Stradella House
1200 sq. ft. addition
With an existing house sited on flat ground above a canyon in Los Angeles, the clients were interested in taking better advantage of their breathtaking views of the Santa Monica Mountains, Stone Canyon Reservoir, and downtown Los Angeles via the addition of a new master suite and family room. The site proved to be both dynamic and difficult as we looked at options that would have placed the addition: on the hillside; in an excavation in their patio; or in two stories replacing the existing master suite.

House of Shadows Competition
“wherever the shadow is seen, it is only understood as the limit of brightness. But the shadow is more and other than a limit.”
Martin Heidegger
Our clients are heathens. As heathens they understand the prompt of “house of shadows” to mean a re-discovery, reclamation, and re-vitalization of those things considered dark. This is a project about allowing the intersection of the mysterious, the mystical, the uncanny, the sublime, the intuitive, the undecidable, the unacceptable, as the very spiritual core of our existence.
Our clients desire is for these element to penetrate and subsume their space of dwelling. As such, their house of shadows consists of literal dark spaces and metaphorically dark places, with both providing the opportunity and reminder to be amazed, to find wonder, to not settle for the accepted and to allow – those things shadowy to remain shadowy as their darkness is where their potency lies.