The Design for My Green House: Stage One of Working with an Eagle Rock Architect

Since I purchased a rundown house in Northeast L.A. a few months ago and decided to work with professionals to put some of ideas I had for the place into action, I have hired a talented architect—one among several I had talked to—who has worked on interesting residential projects. His name is Jeremy Levine and he is a local. He recently remodeled two houses in Eagle Rock and lives in one of them.

Jeremy’s design aesthetic basically matches mine. His two Eagle Rock projects made existing houses greener and more modern. He incorporated solar panels and installed rainwater and grey water systems. He used recycled materials and passive solar heating and shading. And, among a host of other innovative things, he built interior pocket courtyards around existing trees.

I like Jeremey’s enthusiasm and on-the-fly creativity. We met at the site that I bought and talked about my goals for the house, which I wrote about in my . Designers of all sorts will often say that constraints are what usually inspire their best creativity. My new house certainly offers plenty of challenges:

• The existing interior layout is terrible. The house had been chopped into a series of rooms without any hallways for circulation. To get from one end of the house to the other, you have to walk through a bathroom and a bedroom that are in the middle of the structure. The smallish house also has three front doors and two back doors, making it feel more like a motel than a home.

• The house is long and narrow—as little as 13 feet wide at places. While my goal was to create a more open floor plan, there would probably still need to be passages, halls, rooms—enough living space. How could both these objectives fit into the narrow shape of the house without spaces feeling cramped?

• The house is built on a long, narrow flat area on a hill that has a big slope in front of it and a small slope up to the crest of the hill behind it. This location has advantages in terms of views and breezes, but it also means that there are much stricter rules about the house’s foundations, fire-resistant design and materials etc., and that it could be hard to haul construction materials up to the site. Basically, we knew we couldn’t add a second story or weight to the house or expand forward or backward without the city requiring major (and very expensive) pillars to be sunk into the hillside for additional support. I was fine with keeping the house single story and staying pretty much within the existing shape of the house. But I did want to raise the ceiling and provide decks and patios to give usable outside space to as many parts of the house as possible.

• The house is poorly insulated, with single-pane windows, thin walls and no attic space under the roof. The existing stove and wall and water heater are old and inefficient. There is no air conditioning. We need to make the house more energy efficient and comfortable.
• The roof is flat—a good starting point for a more modern design—but doesn’t have much of an overhang. I wanted to add more south-facing windows but also wanted the house to be energy- efficient. We needed to figure out a way to let in light but also shade the interior from sun in the summer. For views and aesthetics, I liked the aesthetic possibility of tilting the roof up into a shed roof with the high side open to the south. But if I wanted to install solar panels, the most effective angle would be to tilt the south side of the roof down 15 degrees.

Jeremy considered my goals and the challenges and opportunities presented by the house and the site. There was also the question of my budget—I am certainly not the kind of client who, as Jeremy once told me, can do “anything,” provided I have the right kind of money. He presented me with a design possibility that worked within most of my constraints. His floor plan had an open living room in the curved, west side of the house, the master bedroom and bath in the east side of the house, with the kitchen, bath, second bedroom, and office/guest room lining the center of the structure. There would be a sliding wall between the office and second bedroom so they could be used as one larger room or two separate spaces.

The key was putting a hallway in the front of the house. I had assumed that if the remodeled house would have a hallway, it would be in the rear—the dark side of the house—so that the living space could be up front, where the light and air and views are. I thought that skylights along a back passage could keep the area from being too dark, and that people wouldn’t spend much time in it anyway.

But Jeremy suggested having a three-foot-wide hall along the front of the middle section of the house, paired with a three-foot-wide deck added to the middle front of the building. This would make the narrow hall seem wider because the hall and deck would function as a single passage.

A narrow deck would also be less likely to require extensive foundations than a larger deck projecting forward toward the slope. There would be sliding glass doors from the deck to the hall—with the rooms off the hall having extra wide doors spaced to match doors to the deck. Opening the doors to the second bedroom and office as well as doors to the deck would bring light in and make it feel as though the rooms extend further out to the deck.

I liked this basic plan, with a few adjustments, so Jeremy worked on more details and drawings. Next time I’ll describe some of the features of the design, including sustainability features, a metaphor for the house, and a new vocabulary word I learned. I’ll follow up by writing about how the design of this house is challenged by the surrounding soil geology, structural engineering and city ordinances.