We are here in Venice, California.
In the house that I designed for my family. The way I started the design, it was very much about – how does the indoor space connect very strongly or graciously with the outdoor space.

We had been looking for a lot in Venice for a while and we loved the fact that there were three mature trees.

Two beautiful Aleppo pines and a Canary Island palm tree and we wanted to create a house that would preserve the trees because they were here first.

The house is very carefully composed as a series of enclosed spaces, open outdoor spaces, then enclosed spaces. But the reality is that the courtyards are actually designed around those trees.

There’s the entrance court where you walk in through the courtyard which also has the pool in it. Then we have the tree court which has this marvelous 85 year old Aleppo pine tree, then there’s the family court.

The family court connects to the kitchen, dining, living area.

This courtyard is symbolic of the big ideas of the house design, which is that this is an outdoor room that is very detailed, very well defined, and it is an extension of the indoor spaces, and that courtyard extends to the back building which includes a guesthouse and a garage, slash gallery, slash man cave space.

I started to truly understand the power or potential of courtyard housing when I lived in Africa, I was in the Peace Corp in Marrakech, Morocco in the early 70s.
Lived in a courtyard house right in the heart of the medina, the ancient city of Marrakech.

You become connected to nature, you can create a compound, your own urban oasis, sustainable, low impact living.

So for example, there is an exoskeleton pulled to the outside of the house on the southwest facade, and it is a large, steel armature for roll down shades and roll horizontal shades that then reduce the impact of the sunlight coming in, using less energy.

I wanted to use materials that would be as sustainable as possible. The main materials on the outside of the house are weathering steel, so it’s steel that will rust and then stop rusting. There’s glass of course. You’ll see a material which looks like wood but it’s actually recycled sawdust and plastic.

There’s concrete block which is a special blend of block that I developed with the concrete block company. It’s made out of white cement and pumice, and it’s bead blasted in the factory so it’s very textural.

There’s no paint, the white walls that you see or white ceilings are actually burnished plaster with wax over it. I’m very interested in seeing the hands of the craftsmen.

Notice this writing, right? It says ‘Shrameck’, that’s the name of the contractor, Mark Shramek.

No paint.

This plaster that you see the trowel mark of the craftsmen and it’s waxed.

We as architects, what we want to do is we want to expose what we do to a broader audience. Because how many people are going to come to this house? Houzz is a way of reaching out to many many many people, and with Houzz this house will become known to other people and the philosophy will get to be understood.

I wanted to look at how technologically we could actually make the barriers between indoors and out disappear, namely glass, basically sliding doors or pivoting doors that can slide completely out of the way.

It’s obviously a fluid, open, loft-like space. I also love the flexibility of the space. This can be a very cozy environment on a cold night, a fire burning or it can have all the glass doors slid completely open and morph into an open air indoor, outdoor pavilion.

So we’ll have up to a hundred people sometimes. So I designed this table and the benches and I like it because it’s really simple and it’s like a floating plane that doesn’t have chairs.

I designed these benches just so you would experience this table and not have other things like the back of a chair.

I would say my major contribution has been to make it comfortable, big cushy chairs and throws and pillows.
These chairs are just so much fun because they swivel. Now I can’t get him out of them, but it really did take five years to persuade him of them.

The art collection is eclectic.
Often the artists are friends of ours.
Steven has a lot of things from Africa.
This is an African stargazing bed. It’s carved out of one log, there’s no joinery.

It’s about our life experience, it’s not about ‘this would look good on the wall’. Clearly the time I spent in Africa was very formative.

In the late 80’s I did a project in Tokyo and had four wonderful trips to Japan. One of the philosophical mantras that I’ve developed over several decades of design and thinking and travel, is called multicultural modernism. This house embodies it.

This stair was influenced by Japanese architecture. It’s a Tansu stair which combines a stairway and storage and display.

On the mezzanine level we have a couple of small bedrooms, we call them pods and they are like small guest rooms.

They’re flexible spaces and there are glass sliding windows but they’re really more like shoji screens. So for example, we come up the Tansu stair and then we slice across the space on this bridge. It’s multicultural and yet it embraces modernism.

What I like about this bridge is it’s a new way to explore the space but you have to believe in technology. We’re being held up by these cables walking on glass, so I love that juxtaposition, that counterpoint of something almost ancient and something maybe almost futuristic.


(Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOrwjA9rUSU)