L+A House

The L+A House—named after the initials of the architect and his wife—is the first project of Palimpost Architects, founded by Aleksander Tamm-Seitz, formerly of Morphosis Architects. Simple and almost deceivingly straightforward, the design solution for the residence and studio is informed by Tamm-Seitz’s 12 years at Morphosis. The design scheme takes into consideration climate, strategic organization, screening and transparency, timeless materials, and a very tight budget.

In their initial analysis of the project, Tamm-Seitz and his wife, quickly realized that, given Los Angeles’s high construction costs, it would not be possible to build a single-family residence. The strategy quickly became to approach the project from a development and business plan standpoint and to use an income-property model. The idea was to build two houses instead of one, with the income-generating property helping offset the cost of construction for both houses.

With a simple, almost non-architectural plan for the front rental house (not shown), the L+A House slips in from the street on a slight angle. The angles are reinforced inside the house by projecting out to frame the backyard. As the angle of the interior opens up to the backyard, the flexible ground-floor rooms are enclosed by a large multipanel sliding glass pocket door. The use of the large glass wall creates the feeling of a much larger interior space, while still using a small amount of built square footage. This simple, classic move has been used by architects through the years to create the feeling of a larger space when dealing with a tight budget. The doors allow the house to completely open to the backyard, creating a large outdoor room to take advantage of the Southern California climate. A shared wall with the garage in the backyard is used to create a large surface for outdoor movie projections. The remainder of the interior of the house is treated as a semiopen loft space, with the more private spaces of bedrooms and bathrooms on the second floor.

The interior of the house uses a minimalist material palette and an organization based on two ideas: timelessness and making something custom using standard products. Simple materials such as concrete, wood, gypsum board, and stucco are used to create a calm space—an important requirement, considering the house’s adjacency to commercial properties. For interior spaces (i.e., kitchen, bathrooms, closets, vanities), the design scheme emphasized savings by using off-the-shelf products and designs (e.g., IKEA), and then modifying them to create custom installations. This approach created the appearance of fully customized and more high-end construction, but with the economy of store-bought products.