When Izabel Duval and her husband, Paul Sablock, commissioned designer and builder Robert Sweet to transform their home in Manhattan Beach, California, they were looking for a Goldilocks-like sweet spot: something just the right size for their lifestyle.

It didn’t need to be as big as the 3,600-square-foot house near the beach that they’d once lived in, they told Sweet. But Izabel and Paul needed more room than their current 1,200-square-foot, circa-1954 house offered. Room for their daughter, Coco, who still lived at home—as well as space for their adult children to come visit. And plenty of room to entertain.

Indoor/outdoor living also topped their list of priorities. A few years earlier, they’d begun transforming the property behind the house. The original garage and backyard became an extended compound with a pool, a pool house, a covered outdoor kitchen, and a series of cozy and large-scale gathering spots, each with its own firepit, amidst a verdant setting of palm trees and ferns.

For all that lovely outdoor space, the couple’s existing house—aside from a dining room slider and a few windows—didn’t offer the kind of glassy transparency they craved. “The whole vision for the house was to incorporate the outdoors into the indoors,” says Izabel, an apparel executive who designed both the interior and the outdoor landscaped spaces.

Izabel and Paul also considered their rapidly transforming neighborhood. Two neighbors had already torn down similarly modest 1950s cottages and built multistory dwellings pushing 5,000 square feet.

As a commercial real estate broker, Paul knew that maximizing square footage would be the best way to boost the home’s future value, should they decide to sell—“but we’re not thinking of reselling it,” says Paul. “That gave us the ability to go with a smaller footprint.”

It took time to land on the right approach. The couple initially commissioned a different architect, who designed a larger dwelling that would have claimed some of their treasured outdoor space.

Then one day while walking their dogs, Rosie and Jackie, Izabel encountered a nearby house by Sweet that was nearly completed. Within days they were touring the house, and they decided to hire Sweet’s firm, Ras-a Studio, and start over from scratch.

The couple’s home, known as the Curtis Avenue House, seems to occupy its own category—or exist between several. It’s technically two stories, for example, but it still reads like a single-story home in front. It’s just 1,700 square feet, but it has an almost cathedral-like vaulted ceiling. From the street, the house appears to have a single-plane roof sloping upward, but it is actually a split-level with a particularly steep pitch—even for a two-story home—of 25 feet. From the side, the house resembles an A-frame cabin, or a small church.

“It’s almost an optical illusion,” Sweet says. “We added quite a bit of program into that roof, but it doesn’t read as a two-story house, even though it is.”

“It still has kind of a lower-slung bungalow presence on the street—finding a way to do that forced us to get creative,” continues Sweet. “How can we add the program and square footage to this house without growing it horizontally, and without it just feeling like a pancake house where we just stack two identical floors on top of each other?”

To match the material palate of the property’s existing backyard buildings, the Curtis Avenue House is clad in California incense cedar with a dark stain. “We used a rough-sawn face,” Sweet explains. “When you’re there, it just has this beautiful texture and depth to it.”

While the new home was built on the foundation of the old house, thus qualifying as a renovation, and most of its rooms are in the same places, it feels more like new construction: Everything’s entirely different inside.

The ground floor has wide-open public spaces—perfect for a couple who love to entertain, sometimes for as many as 50 people at a time (birthdays, Super Bowl parties, even an occasional fashion shoot). And from walls of glass to skylights, it’s full of light and connected to the outdoors in a way that delights Izabel and Paul, who migrated from Quebec and Massachusetts and still love spending as much time as possible immersed in California sunshine and ocean breezes.

The design responds to two specific client wishes. First, the ability to look straight through the house, which Sweet achieved by lining up its front-facing living room glazing and its back-facing dining room glass wall. And, second as Izabel explains, “The heart of the house had to be the kitchen where everybody hangs out. I'm a cook, so that had to be top priority.”

Adds Paul, “It’s like we built the kitchen first, and then the house around it.”

That meant lots of counter space: not just the standard three-foot width, but the maximum six feet—and not just one wall of benchtops paired with an island, but an entire U-shaped counter that’s big enough to resemble a restaurant’s open kitchen.

“This way, we can have multiple people working in the kitchen doing things,” Paul says. “We’re not getting in each other’s way.”

A long dining table, ideal for group gatherings, stands conveniently beside the glass wall, which slides away to open the room to the garden. It’s bookended by two oak cabinets that act as a combined kitchen pantry and laundry area. Besides the open living/kitchen/dining area, the first floor includes a study, a bathroom, and the primary suite, the latter of which looks out on the backyard with its own private, plant-enclosed patio.

The build added about 500 square feet to the couple’s existing home by lifting the roof to accommodate a second floor at the rear of the house, with two new bedrooms (one for daughter Coco), a shared bath, and a bridge-like hallway in between. But it feels more like a mezzanine than a second floor, because the bedrooms take up less than half of the potential square footage, saving room for a double-height entry and dining room with a dramatically vaulted ceiling.

“Those negative spaces in the upper volumes—psychologically, they add space to the floor plan below,” Sweet says. “It really adds a dynamic quality to those spaces. They live larger than their footprint would suggest.”

Even the home’s deepest interior spaces are filled with light thanks to nine different roof skylights, including one directly over the open staircase and the bridge between the new bedrooms. “The sun lines and shadows become like art in the house,” Izabel says. “We used to have a lot of art on the walls—but in this house we didn’t hang as much, because we don’t need to. The artwork is the house.”

“We've become very minimalist,” Paul adds, “and we’re not trying to be.”

Since the skylights are operable, they also help passively cool the house thanks to the stacked ventilation (or chimney) effect, as air passes through the large glass doors and travels up and out. “During construction, before the air conditioning was installed, it would get a little hot in there sometimes,” Sweet recalls. “But you’d open the skylights and the sliding glass door, and it would cool off by 10 degrees inside.”

The front and backyard spaces act as small and large outdoor rooms, but they are united by lush green tones: Dwarf karo and coast rosemary ferns in front give way to palm trees, ferns, and barrel cactus in back.

“Last summer was our first real summer in the finished house, and we probably had people here every weekend,” Izabel recalls. “We gave an engagement party for my best friend’s daughter: about 55 people. There were people in the house, people on the lower patio, people up top by the pool. Everything just flows.”

Izabel and Paul are happy enough with their house that they even find themselves traveling less often. “Our vacations are just having other people come vacation,” Paul says with a laugh.

“Everybody’s asking, ‘What are you doing this summer?’” Izabel adds. “I’m like, ‘Why would I want to go anywhere else?’”

More projects by Ras-a Studio:

It Took a Neighborhood to Build This Beachside Bungalow

This Crisp California Residence Is All About the Courtyard

Project Credits:

Designer/Builder: Ras-a Studio / @ras_a.studio

Builder: Ras-a Studio

Structural Engineer: McCullum Engineering