With its azure facade and its offset peak centered around the second-floor bedroom windows, this Los Angeles ADU has style in spades. That’s due in no small part to homeowner Joanna Vernetti, a TV producer who brought design sensibilities from her production company to the interiors.

“When you’re building out a house that’s 100 years old, it’s really hard to recreate that era,” Joanna says. “We knew we wanted to go modern with the ADU, but also make it feel right with the rest of the house.”

Jaime Domínguez in the main bedroom, which lies in a new extension off the existing house." layout="wide" credit="Photo: Yoshi Makino" photoUserId=""/>

Joanna and her restauranteur husband, Steve Vernetti, have lived in their 1917 bungalow in Hancock Park for over 20 years. As their family increased in size, they needed more space—so they initially thought about adding another floor. After California passed a regulation in 2020 to ease the permitting of ADUs, they called up their good friend (and former neighbor) David Thompson.

Thompson, a founding principal of Assembledge+, had recently participated in a Los Angeles Magazine project to imagine solutions for those who lack housing in the city. Their notion was for public agencies to subsidize building ADUs in backyards along alleyways, dovetailing with existing alley revitalization initiatives.

That concept, titled Rear Projections, became a jumping-off point for other types of ADUs, and it ultimately informed the design of the Vernetti’s Hancock Park project, which replaced a detached backyard garage and extended the rear of the old house to create a new main bedroom, with French doors that lead out to a new deck.

“We decided that the accessory dwelling unit would be modern,” Joanna says, “and we wanted the extension to be pretty much in keeping with the existing house. It’s a little bit more modern in the additional unit, but it still feels like it’s part of the house.”

Made from ipe wood, the deck weaves the ADU and the house together through the garden. The design team seamlessly connected the area outside the kitchen to an outdoor eating area using concrete pavers and wood boards.

The eldest of the couple’s three teenage kids—the only boy—has rights to the upstairs bedroom of the ADU, on the condition his grades are good. Its garden-level living room opens perpendicular to the house, giving the teenager a sense of privacy.

At a total cost of $600,000 (including landscaping), the project has expanded the family’s century-old home with much-needed living space that seamlessly flows from indoors to out.

“It’s a really beautiful hybrid between old and new, and it does a good job of letting the family extend their life out into the rear yard of the property, activating the negative space between the house and the ADU,” says Thompson. “It creates a great backdrop for Joanna’s sensibilities—which are really the family’s sensibilities—to be expressed.”

More projects by Assembledge+:

A Renovation of an L.A Midcentury Channels Its Designers’ Utopian Ideals

An Architect’s Matte Black Los Angeles Home Opens Wide to the Great Outdoors

Before & After: An Enlivened DC Residence Now Channels California Cool

Project Credits:

Architecture: David Thompson (Principal in Charge), Raul Aguilera, Ignacio Bruni, Assembledge+ / @assembledge

Landscape: Outer Space

Contractor: Brunswick Builders

Photography: Yoshi Makino / @yoshihiromakino

Styling: Lisa Rowe