Construction Diary: How a California Designer Crafted His New Family Home—On Top of Their First Home

Eric Johnson appreciates sleight of hand, especially when it comes to design. The educator and designer’s own home in Encinitas, California, appears as a two-level single-family dwelling—one front door, uniform cladding, and few windows on the lower level—but is in fact two homes. Having been in his ’50s beach home for 17 years, Eric wanted more space (and more bathrooms) for his growing family, so he designed a 1,430-square-foot indoor/outdoor plan on top of it, moving in upstairs and using the original space as a rental.

"The new house essentially fits over the old one and hovers above it," explains Eric. He doesn’t mean that his family’s floor literally "hovers," of course, but that it has its own structural system that ties into the existing home, separated with a cavity between the roof and the new floor that holds mechanical equipment dedicated to the top level. Each home has its own entrance, and Eric kept the office downstairs for himself, which has its own access, and sits adjacent to his standalone woodshop.

In another of a series of surprises, because Eric maintained and lightly updated the interiors of the ’50s home while he and his family lived there, entering the freshly clad building on the lower level is something of a time warp. Below, the designer explains how he preserved their beloved beach home while creating an upstairs addition—or perhaps, more accurately, a house on a house—that works for both his family and the neighborhood.

Something Old, Something New

Eric Johnson: My family and I had been living in this house for a while before we decided to add on. Both of my kids were born here. It’s a typical 1950s coastal beach house: single story, two bedrooms, one bath, very little storage. Over time, I removed all the carpeting and refinished the floors, and I redid the bathroom and the kitchen—mostly cosmetic stuff. As our kids were getting older, it started to feel tight, especially when you’re sharing one bathroom with four people. It was time to expand.

The idea with the addition was to keep the original structure hidden from the outside, so once you enter, you’re back in a somewhat preserved 1950s space. There’s a tendency today to throw things away because it’s maybe cheaper or easier to tear down and rebuild, but we appreciated the qualities and the history of the original house. So part of the challenge was trying to prove that we could preserve the original home while adding on.

Making It Work

For the new level, I designed a wooden post-and-beam structure to "float" above the existing home. The structure is hidden, but essentially sits over the existing house and forms a second residence with three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a living/dining/kitchen area, and an outdoor porch.This design allowed for the tongue-and-groove ceiling of the original home to be kept in place and created a nice space for all the mechanical equipment. We had to open walls in the existing home to support the structure, but then bandaged them back up.

Conceal and Reveal

Our new home is fairly small at about 930 square feet of interior space, so it’s very technically designed and just enough for what we need. Every room has big six-by-six-foot windows that you can open to capture coastal breezes and use for cross-ventilation. There’s also a large 18-foot-wide slider in the living area that opens to the covered porch, so most of the year we can just have that completely open and it feels like a much bigger house.

We designed the pitched roofline as a play on greenhouses, which used to be all over Encinitas, which is actually where my wife and I grew up. We selected exterior materials like Hardie Panels and asphalt shingles for their durability. I also liked the play on textures with the vertical "sticks" below and the pixelated texture of the shingles above.

I always like when there are surprises in architecture—things that you don’t see at first, or it takes a few visits to figure out. It’s like when you watch a good movie over and over again and see something new every time. From the outside, it looks like one home, because we tore off the stucco on the original and added a cohesive skin with the shingles and panels.

Home Work

I did a lot of the work myself, including the majority of the finishes, cabinetry, and all the chairs you see. At some of the firms I’ve worked for over the years, we had the opportunity to build stuff, and I’ve always enjoyed doing that.

On the lower level, I have an office that opens to a woodshop that I built, which is a separate structure. About a year ago, I took a sabbatical from my teaching job at Southwestern College, where I am a professor of architecture, and took the time to design and build chairs. So now I build a lot of furniture, and my kids use it, too. Right now my son has a wheel in there for throwing pottery.

From my office, there’s a back stair that heads right up to our home. It’s a nice, short commute, but it’s separate enough so I can focus. I wanted to have a connection between my office and the shop, because when I work on architectural projects—I usually always have one or two design projects going on—I make a lot of models. It’s nice to sit on my computer, go out to the shop and make something, then come back inside.

Tricks of the Trade

I always like when things are clever and witty in design, so I try to do that in my own work. I’ve always been interested in this idea of a threshold, where there are layers of discovery as you walk through a project. In our house, there are a couple of surprises. For example, in the kitchen, the largest cabinet to the far right is actually a door to the primary bedroom. Everyone thinks it’s a pantry, but then someone will come out of it.

There’s also an operable skylight that you can crank open. When it starts getting into the warmer months, you can open it and crack the sliding door a little bit, and because the skylight is higher, it pulls the hot air out, like a solar chimney. There’s no HVAC in the house, and so this does a pretty good job of cooling the space and letting it breathe.

For me, design is about upending beliefs about architecture and what’s possible. This would have probably been a tricky project to sell to a client, but I wanted to see if we could live in a smaller space as long as we had good light and air. It took forever to build the new house, especially if you ask my wife and kids, but I appreciate handmade things and the craft of it all. I feel like when you can see the time that went into making something, there’s an inherent value to that.

More Construction Diary stories:

At Sea Ranch, a Couple Build a "Forever Moving" Home Made to Change With Them

In Los Angeles, a Couple Create a Multigenerational Haven

Project Credits:

Designer: ANOTHERericjohnson / @another_ericjohnson

Builder: Eric Johnson

Structural Engineer: Solid Forms Engineering Inc.

Landscape Design, Interior Design, and Cabinetry Design & Installation: ANOTHERericjohnson / @another_ericjohnson