Living on the edge - decks on canyon houses

Sunset, Sept, 1996 by Bill Crosby

Two canyon houses maximize their only outdoor space - on decks two and three stories off the ground

When a large part of your backyard is off the ground, your deck needs to be more than just a place to stand and soak in the view. These two houses in the hills above Los Angeles feature added-on outside spaces that make the leap from simple platforms to house-extending outdoor rooms. Both also take steps to put acrophobes at ease through generous proportion, enclosure elements, and mass.

The original deck on Vincent Paterson's Hollywood Hills house was a little 4- by 10-foot perch off the living room. Architect Ruben Ojeda of Pasadena maximized the living space by adding almost 1,000 square feet of decking. The 12- by 48-foot main section of deck acts as an outdoor living-dining room. The deck narrows as it wraps around the corner kitchen, then widens again to a roughly 12- by 25-foot curved sunbathing deck off the master bedroom and office. A curved stucco wall with punched openings encloses the bedroom deck and screens it from the neighbors. Another large stucco wall supports the focal corner of the deck where it makes its turn. A large cutout leading to a two-person "pope's porch" frames the view down the canyon to the lights of the city.

"When you're out on the porch, you're really floating," Ojeda says. But the mass of the wall gives the overall addition a feeling of solidity.

Sconces are built into all the walls to light the deck at night. Steel tubing forms the rails atop the 6-by-6 framing posts; five courses of aircraft cable complete the railing for unblocked views of the greenery below. The 2-by-4 decking is coated with a Sikkens finish.

Decks were added on two levels of Irmi and Peter Maunu's house on Mount Washington to create their only outdoor space. Los Angeles architects Fung Blatt added a 175-square-foot deck on the top level that opens off the dining room and kitchen, as well as a 150-square-foot deck downstairs off the child's bedroom.

Painted plywood benches, proportioned to mimic the famous modernist Rietveld chair of 1918, form the main outdoor dining room portion of the top deck. Their solid backs and seats provide a comforting barrier for diners perched 24 feet off the ground. The 42-inch-high bench backs and 2-foot-deep planters are used in place of railings for most of the project. A welded-steel grid rises out of the planters both to provide support for the plants and to raise the rail height to the required 36 inches. The sections of conventional railing are made of 1/4-inch steel hardware cloth in an open redwood frame.

Half-inch-diameter steel rods form a two-course top rail 36 inches above the bench seats. Similar rods form the support for a canvas canopy attached to wooden dowels that slide on rings to cover the dining corner. The canopy retracts under the house overhang for protection from the weather.

Because the house sits on a steep hillside, conventional footings for the new structure would have been prohibitively expensive. Instead, diagonal struts supporting both decks (shown in the photo at top left) tie back into the original foundation.