Chalk it up to the ceilings, which peak at nearly 15 feet, the skylights casting patches of sun on the concrete floors, or windows and doors opening to green vistas, but there’s an undeniable Zen to designer Hannah Go and songwriter-producer Rami Jrade’s home in northeast L.A. Standing in the airy living/dining room, you’d never guess there was an auto shop next door or a busy boulevard just up the street. And that’s just what architect Hunter Knight envisioned. “The focus was on beauty, simplicity, and livability while working within a minimalist budget,” he says.

Searching for a place to build a multifamily compound, Knight, the founder of local firm Weather Projects, landed on a 6,250-square-foot corner lot in Cypress Park that was vacant save for a 1905 bungalow. After purchasing the property for $1.025 million, he prioritized renovating the house and renting it out to shave his monthly expenses while he built a duplex at the rear of the lot. Over the course of the nine-month project, he wore multiple hats: architect, owner, builder, and landscape designer. Saving money was key, but Knight was just as interested in exercising his creative chops. “I’ve been doing architecture for twenty-odd years, and I was construction manager for one of my firm’s first projects,” he explains. “That saved the clients money, and I got to get my hands dirty. So I thought, I can do this.”

From the start, Knight resolved to stay within the neighborhood context of modest, mostly one-story structures, designing a 1,442-square-foot duplex with a single-family dwelling on one side and a slightly larger ADU on the other, where Hannah and Rami live (read more about their home here). To enhance the feeling of space, he vaulted the ceilings and used natural materials where possible. “I have a bias toward wood, so exposing the ceilings was an important design idea,” he notes. Glass sliders open to the private entrance patio along one side of the ADU’s living area and fill it with light. Down what Hannah and Rami call the “tall hall” is the compact bedroom, an office, and a skylit bathroom.

1. Ceiling

The sloping wood ceiling in the kitchen-living area features one of the ADU’s three skylights. “The units have a pretty small footprint, but the ceiling height makes them feel so much larger,” Knight says.

2. Cabinets

Knight specified 15-ply, 3/4-inch European Baltic birch doors for the large kitchen cabinets, accenting them with pulls of incense cedar that he sourced in the local mountains and hand-turned on his lathe.

3. Countertops

After finding Silver Forest leathered granite for just under $19 a square foot at a local stone supplier, Knight used it for the kitchen counters and the backsplash, which complement the green cabinets from Ikea.

4. Floors

Rather than install vinyl or engineered wood flooring, Knight chose concrete, which he tinted a warm gray. “Tinting it was an additional cost of roughly $3,000, but the darker floor makes the compact space seem larger,” he says.

$93,496 Structure	$69,805 Envelope	$62,290 Services
$60,258 Interior Build	$23,208 Landscape	$11,110 Demolition
$10,254 Appliances	$5,601 Millwork	$3,835 Plumbing Fixtures
$2,120 Lighting Fixtures	$744 Hardware	$49,309 Miscellaneous
Grand Total: $392,030

“I wanted to keep the house simple and within the friendly box of things I can control, and that was also good for the neighborhood.”
—Hunter Knight, architect

Knight kept costs down by pairing Ikea cabinets with European Baltic birch fronts and cladding the exterior in wood siding and Hardie board. This made room for splurges, like the skylights, exposed ceilings, aluminum windows, and granite counters—though he found the latter for just under $19 a square foot. And he made sure he had the budget for landscaping. “The lot is hemmed in on three sides, so softening all those edges was a strategy to invite you outward,” he says.

Hannah says the result is not your average rental. “As a renter, it’s unique to find a space that has a lens. And the light is fantastic. It feels really special.”

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Project Credits:

Architect of Record & Builder: Weather Projects / @weather_projects

Structural Engineering: Offset Engineering

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