Venice Residence

The on-site two-bed­room rear main house and front pied-a-terre above the garage (a re­ver­sal of the more com­mon re­la­tion­ship be­tween main and guest house found in this neigh­bor­hood) was a dated 1980s re­model in an Amer­i­can South­west­ern style.

The pri­mary de­sign chal­lenges were to re­con­sider the build­ing struc­tures and al­low shared use by an ex­tended fam­ily while main­tain­ing vary­ing lev­els of pri­vacy. The two story façade fac­ing the court­yard be­came en­tirely glazed, which is in turn shaded by a fold­ing, per­fo­rated metal skin that rests on an alu­minum ex­oskele­ton.

This per­fo­rated skin and sup­port­ing alu­minum ar­ma­ture is mir­rored across the court­yard by a fold­ing en­clo­sure sur­round­ing the garage apart­ment. Only these build­ing sur­faces ex­tend into and float above the court­yard. Pri­mar­ily de­signed as sun shades, they pro­vide pri­vacy and fil­tered nat­ural light into the main liv­ing spaces of the house and apart­ment. In ad­di­tion they form the sup­port struc­ture for bal­conies that ex­tend from the mas­ter bed­room of the main house and the apart­ment to al­low fam­ily mem­bers to see each other across the prop­erty.