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Skin job: wrapped in a lightweight, chequerboard skin, this LA house maximizes a tight site

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2004 by Michael Webb

When architects house themselves, the opportunity to cut loose is constrained by the need to live in what they've created and the desire to put their talents on show. Lorcan O'Herlihy has mastered many precipitous lots in LA (AR October 1996), but he set himself the challenge of building a 230 sq m house for himself and his wife on a vestigial plot of flat land beside a busy street in the oceanfront neighbourhood of Venice. The product of his inventiveness is rigorous, roomy, frugal, and eye-catching: a major step forward for a burgeoning practice.

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In essence, it's a steel-framed box that makes maximum use of a 12m X 6m footprint. The ground floor is cut away to provide a double car port with a studio at the back; the first floor contains the master and guest bedrooms; the second, a living room to the rear and kitchendining in front. These spaces form a racetrack around a central stair that rises to a glasswalled pavilion on the roof terrace, which serves as an outdoor room with an ocean view for entertaining or a spot for quiet retreat.

The house is defined by its skin: a chequerboard of painted cement board and varied glass. O'Herlihy is a painter as well as an architect, and his geometric collage is infused with jazz rhythms in the manner of Mondrian's 1943 painting Broadway Boogie Woogie. Working within a 600mm module that emphasizes the verticality of the facades, he has positioned windows of clear, coloured, and translucent glass to cut across the floor plate and blur the division between the two levels. A fence of the same coloured board protects and conceals the base of the house from the street, creating a seamless, and apparently impenetrable container.

The flush skin defines the inner volumes, in which walls and ceilings are cut away to accommodate the glass and recessed lighting. The small openings frame pieces of neighbouring buildings, trees, and the street below, creating living artworks to complement paintings hung in the spaces between. By day they admit shafts of differently toned light from the pale blue, green, yellow, and clear glass, which animate the rooms; at night, there are fugitive gleams from street lamps and neighbours' windows. There's a sense of being inside a magical box that has fragmented and reordered the outside world.

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The narrowness of the openings assures privacy, there are lightweight clip-on shutters for the bedrooms, and windows are double-glazed at the front to exclude traffic noise. A wall-mounted cabinet is raised above a window in the living room, so that it appears to float in the light. To maximize useful space on each floor, the bathroom is tucked under the central staircase, and built-in cupboards have sliding doors suspended from ceiling tracks. To achieve precision of detail and finish, O'Herlihy employed a steel frame and metal studs, in contrast to the conventional wood-frame construction of houses in LA. The cement board, chosen because it doesn't expand and requires little maintenance, is backed by a waterproof membrane. Sharp-edged yet accommodating, this is truly a machine for living in.

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