“I need my space!” is not only a battle cry of relationships but a plaint common to most anyone with at least four walls and a ceiling. No doubt our cave-dwelling ancestors at Lascaux longed for just a little more wall space, and even the Palace of Versailles could get
a tad confining (hence the Trianons). Compact living may be Zen, but it’s also very cramped.
The following five home-expansion projects have little in common apart from a kind of thoughtful elegance: Square footage is not simply tacked on to the mother ship, but conferred in a way that opens up sensual possibilities for the resident. In a loft space in Massachusetts, change came from within, with the construction of an intimate room inside a room. In Los Angeles, the addition of a swimming pool prompted a new rapport with the natural world. Outside Rotterdam, home cloning proved the best way to gain breathing space and a breathtaking vista without trampling on the landscape. In Tucson, an architect detached his bedroom from the house, encouraging fragrant communion with nature at night and during the short trek back for morning coffee. Finally, in San Francisco, an urban outbuilding became the ideal repository for art.
Location: Lynn, Massachusetts
It begins like the plot of an Edgar Allan Poe story. With light flooding all corners of their 1,500-square-foot loft, chef Robert Fathman and his fiancée, teacher Janis Lemke, had only one darkened place to lay their heads: inside the vault, a remnant of the building’s previous life as an insurance office. So the couple called upon their former neighbor, designer Dan Hisel, whom they met one Fourth of July when Fathman was standing on his deck wearing nothing and clutching a glass of sangria.The unconventional meeting left little worry that Hisel, whose work often explores things on an intimate scale, would simply stick up some Sheetrock and call it a day.
Instead, Hisel created a rather ingenious 12-foot-square and 10-foot-high fusion of all the functions the couple was lacking: sleeping space, bedside tables and lamps, shelves, a closet, and beds for their two pugs. What Hisel refers to as a piece of “furnitecture,” the Z-Box (a place to catch some z’s) is, he explains, “a sort of continuous environment, as if you took different pieces of furniture and sort of melted them together.” Dividing the dining room from Fathman’s painting studio, and equipped with a full-length closet along one outer wall, the new room’s private aspect is as intimate as its façade is dazzling.
Nestled within the Douglas fir interior (Lemke cut the boards as Hisel yelled out the dimensions), drapes pulled shut, the feeling is rather like being inside a snug little boat. Outside, the layer of frosted laminate sandwiched between the wood and perforated steel glows like a beacon at night.
Although this Z-Box took ten weeks to build (at one point Lemke fled to New Jersey to wait it out), possible mass-production should speed things up: Hisel has heard from businesses who are interested in using the boxes as office cubicles. And the vault? “We’re converting it to a kind of party room,” says Fathman. “It should be pretty cool!”
Location: Los Angeles, California
“Pamela’s brief was simple: She wanted to be able to roll out of bed and into the pool,” says David Thompson, principal of the firm Assembledge, who transformed this small, Spanish-style house in the Melrose district.
The homeowners—Pamela Barsky, who designs gift products sold at places like the MoMA store and Fred Segal, and her husband, Steve Haase, that quintessential Los Angeles actor/waiter hybrid—had longed for a mid-century-modern house. “But we could never quite afford one. So, we decided to make our own bold architectural statement,” says Barsky of the process that began when they tore out the original pink wallpaper and carpet, “on a budget even tinier than the house.” The property was overendowed in one department: a massive detached garage bloated in the ’50s with an illegal rental unit. To make room for the pool, Thompson reduced the garage’s girth and flattened out the pitched roof. Then he took down the back of the house, turning one bedroom into a den and adding a hallway, closet, master bath, and—one step down—the new bedroom, by request just big enough to contain the couple’s prized Duxiana bed, a chair, and two nightstands. While attached to the house, the room flirts with the yard—its polished-concrete floors continue into the decking and the transparent wall of sliding glass offers an unobstructed view. And because Thompson pulled back the foundation, the chocolate-brown box appears almost to float.
Barsky was inspired to move her office back home and now takes calls poolside, like any self-respecting L.A. player. And there have been unexpected rewards. “Our house used to be so inward-looking,” she recalls. “But now it’s in constant dialogue with the outdoors. The other night we were in bed, and the moon was framed in the vertical window with light streaming in. And when it rains, it’s almost like camping. Then you open up the doors and it’s like, Hello, world!”
Location: Kinderdijk, the Netherlands
One hundred and twenty years after their house was built, Huib and Annette Velthuizen felt a bit cramped in the 860-square-foot domicile located in Kinderdijk, a starkly beautiful village (and UNESCO World Heritage site) outside Rotterdam. Most famous for the 19 historic windmills that line its canals, the area has gained some local notoriety for the Velthuizens’ recent home addition, a very close facsimile of the original structure.
“This style is an archetype in the area,” says Ben Huygen, of Rotterdam’s UCX Architects, of the simple pitched-roof design. “Copying it was the best way to more than double the space but still tread lightly on the landscape.”
The architects “made models and told stories” in order to convince the initially hesitant couple, a teacher and his wife in their early 30s, that this was preferable to simply tacking something onto the building. Not a historic replica, the new abode tweaks tradition with streamlined materials and a loftlike interior that places it firmly in the current century. In place of stucco-covered bricks and roof tiles, UCX chose red American cedar, which will weather over time to blend in monochromatic harmony with the soft gray of the zinc roof. “It’s a stronger version of the archetype,” says Huygen. “And maintenance-free!” The interior is similarly graphic, with white walls and brown-painted oak floors.
The main connection between the houses is on the middle floor, where two windows of the original were opened up to create a door. You enter the new living room—now half-crowned with a double-height ceiling—and are faced with a postcard view of the windmills through a wall of windows. “For some, it’s too abstract,” Huygen explains, “but for us it’s the ideal. From the side, with the single window, it resembles a child’s drawing of a house! We like self-evident buildings,” he continues. “After all, we are not standing there to explain them; they should tell their own stories.”
Location: Tuscon, Arizona
When John Messina bought an 800-square-foot house in Tucson, Arizona, he knew something would have to give. Messina, a professor at the University of Arizona, has written extensively about Mexican urbanism and courtyard houses in arid lands, and his research helped guide his home expansion. “Most people around here just graft on new rooms in a box-car arrangement. But these lots are long, about 180 feet. So you’re left with a narrow, useless strip of yard.” Instead, Messina decided to situate his master bedroom and bathroom a short stroll away.
From the stucco house it’s a fragrant journey across a courtyard planted with lime, tangelo, and grapefruit trees to the new adobe outbuilding. “Adobe’s thermal mass functions best where there’s a wide spread of day and nighttime temperatures. In summer it takes eight hours for the sun to have any effect on the 15-inch walls, and we’ve never used the heat at night.” The 20-foot-square room—the same width as the house—avoids any Southwest-theme-park feeling. “I respect the material, but I wanted to use it in a more progressive manner.”
Through an open doorway is the master bath, half of which is a wet room. The monolithic concrete soaking tub and floor were formed in one pour, and Messina clad the shower walls with galvanized sheet metal, placing a rain screen of fiber cement board an inch from the sheathing in order to dissipate solar gain by a chimney effect. The inward-canting wall gives the next-door neighbor some breathing room.
The wall of Messina’s new office, however, slants out in the other direction, making the 100-square-foot space feel more expansive. To keep things cool, Messina created a shading screen from panels of perforated steel and pinned it to oxidized steel plate, with a vertical strip of frosted glass left facing the street. “Light spills out when I’m working at night. It’s a gesture to the public realm, like the lamp in the window,” says Messina, laughing.
Location: San Francisco, California
A shared appreciation for the properties of felt led Adriane Iann and Christian Stolz to architects Byron Kuth and Elizabeth Ranieri, when the German-born couple saw an SFMOMA installation by the architects rendered in the soft, industrial fabric. “Which of course made us think of Joseph Beuys,” enthuses Iann, an animated 37-year-old who with her husband shares a 16th-century home near Coburg and a passion for modern German art.
A few years ago, Kuth/Ranieri transformed the couple’s 1906 Swiss-style chalet in San Francisco into a sleek two-bedroom abode sheathed in painted marine-grade plywood panels and ledges. When a tiny infill cottage a stone’s throw across the steep and sleepy tree-lined alley went on the market, Iann and Stolz thought it might be just the place to hang the art that had been sitting in storage limbo and to house their many peripatetic friends, such as actor Bruno Ganz, most recently in residence.
“But first, we had to do something about this ugly duckling of a grandma’s cottage,” says Iann. Requiring a major seismic upgrade, the earthquake shack lost its front bay window and underwent a radical renovation, to be reborn as a kind of urban outbuilding. “We didn’t want to just mimic the main house,” says project manager Steve Const, describing the partial cladding of Resolite, a corrugated fiberglass used for greenhouses that sparkles in the sun, and the gray epoxy–coated wood floors.
Out back, in the sliver of garden designed by landscape architect Andrea Cochran, Const and Iann are consumed with some muscle-bound dandelions that have surrounded two Gehry twist cubes. As they pull, Const elaborates on the “secret relationship” between the two houses. “When the skylight in the cottage is illuminated, you look out from the deck across the street and this flat bar of light just appears to be floating in the night.”
