Like so many L.A. stories, the tale of the Courtyard House begins with a lucky break. One day in 2001, Thomas Robertson got a call from a friend he hadn’t seen in ages. The friend told him that his elderly aunt needed companionship in her twilight years, and that she owned an empty lot in a posh West Los Angeles neighborhood. Would Tom like to design a home they could live in together? “I thought he was joking,” Robertson recalls. And just like that, he had his first house commission.
Inspired by L.A.’s “phenomenal weather,” the English-born, Pittsburgh-bred designer was determined to build his friend a courtyard house, one of the original forms of sustainable architecture. After a scouting trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, Robertson came back with visions of haciendas dancing in his head, convinced that the age-old style was the perfect solution for modern L.A. living.
From the street, the 2,800-square-foot Courtyard House looks, at first, like any other modern house: concrete, desert plants, a Blomus mailbox. But then one notices the thick, gray stucco of the exterior has a soft, steel-troweled sheen, and the iron railings on the ipe-wood balconies look suspiciously hand-wrought, hinting at more old-school ideas within. The street-level entry court is paved with orange-red porcelain tiles, recalling the bricks of Old Mexico.
Stepping up into the home, visitors are met by the wide-open courtyard, paved with the same porcelain tiles and protected from neighbors’ prying eyes by the U-shaped embrace of the house. (“It’s almost like an arm hugging itself,” says Robertson.) One wing soars up to a second story, with a rakish roof oddly reminiscent of classic L.A. diners—then again, not so odd, since Robertson’s client sent him to look at Googie-style coffee shops for inspiration. “He was pretty eccentric,” notes Robertson.
The client had specific, seemingly contradictory requests: “He wanted an open, loftlike place—but also nooks and crannies, little places to tuck away in,” Robertson remembers. He wanted a place where his aged aunt would feel secure, yet where he could work on his art—alone. By committing to the courtyard, Robertson was freed from figuring out how to negotiate the incongruous spaces in the same big box.
The two-story wing was built for the nephew, with a living room at ground level that’s bathed in sun from a skylight, and a bedroom and bath with a private balcony upstairs. Tucked away in back are an office and tiny art studio with a separate entrance. The stairs are part of a spectacular storage unit Robertson designed from knotty-pine plywood; it looks like something the IKEA elves dreamed up after a week at Burning Man.
The aunt’s wing is a single story that slopes down gently into the lot, containing a kitchen, a den, and, at the farthest end from the street, a bedroom and a bath that includes both outdoor and indoor showers. Access is via either the kitchen and den or a narrow secret hallway that ramps down behind the kitchen, avoiding the bustle of the social areas. This hallway includes cubbies and hide-away storage, all Robertson’s design; he was given carte blanche to design everything in the house, and he ran with it. In the kitchen, he designed the powder-coated metal cabinets and silverware drawers, and a cartoon-angled breakfast nook in the same jaunty pine (think Keith Haring meets Amtrak).
The Courtyard House has the standard Prius-generation green kit: radiant heating in the slab-on-grade concrete floors, boosted by a solar water heater; photovoltaic cells hidden on the reflective Galvalume roof. But the real ecological engine is the windows, amazing Transformers of fenestration that take the term “curtain wall” literally: Once lifted up and slid in their tracks, the kitchen windows stack neatly out of the way, like 200-pound vertical blinds. The result is total deconstruction. The kitchen doesn’t just flow into the courtyard, it becomes a part of it. The same functional, but pricey, window system (by NanaWall) is used, if slightly less theatrically, in the dining and living rooms.
Robertson’s wonderment at L.A.’s temperate clime, and his choice to build in harmony with it, is in tune with some of the greatest architects ever to work in Los Angeles, from Greene & Greene’s Craftsman sleeping porches and Frank Lloyd Wright’s outdoor living rooms to Rudolf Schindler’s breezy masterpiece on Kings Road. All of those architects were cold-state émigrés similarly inspired by L.A.’s permanent forecast of 90 percent awesome, 10 percent apocalypse—and their houses were built before the siren song of the four-ton air-conditioning compressor made uninsulated boxes so cost-effective to mass produce.
But like so many L.A. stories, the tale of the Courtyard House ends with a shocking twist. As the project reached completion, the elderly aunt died, and the house was put up for sale. With no A/C, no master suite, and no pool, Robertson’s brand-new, fully realized Courtyard House was suddenly a handyman’s special on L.A.’s multimillion-dollar Westside.
All houses change as they age, and the Courtyard House has had to grow up faster than most. Its new owners, Jan and Maureen Horn, have a professional appreciation for architecture: Maureen’s a broker, and Jan’s a real estate agent who specializes in what he calls “architecture as art,” mostly modern and architect-designed homes. “Tom’s kitchen/den is one of the greatest spaces I’ve ever been in,” Jan exclaims. And of the courtyard, he says, “Maureen and I call it our piazza—to us, it’s very European feeling.” The Horns love the Courtyard House, though they do plan a few changes.
Piazza or cortile, plaza or patio, the courtyard is the heart of the house, with L.A.’s light and space as its lifeblood. Which may be why the Courtyard House feels like it’s been around for decades. It’s all so retro, it’s practically medieval. Robertson prefers to call it “modest,” which sounds about right.
Like all new technologies, whiz-bang green is having its look-at-me moment; but like indoor plumbing and the iPhone, it’ll become ubiquitous soon enough. The Courtyard House jumps ahead of the curve by looking back at time-honored concepts of site-specific regional buildings (in this case the hacienda). You heard it here first: Passive is the new active.
