Sculptor’s House

This was an extremely happy and fruitful collaboration of designers who all happened to be close friends. The owner, a renowned sculptor, was central in initiating what became an intuitive creative process. A great advantage was to be meeting regularly over three years to orchestrate and integrate all aspects of the design before any construction began. It was a joyful sharing, with exponential, cross-disciplinary investment-and then the owner, most important of all, was the onsite supervisor for construction, overseeing every detail. The original one-story house was mostly eliminated in order to build the foundations for the new two-story house with a partially enclosed third-story roof deck.

The dark plaster exterior is classical and symmetrical, much like the houses of northern Italy where the owner spends much of his time. However, the interior is another story indeed: very contemporary and deconstructed with a tall central space that sets up, with one stair on top of another, a spiral of circulation that winds through even the master bedroom and closet on its way to the outdoor room on top and a view of most of LA. The new place fits the owner’s personality so exactly that he can’t bear to leave and has had to abandon his original studio, just two miles away. So,  PBA collaborated with the owner again to make an indoor/outdoor studio on the property. This house in in what its owner calls its hortus conclusus (or enclosed garden), which has become both a cloister and laboratory.