Light fantastic: kitchens and baths shine brightly in these open-plan houses: a house undivided

Residential Architect, March, 2003

Kanner and his wife and two daughters had lived in the neighborhood for six years before their best friends down the street sold them the property. They tore down an existing house and quickly began plotting the new one. Kanner's top priority was to site the house to take advantage of natural light and cross-ventilation. He also was interested in blurring indoor-outdoor boundaries, so he pushed the house to the north side of the east-west-facing lot. The result is that the 60-foot-by-120-foot property feels much larger from inside the house. "In a conventional house with rooms cut off from view of each other, you don't sense the size of the property," Kanner says. "But if the house has a lot of glass and you set it to one side, you're looking all the way across the property and sense its entire width. People are surprised the site is as small as it is."

The house's playful colors, materials, and shapes are anchored in a rigorous floor plan. Built into a slope that drops 8 feet from the street to the backyard, the house's second story is at street level. Kanner divided his home into three discrete parts. The long body--the width of a two-car garage and laundry room--holds the garage and three bedrooms on the second story, and a guestroom and kitchen, dining room, and living room on the ground level. A glassy entryway, centered on the view of a backyard pine, links the house with a canted stair tower that rises to a home office and descends to a sinuous patio.

Despite the abundance of steel and glass, Kanner has yet to use his air-conditioning, thanks to the building's design and orientation. The lower floor is tucked under the second-story overhang, so the family lives in sheltered, yet intimate, contact with the elements. And to make the most of the see-through walls, the floor plan is open, with only a floating bookshelf separating the dining room and living room. Likewise, the kitchen's boundaries are delineated by a commodious marble countertop and upper cabinets, attached to airy, 934-foot ceilings. "As a family, we spend a lot of time together there," Kanner says. "If we're entertaining, the dining room table is just beyond, so there's a dialogue between us cooking and the guests at the table." Dirty pots and plates can be banished from view, however, with a PVC mesh scrim installed in the upper cabinetry that descends with the touch of a button.

Kanner continued his light studies upstairs, where the bedroom closets stop 18 inches short of the ceiling. Clerestory windows above the closets transfer light from the exterior, through the hallway, and into the bedroom. "The rooms feel bigger because the ceilings continue," Kanner says. A large window overlooks the two-story living room. "We have it for acoustical control," he says, "but it creates a glass cube from the perspective of the master bedroom." The thoroughly modern spaces are assembled with sensuous materials. Deep blue terrazzo on the entryway floor, glass mosaic tiles on the fireplace wall and on the wainscoting in the bathrooms, and marble in the kitchen and master bath add touches of glamour. Elsewhere, Kanner relied on inexpensive materials to offset the house's structural costs. The living room and dining room floors are the basic concrete structural slab, polished and left alone. "It made sense because we poured a slab on the terrace, so it became a continuous material," Kanner says.