In March, one year after California’s stay-at-home order first put a pause on live events, DJ Adam Cooper moved his show to the yard he shares with a small group of renters in Los Angeles’s El Sereno neighborhood.

With a blue sky above and palms swaying in the background, he livestreamed a mix of Afro-Caribbean and amapiano tracks to his virtual audience. It was everything his landlord, architect Max Kuo, had hoped for when he transformed the rear structure of a rental property that he owns into a blank slate for future tenants’ personal and professional pursuits.

Kuo, the cofounder of AllThatIsSolid, a practice based in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur as well as in L.A., wanted to create a well-designed setting that would accommodate a mix of households sharing a single-family lot.

“The project was always concerned with the question: How do you create a living space for different tenants to come together?”
—Max Kuo, architect

“It looks like an ordinary home, but there are decisions here that are out of the ordinary,” Kuo says of the multiresidence property, which he worked with his team to renovate via WhatsApp while he was in Boston teaching at Harvard and MIT. The plaza-like area between the front house and the new accessory dwelling unit, for example, is finished with diagonal strips of concrete and decomposed granite—details Kuo says are intended to eliminate boundaries in the communal outdoor space.

With a budget of roughly $538,000, the AllThatIsSolid team converted the original back house and attached garage into a white-gabled duplex with a 900-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment on the ground level and a 700-square-foot studio upstairs.

While retaining the initial footprint, the architects nudged the structure’s square footage to fit the top unit by building a new roof that is pitched higher and also cantilevers over the front of the first floor. Both rentals have significant natural light, clean-lined cabinetry, black fixtures, and terrazzo tile.

Adam and his partner, educator Brianna Swan, were taken with the downstairs unit when they first saw it last fall, but it was the soaking tub in the primary bathroom that really sealed the deal. The ample storage came in a close second. The couple turned a second bedroom into a work-from-home space.

Upstairs, the skylit studio provides the perfect live/work setup for photographer and producer Richie Davis. The unit, in addition to its garage-turned-entryway, has already served as the setting for a number of his shoots, including a recent Interview magazine spread on musician St. Vincent. “I play a lot with the light here,” Richie says.

Kuo’s renovation has already left an impact on his tenants. “When a place is well designed, you don’t have to go overboard with decor,” says Adam.

“Every element is so well thought out,” Brianna adds. “Going forward, it’s going to be really hard for us to live anywhere else.”

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: AllThatIsSolid

Construction: Snow Construction / @snowconstruction

Structural Engineering: M.A.D. Design

Landscape Design: Ginny Hwang

Cabinetry: Trejo’s Cabinets

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A Two-Unit ADU in Los Angeles Offers Inspired Spaces for Creative Tenants