Houzz Tour: Living Large in a 1,400-Square-Foot Home

As you can see in the previous image, the front door isn’t obvious from the street. The entrance is through a side gate on the left of the garage and down a path along the side yard setback. That path is seen here, facing back toward the driveway.

(Check out the site plan at the end of the story to get oriented.)

The home’s exterior is a combination of smooth white plaster and a heavily textured overgrow limestone, which means the grout covers a bit of the stone. That technique, Laney explains, adds an old-world flair to the new home’s contemporary lines. “I love the ambiguity,” he says of the effect, which prompts passersby to ask: “‘Is that an old home? Is that a new home? Is it a futuristic home? Is it an ancient home?”

In fact, the home is newly built on a 2,760-square-foot lot, though it’s surrounded by mature vegetation that the team took great care to protect during construction.

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This entry foyer is at the end of the side path, at the intersection of the two gable-roof volumes. It has a glass Dutch door, visible in the foreground, in lieu of a traditional front door.

“It’s very unusual for a small house to dedicate an entire space to arrival,” Laney admits, “but it’s all about pairing things that are big and generous with things that are more modest.” A large arched window helps create a sense of spaciousness the moment you walk through the door.

The design also negates the need for a long, wasteful interior hallway.

Sconce: Workstead

Speaking of efficiency, compared with a large, conventionally built home, fewer materials and resources are generally required to build and operate a small home, making the latter fundamentally more efficient. But Laney and his team went above and beyond, integrating dozens of sustainable strategies in the house.

For example, in addition to the hydronic floors, the primary spaces in the home rely on natural daylighting (using windows and other design features to bring light into a space) versus recessed lighting, and window shades and deciduous trees reduce heat gain.

Here, above the door into the entry foyer, you can see a 1-inch slot diffuser that’s part of an ERV (energy recovery ventilator) system, which Laney calls the most radical part of the project. Instead of traditional air conditioning, the ERV dehumidifies the air and pulls fresh air from the outside and from the coolest areas of the home. The cool, fresh air spills out of the diffuser and falls down into the room. (More on the home’s sustainable systems later.)

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Led by Laney and his wife, Krista, the Laney LA team did all of the project’s interior design as well.

That said, the clients were in every design meeting and “steered the ship,” Laney says. They brought the ideas for the steel-framed windows and doors, for example.

They also chose the splurge-worthy de Gournay wallpaper (in a design called Amazonia, hand-painted on Adams gray silk), which backs the wet-bar nook seen here.

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To make efficient use of the space, built-in storage and shelving were a large element of the interior design plan.

Laney LA custom-designed the breakfast nook’s three-legged table (made by Board & Block) to provide easy-access storage in the banquette. It’s screwed into the floor so it’s removable but can’t tip.

Complemented by the outdoor dining space, the nook takes the place of a formal dining room.

This little reading area in the corner across from the breakfast nook also contains hidden storage in its bench, as well as a wide white oak sill that functions as another shelf.

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The window above that sill opens to the courtyard, which you can see again in this photo taken from the entry foyer.

The south-facing courtyard allows light to pour into the main dining space and into the primary bedroom, which is in the front gable-roofed structure along with the other private spaces and the garage. A deciduous tree provides shade in the summer.

You can also see the primary bedroom’s open French doors on the right side of the courtyard.

Here’s a view from that bedroom into the solar courtyard. Click on the photo to zoom in and look closely at the beautiful black-and-white Portuguese cobblestone.

“We designed different patterns in each of the courtyards [in] a variety of geometric shapes,” Laney says, explaining that they, as well as the overgrow limestone exterior walls, were inspired by the owners’ recent trip to Portugal.

Remote-controlled privacy and blackout roller shades are visible above the French doors, and recessed roller shades hide in the ceiling above the other windows.

Hooded sconces: Ravenhill Studio

In contrast to the soothing palette of the primary bedroom, the en suite bathroom is a playful mix of color and pattern.

The same de Gournay Amazonia wallpaper used in the wet bar covers the walls, and the herringbone-pattern floor is encaustic cement tile by Clé in Federal Blue.

The door opens into a small, private courtyard that’s protected by trees. If you look at the very first photo, you can see the low wall surrounding it to the right of the garage door.

Perhaps the most charming touch in the home is a full-height loft space in the kids’ room, which sits above a built-in wardrobe and staircase with integrated drawers. It’s big enough for a bed, and at its peak, it’s tall enough for an adult to stand.

Raw cedar shingles and interior shutters give it a fairy-tale feel. A second window with shutters peers into the entryway.

Not pictured here are the room’s built-in bunk bed and en suite bathroom.

The loft is the most whimsical space in the house, but the full-size lap pool is probably the most enviable.

“[The clients] asked pretty hesitantly, ‘Is it possible to have a lap pool?’ ” Laney says. “That’s a big part of their daily ritual.” So while he’d never seen a lap pool in that neighborhood, his answer was: “Absolutely. It’s a custom home. Anything is possible.”

The pool stretches from the entryway into the backyard. During construction, locally sourced stone walls were painstakingly soft-stacked to protect the roots of the flowering camellias surrounding it.

Look back to the second photo and imagine turning 180 degrees. This would be your view.

In addition to being used for daily exercise, the pool is part of the home’s hydronic heat system.

Under the house, a heat exchange system — essentially a boiler — connects four systems: the pool pump, the hydronic floors, the solar hot water (from solar panels located on the south-facing slope of the gable roof) and the domestic hot water. So the pool supports the thermal mass for the radiant floors that heat the house, Laney explains. Meanwhile, the ERV system, described earlier, keeps the home cool on warm days.

The green approach is in line with the firm’s manifesto: “to [spark] a dialogue between enduring architecture and its evolving environment.” But Laney says that, compared with most other projects, this house has more ideas packed into every inch. Laney credits the construction team, Denton Developments, with not only embracing the more innovative ideas, but also with pushing his team’s and the clients’ shared vision even further.

“We found that that three-way partnership was what was special about this project,” he says. “Because our voice can be just a little bit lonely there.”

The Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects clearly saw the project as special too: It recently bestowed it with a prestigious Honor Award.

Equally telling is the visceral reaction that the space evokes.

“So many people have walked through this house and gasped because they’re struck by something emotional,” Laney says.

That’s the feeling of being in a home that’s “just right.”