Designed and constructed by Los Angeles architect, John Southern and his firm Urban Operations, the Slice and Fold House is a contemporary hillside home in the cosmopolitan neighborhood of Highland Park. Nestling into its steep hillside site, the house steps gracefully up the sloping topography, and provides outdoor space for every room without additional sitework. The first floor is conceived as an open plan, and features strategically located light-wells that flood the home with sunlight from above. On the second floor, each bedroom has access to outdoor space, decks and an at-grade patio, which opens onto a landscaped backyard. The home also features a roof deck inspired by Le Corbusier’s early villas, and where one can see Griffith Park and the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance.
Slice and Fold is a contemporary homage to L.A.’s stylistically heterogeneous collection of hillside residences that cover the city from Hollywood to El Sereno. The design marries strategic hillside engineering with a series of stepped programmatic volumes, which are then sliced and folded at various code-generated orientations in order to produce a unified holistic design. Taking into consideration that the goal of the project was to deliver a custom signature piece of architecture for the mass market, Urban Operations designed, developed and built the home, which took eighteen months to design, permit, and construct.