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- I came here when I was 12 with my father and mother
we visited Disneyland and all that,
and I just fell in love with California.
Somehow I knew I was gonna be here.
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When you see kids in the ocean and people they scream
and they play on that because he gets so excited.
It's just part of an open space
and I wanted that same kind of feeling
that when people come here they feel at ease
and they feel that there's a space that compliments
what you see or the environment that you're in.
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- [Anders] One of the things that I really love
about this particular property
is it has a bit of an irregular shape.
It's kind of a wedge shape,
wider along the street at the coast highway side,
narrower down at the bottom.
So that naturally meant
that somehow we've got to fit a building onto that,
that maybe responds to the taper of that property.
And we have two parts to this building,
we have the living unit for the owners
and then we have the living unit for the renter.
- Being from Latin America and in Venezuela,
Tim used to say whenever we visited Caracas
whenever you say my family, he says, no wonder now
he understood because we, everything is open,
it's a tropical place.
We're only seven degrees above the equator.
So I wanted to imitate some of that.
I went through Houzz and I set the parameters
for Laguna beach, contemporary mid-century light,
whatever and then I started looking at all
the architects that I could see
and I kept going back to Anders.
- Some of the architects we interviewed,
you got the feeling they were gonna build a building
they wanted to build,
instead of maybe the one you wanted to live in.
And interviewing with Anders
we got the feeling that he really balanced those things.
He's like, I'm gonna build you a great building
but it really it's got to come from you,
what the program is.
- It's one thing to hear a client say,
I want this many bedrooms or I need an office
or a gym or these quantitative things.
It's really for us a more interesting question
to look for those qualitative kinds of living experiences.
When I come home from work,
I want to see this beautiful view
and feel like I've arrived in paradise
or I want to feel energized in the morning when I wake up
because of the way the sun comes
into my bedroom or my bathroom.
And it's the little things
about the way we live that I think make
for those really transformative experiences.
Our challenge was create a building that's as big
as it can be, give them as much value for their money
but do it in a way where the quality of the space
is as good as it can be and the best value for their money.
And I don't think there's anything more important
than light, so for me the best feature of this house is
as we fit it to the site, we develop this opportunity
for a central courtyard that could read
through both stories, pull light in
and really generate a kinda space that now
they, it doesn't matter where you are in the house.
You can always relate back
to where that light is coming from.
- This is the first bone structure
building in Orange County.
A BONE Structure building is a company from Canada
and they shipped us the entire duplex.
It's a pre-fab way of building houses,
all their proprietary posts and connections and engineering
and we assembled it in the field.
- They were able to help us figure out how to get the shape
and the height and the configuration of the house
that we could get approved at the city.
How would we actually build that with their parts?
A couple of the really interesting details of this house
stemmed from the owner's needs themselves.
One of them is we have dogs, we live at the beach,
we love an outdoor lifestyle, we're active.
So we need finishes and we need materials
that can be easy to take care of
and something that looks good in 20 years
like it does today.
Concrete floors for example,
this slab needed to be here anyway,
we've polished it, we've saw cut it.
We've treated it in a way that elevates the quality
of the concrete from a workaday construction material
into something that can become really quite beautiful.
And it's never been something
that a client has ever regretted.
Sometimes they don't trust and they think,
oh I won't like that, but when we do it
they really do love it because it is as carefree as it gets.
Another interesting feature was the stairway itself.
Now stairs in my mind
they're a little bit like the jewelry of a building.
It's an opportunity to be expressive in a way
that supports some of the bigger ideas in the house.
And in this case, this stairway spirals its way up
in this double height volume that we have,
where we're pulling light in from clear story windows above
skylights above the windows down at eye level.
So this stair had to be something beautiful.
With that much light on it, it's got to look good.
- We tried to fit all of the little pieces
that we thought were really important into the space.
We also really liked that sort of great room concept,
your big island and people can stand at the island.
And then you've got the dining table,
people could set in the living in.
Everybody can be, you can get 20 people in here
pretty comfortably now.
- Invariably, we find our clients live in their kitchen.
It's really front and center, it's the gravitational center
of the house and everyone orbits around that space.
She loves to cook.
Tim loves to make really wonderful espresso.
So we knew that that kitchen had to be right for them.
- I love my kitchen.
It took us probably about a year to design that kitchen.
Joe was kind of concerned about that's a big island,
then I showed him Houzz
look they're like 16 chairs in here, we really have five,
it's nothing, we can do this and so we just did it.
We had to make some accommodations,
but we got so a kitchen and a hammock.
That's all I want
and it just built everything about now, right.
It was a little more there
but I would tease him all the time.
He says, do not forget my hammock or my bidet.
So he goes, yeah, I get it, I get it.
- Ileana likes being in the hammock a lot,
she'll be out there reading
or sometimes the dogs will go the hammock with her.
- The deck also is successful because it feels
to be a natural extension of the interior living space.
The ceiling on the inside does extend out to the outside.
Seeing that lid going past the sliding doors
is what connects our bodies
and our visual mind out to the outside.
On the deck we used a thicker version
of that porcelain tile and set it up on pedestals.
Meaning those tiles are floating if you will
above the deck surface that's below.
And there's a little gap between each of the deck tiles.
So when it rains or if you hose off the deck
whenever there's water, the water finds its way
to the cracks between the tiles drops down
to the sub deck below where it's picked up and drains
and then taken away to the site drainage system.
But what's nice about that,
is that that floor surface remains level
from inside to outside, it's uninterrupted.
And to the brain this outdoor space
really is the building still.
The bedrooms are always an interesting question
because sometimes we have clients who want their bedrooms
to be very cavernous vast spaces.
Others feel, no, it doesn't need to be big,
it's just where I sleep.
This isn't the grandest space
of there where the bedroom is,
but the bedroom, the master bathroom
the space behind the bathroom
which becomes the closet and the gym space,
it's really one large almost like an apartment.
So our thought eternally was how do we make
the spaces we have feel larger?
So that bedroom extends right out onto an ocean facing deck,
and on that deck is a beautiful fireplace.
And in front of that fireplace is a lovely sitting area,
so we've programmed the spaces,
we've given them purpose for being there.
So now when I'm sitting in my bed
I looked through a window or a sliding glass door,
I see that extra space that has furniture
that has purpose has a reason to be there,
and then I look beyond that to the ocean.
Your room really feels like it goes all the way to the ocean
because you feel an extension of your body.
You know you can occupy all of those spaces,
and in our mind that subconscious connection
to the outside just knits everything together.
Your bedroom is now this big
- Each person has like a space
that makes them feel whole I think,
it was very important for me that we have an art studio
where I could express myself
and not having to pick everything up
because we have to put stuff in.
I became very interested in combining my love of photography
and painting and design.
Whenever I come from the beach with the dogs
and I looked at it says,
that's our house, that's our place.
How cool is that?
So we're still kinda like pinch me.
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