After years of bouncing around LA’s competitive rental market, designer Alfie Koetter and his wife, documentary filmmaker Cristina Costantini, decided to take on a bigger challenge: purchasing a home of their own. It was the height of the pandemic and like many at the time, the duo was tired of being cooped up in their small apartment, so they started scouring the internet for a single-family residence they could customize to their liking.

“We were dreaming of living somewhere else,” says Alfie, who founded multidisciplinary design studio Loaf with architect Luke Studebaker in 2021. “We looked at so many houses and made so many offers,” he continues. “We could not get a spot, but it’s hard to compete with people who can pay all cash and waive the inspection.”

Before: Living Room

After: Dining Room

Undaunted and determined, the couple kept searching, passing over the copious quick-flip houses with cheap finishes and high price tags. “All I saw was a bunch of stuff that we would be paying to undo,” Alfie says. Then, one day, Cristina came across a listing on Redfin that most people would have quickly clicked out of. “It was the house we have now,” Alfie recalls. “There was only one photo, and it looked like it had been taken by somebody who had never used a camera before.”

“We immediately knew that we wanted to see it,” Cristina says. “We saw it as an exciting opportunity. It wasn’t a cute flip with white subway tile like you see all over L.A., but we wanted to start from zero, and this house let us do that.”

When she and Alfie went to view the property, which was co-owned by a brother and sister whose parents built the house in 1926, they had to look past the neglected aspects—dated carpet, flooring, and finishes, and an odd layout that required you to go through a bedroom to access the backyard—to envision its potential. Aside from the prospect of fully customizing a single-family home, Alfie saw the purchase as an investment for his career. “At that stage, our practice wasn’t even born, it was in the gestational stage,” he says. “This was a great opportunity to showcase my sensibility for our growing practice.”

Before: Kitchen

After: Kitchen

To redirect the flow of the house, and provide easier access to the backyard, which came with a grove of more than two dozen citrus trees, Alfie and Cristina opted to fully gut the 1,173-square-foot structure and rearrange the rooms to better suit their lifestyle. “We love to have friends over,” Cristina says. They also wanted to add a bathroom, so that guests wouldn’t have to use the one attached to the primary bedroom. The new layout reorganized the house simply, with a living/dining space and kitchen on one side, and two bedrooms and bathrooms on the other. A circulation axis runs between the two zones, its width allowing for storage, and a built-in dining nook in the kitchen.

“We built the house to be a very social space,” says Cristina. “The kitchen is really the hub, and there are plenty of places for people to gather when someone is cooking. As hard as you try to keep people out, everyone always gravitates towards the kitchen.”

Here, the couple combined IKEA cabinetry with Carrara marble countertops and Plykea cabinet fronts for a simple, streamlined look. New skylights let in the California light, which Cristina describes as “dancing around the house all day.” Throughout the home, but especially noticeable at transitional thresholds, Alfie adopted an archway motif, inspired by a feature that his parents, both architects, included in one of their homes. In the kitchen, a two-top table and custom millwork seats by Aaron Hauser are tucked into a cozy arched nook near the island—a popular place for friends to post up while Cristina and Alfie cook a meal.

Before: Bedrooms

After: Backyard

“I really wanted a booth,” Cristine says, “so I asked Alfie if he could figure out how to incorporate one into the kitchen. He’s a big fan of Star Wars, so the nook ended up being an homage to the Mos Eisley Cantina.”

The wall between the kitchen and living room was removed, and a set of French doors at the back of the house creates a long sightline that makes the expanse feel larger than it is. “The doors open up to an outdoor space that we use as our dining space,” says Alfie of the new, 400-square-foot back patio and terraced garden. “It doesn’t ‘count’ as square footage, but it’s as much a part of the house as the living room.”

Before: Guest Bathroom

After: Guest Bathroom

“The living room is performative,” adds Cristina. “Our kitchen is our living room, and our pug uses the living room more than anyone else!”

The couple planned to tackle the project on a rolling basis, focusing on the public spaces first, and then working to refine the bedrooms. “Two years into the project we thought we had figured everything out,” says Cristina, “but then our family of two became a family of three and the office became the baby’s room.” According to Alfie, working with a limited budget, which resulted in the staggered project timeline, ended up being an unforeseen benefit.

“Stylistic ambitions are always going to be restrained by financial realities,” he says. “Once we moved in, we discovered things we thought we would get rid of, or change ended up being our favorite spaces.” Case in point, the house’s front porch. “We both thought it was a meaningless use of space that we would eventually enclose as a vestibule where we could drop shoes and coats when we entered the house. If we had had the money at the time, we would have rushed to enclose it, but now it’s one of our favorite spaces. We spend so much time out there drinking coffee in the morning while our daughter plays.”

It's a lesson that Alfie has parlayed into Loaf’s growing roster of projects. “I’ve learned that doing more is not always better,” he says. “People will buy a house and want to do all the work immediately before living in it, but what they miss out on is finding those little unexpected moments that really enhance daily life.”

More Before & Afters:

They Brought Their Buff and Hensman Midcentury Back to Its Original Glory

Rich Color and Millwork Revive a Historic New Orleans Shotgun Home for $198K

Project Credits:

Design: Alfie Koetter / @loaf.losangeles

Cabinetry Design/Installation: Aaron Hauser / @mason_haus

Builder: Humberto Ramirez

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Before & After: A Highland Park Fixer-Upper Sings With a New Archway Motif