginning in late May.

There are four types of G-Pod. The $14,000 Lounger and Seater models are 7.5 feet in diameter. They rotate, so the entrance can be shifted to capture sun, shade or wind. The waterproof interior contains seating for at least six and a height-adjustable table. The furniture can be flattened into a full circle and covered with the cushions to make a bed. A snap-on cover closes the entrance.

The $30,000 Diner and Summer House models are 10 feet in diameter and stationary. They can be wired for electricity and equipped with solar panels. The Diner and Summer House seats up to 14 people and is made in custom colors.

All four models are made from laminated pine with UV-protected, polycarbonate tinted windows. Assembly is required and is not included in the price.

RELATED:

LivingHomes C6 prefab house

Modern living in 495 square feet

Architect Wallace Neff's bubble houses

Small-space furniture for shoppers with bigger budgets

-- Susan Carpenter

Photos, from top: G-Pod Seater and G-Pod Summer House. Credit: Leisure Shelters

‘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.

Pro Portfolio: Modative 2X small-lot homes

The Los Angeles architecture firm Modative's latest project consists of two homes, each built with just two exterior materials, two interior materials, two principal colors and only two window and door sizes. The 2X project, built under the city's small lot subdivision ordinance, is the latest installment of Pro Portfolio, our Monday feature that looks at recently built, remodeled or redecorated spaces with commentary from the designers.

Project: Two 1,000-square-foot homes.

Architect: Modative (Krystal Návar, Christian Návar, Derek Leavitt and Michael Scott). Contractor: Modative Build. Landscape design: Miriam Rainville, (310) 378-2650.

Architects' description: The 2X concept came out of finding a simple, creative, cost-effective
way to re-imagine a pre-housing-bust development. The homes are the reincarnation of the Fay Avenue Art District Dwellings, a seven-home small-lot project designed before the real estate market crashed. Our client asked us to propose a design that would generate rental income. The two homes pictured here make up Phase 1 of what's intended to be a four-phase project.

The modern design was influenced by its location near the Culver City Arts District, but it's also the result of trying to provide a cost-conscious solution for our client. We limited certain building components to only two variations as a way to minimize costs. Further emphasizing the 2X concept, each home has two bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms on two floors. These homes are being rented as apartments until all four phases are complete and the properties are ultimately subdivided into seven lots.

As a design-build firm, we acted as the general contractor. This helped to keep construction costs down, drastically reducing the expenses that come with the change orders that are typically part of an architect-contractor relationship.

These two homes were completed in December and are occupied. To see more, keep reading ...

Centre Street lofts in San Diego: New vision for apartment living

On an otherwise unremarkable avenue in San Diego, architect Lloyd Russell has built an apartment complex intended to challenge commonly held assumptions about apartment living. How? By targeting a very specific group of renters — a generation of young Californians burned by the housing bust.

“Dad and I thought there were a lot of young people out there who have had a hard time holding on to their first homes,” said Russell, who developed the Centre Street apartments with Lloyd Russell Sr., formerly a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “Their expectations about how they wanted to live had expanded, but their ability to pay for them had contracted.”

Soon after the Centre Street complex was finished in late 2010, the architect placed a small “for rent” sign outside. Russell confessed to having been nervous. He posted the apartments on Craigslist as well, knowing that the project needed to reach 90% occupancy in 90 days before the bank would agree to the long-term financing he needed. Russell wondered, “Is there such a market?”

PHOTO GALLERY: Centre Street lofts in San Diego

The answer came quickly. Despite rents that were as much as 20% higher than what the San Diego real estate research firm MarketPointe said was the average per-square-foot price for newly constructed rental housing in the city, Centre Street reached its occupancy goal well before the bank's three-month deadline. Today, the loft-style apartments are loaded not only with design features that are novel for rentals, but also with residents who have happily set aside the dream of house ownership for a cool, modern apartment.

“Several applicants had been through short sales,” said Keith Weibrecht, an associate architect in Russell's office, who manages applications at the Centre Street lofts and lives on the third floor. (That's his apartment with the glass sliders pushed open, above right.) “Another applicant had a credit rating of 400.”

Before and After: Small 1940s condo remodel

A small, cramped apartment from the 1940s is now light and airy, courtesy of architect Deborah Teltscher, who took down a wall between the kitchen and dining room to create a sense of spaciousness. The project is the latest installment of Pro Portfolio, our Monday feature that looks at recently built, remodeled or redecorated spaces with commentary from the designers. 

Project: To update a 650-square-foot apartment turned into a condominium. 

Location: Santa Monica.

Architect: Deborah Teltscher. Contractors: Rob and Jan Vandermeer, Vandermeer General Contractors, (818) 708-2181.

Designer's statement: My client, a close friend, bought a condominium in Santa Monica that is part of a complex of small garden apartments built in the 1940s and recently turned into condominiums. The condos have large windows opening onto pleasant courtyards in the front and back, but my friend’s unit had barely been touched since the 1940s. The kitchen, photographed above before the remodel, was tiny and had a small stove squeezed into in an alcove, old-style 18-inch-deep counters and few cabinets. There was virtually no storage, and the lighting was poor. The biggest issue for the owner, a serious and gregarious cook, was the small opening between the kitchen and the dining room and the lack of connection between the kitchen and the living room. The bathroom was cramped as well.

 We removed the wall between the kitchen and dining room and raised the cabinets to create an opening between the kitchen and the living room, so my friend can talk to guests while cooking. The cabinets go all the way to the ceiling to create as much storage as possible. Energy-efficient LED lighting under the cabinets makes the kitchen glow at night. We added a tall pullout rack to the left of the refrigerator (see photo at top) to house a huge collection of spices. We replaced the kitchen's linoleum floor with oak to match the living room. Additional storage in the living room includes a new built-in desk, bookshelves and TV cabinet.

To see more of the remodel, including the transformation of the bathroom, keep reading ...