In our January/February issue, we announced the winner of the Dwell Home II, our second home-design competition. Los Angeles homeowners Glen Martin and Claudia Plasencia offered up their plot of land in Topanga Canyon as the testing ground, and Escher GuneWardena Architects was selected from a group of five firms to design and build a house for the young family of three. The goal was to help establish a model for sustainable home building in the 21st century.
Deciding to build a home is usually just the beginning of a bureaucratic maze of city offices, inspectors, and paperwork. Due to the Dwell Home II’s unique location, the land falls under the jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission, an agency established to “protect public beach access, wetlands, wildlife on land and in the seas, water quality, scenic vistas, and coastal tourism.”
The Commission is a necessary entity, but getting approvals from it has the potential to be overwhelming. “It’s not what they do [that is problematic],” explains Dwell Home II owner-to-be Martin, “it’s the time it takes.”
That the Coastal Commission often takes up to five months to approve a project complicates matters enough, but the fact that the Dwell Home II is located in an unincorporated city within Los Angeles County makes them even more complex. As architect Frank Escher explains, the project “falls under the Los Angeles County General Plan and also the Topanga Canyon Community Standards plan. It’s in the coastal zone, so we need to get a coastal development permit, and the project is also in the hillside development zone.”
All of the zones and jurisdictions can add up to a huge headache, but good planning and an even better permit expeditor can help ease the pain and facilitate the pro-cess. Escher GuneWardena will tackle the permitting in four phases, submitting many of their plans to various departments concurrently to save time.
Bojana Banyasz, the project architect explains, “You have to please so many different people with so many different concerns, but that is one of the things that makes this project so interesting.”
