18th Street

2,400 sq ft

Primary components: polished concrete floors, cedar siding reclaimed wood floors, fleetwood sliding doors, maple cabinetry, denim insulation, ecoterr counter, solar evacuated tubes

Hermosa Beach California, completed 2007

This project is a single family residence for 2 parents and 2 children--the ideal American family unit. The family plans to reside in the house for many years to come, and have their children attend the adjacent elementary and middle schools. Sited on tight infill lot in a quiet beach community south of Los Angeles, SH_Arc was asked to design an efficient, environmentally conscious and cost sensitive project.

The design cleverly maximizes the long skinny site while simultaneously keeping the inside open to the yard, light and sea breezes, unlike many new lot busters in the surrounding area. The house divides the lot into two long halves, with a breezeway room that fully opens to both a back and front yard. On cool fall nights these doors are opened and a warming fire in this room permits these doors to remain open well into the night.

The spaces in the residence alternate between small, private, comforting spaces that connect to free flowing wide or tall spaces. The climax of this spatial variation is experienced in the kitchen and dining room, an 18' long tall space that is open to the staircase leading to the second floor, allowing view up, in, and down of this dynamic volume. The upstairs consists of bedrooms and a family lounge, where homework and reading takes place, away from the active downstairs. Operable skylights and ceiling fans passively vent warm air out of the space to help cool the house which purposefully has no central air conditioning. The house has a long list of sustainable features: solar water heating, radiant floor heating, denim insulation, passive air cooling system, non toxic paints and glues, high fly ash content concrete, and on site rainwater seepage pit.