Koning Eizenberg HOME

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KoningEizenberg 1454 25th Street Santa Monica, CA 90404 t (310) 828.6131 f (310) 828.0719 www.kearch.com

City / Santa Monica, CA Program / 3,456 sq. ft. single family home Completed / 2001 Awards / 2004 Residential Architect Merit Award

Designed to transcend expectations of the potential of cost-conscious conventional construction, this single-family house utilizes quality materials and crafted details in a simple plan to achieve elegance and affordability. Living and utility areas are on the ground floor with master suite and children’s bedrooms on the second floor. California seismic and energy codes have made glassy modern design intrinsically expensive.

Strategic use of glass and plywood shearwalls (avoids steel framing) extracted an extremely cost effective design from conventional wood frame construction.

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

City / Santa Monica, CA Program / 2,700 sq. ft. single family home Completed / 1989 Awards / 1991 AIA Los Angeles Chapter Merit Award

The house is slender (only 17 feet wide along most of its length) and co-mingles with the surrounding garden.

Oversized exterior sliding glass doors, hinged French doors, secret and surface interior sliding doors, Australian sashless windows, and rolling wood shutters allow an interplay of light and air. With the landscaping now fully mature, the house appears to be an extension of the flora around it, almost overgrown, content in its supporting role.

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

City / South Pasadena, CA Program / 3,709 sq. ft. single family home Completed / 2011

This home is comprised of a series of sculptural white rooms with roofs of varying heights housing living, work and bedroom spaces. Bathrooms, storage and services are accommodated in simple, low, wood-clad fingers that slide back and forth between the white rooms defining a series of outdoor courtyards. The informal open-plan arrangement connecting living and bedroom spaces directly to the outdoor courtyards reflects the family’s desire for the house to feel like a compound of small bungalows where outdoor spaces are an extension of the indoors. The courtyards are the big spaces, and the house the backdrop, designed to be obscured by landscape and offering only glimpses of itself from each courtyard.

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

City / South Pasadena, CA Program / 3,709 sq. ft. guest house Completed / 2009

This off-the-grid guest house provides informal space for a family inspired by sustainability and interested in the potential for homemade and changing art projects.

For them, getting off-the-grid is more than just an environmental choice. It is an expression of values, requiring spaces that celebrate them. Simple materials are used to create a series of light filled spaces: metal siding, wood framing, drywall, glass doors and triplewall polycarbonate. The design also incorporates a mezzanine wall clad with old tennis balls that adds acoustic absorption, and a blackboard wainscot around the core. A solar thermal system, providing domestic hot water and radiant heat, and photovoltaics combine with daylighting and earthtube cooling that capitalizes on an abandoned subterranean bomb shelter, to deliver self-sufficient, sustainable living.

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

City / Venice, CA Program / 3,330 sq. ft. single family home Completed / 1998

This two-story house is located on a 5,000 sq. ft. lot facing a pedestrian-only walk street near the beach in Venice. It is a long skinny house made on a long skinny lot to allow for maximum interest between interior spaces and surrounding garden space. The owners asked for a beach cottage with a contemporary twist, so we connected this theme with the use of recycled pine flooring, which is oiled rather than varnished, and a fireplace made of warm, sand colored cinder block.

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

City / Pacific Palisades , CA Program / 7,000 sq. ft. single family home Completed / 1999

This 7,000 sq. ft. house is located on a slopping 53,500 sq. ft. wooded site in Pacific Palisades, accessed by a bridge over a creek. Planning entitlements involved complex approvals including issues relative to hillsides, creek, private roads, and interpretation of the planning code to allow the house to step up the site rather than be massed on one large level pad. All existing large trees were retained and a pool was added. As the added planting spills over the house, it fuses the building and landscape in the tradition of the classic California home.

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

City / Tarzana, CA Program / 3,000 sq. ft. single family home Completed / 1992 Awards / 1993 AIA Award of Merit; 1994 Sunset Western Home Award; 1998 California AIA Award of Merit

This 3-bedroom house is located in the San Fernando Valley in a rustic subdivision with sprawling residential lots and big trees. The house design provided a medium for exploring the changes in landscape that characterize the region’s development. The dry motor and entry courts transmute through the house into shady, green, irrigated garden. The house is essentially transitional shelter rather than enclosure. In fact, the most roomlike place on the site is outdoors—the yellow—walled entry courtyard.

We explored the inversion of inside and outside by appropriating a traditional inside space, the walled room, as an outside space.

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

City / Hollywood, CA Program / 1,800 sq. ft./unit Completed / 1987 Awards / 1998 Record House Award by Architectural Record

The Hollywood Duplex consists of two 1,800 sq. ft. units set into a triangular hillside site. Twin towers house live/ work spaces above a garage, while kitchens, baths and services are behind in smaller, barrel-vaulted buildings joined to the towers by transparent staircase enclosures.

The design does not rely on decorative ornamentation, but on the interaction of crisp, carefully composed building elements. The detached unit configuration provides better light, breezes and views from all sides, and creates outdoor spaces for public entrances and private patios, allowing the natural landscape to cascade down.

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

City / Los Angeles, CA Program / 500 sf +/- garage Completed / 2007 Awards / 2008 I.D. Annual Design Review Award, Honorable Mention in Environments

Koning Eizenberg was 1 of 10 invited participants in 2007’s MET Home LA Showhouse Installation. In this home, like many others, the arrival sequence for those living in the house is not the front door but the overhead door and the garage. We decided the garage could provide a more theatrical and welcoming experience while screening the usual mechanical equipment and typical garage contents. We like playing with expectations and tweaking ordinary materials. The installation redressed the neglect by conflating billboard and pegboard into a backlit, laser cut, series of screens that spell out a personlized message, here “Welcome Home” and the always anticipated “You’re Late.”

KoningEizenberg

Remodel

City / New York, NY Program / 1,870 sq. ft. single family apartment Completed / 2010

An academic couple with a young family had been living in New York for five years or so when they bought a high ceilinged, long, thin Tribeca co-op. We worked together with the Los Angeles natives to infuse warmth into the space as well as updating bathrooms and bedrooms. The key design strategy was the introduction of a series of low plywood sleeves inserted into the dark entry hallway to add utility and reduce its apparent length. The ‘entry sleeve’ provides storage and at the other end a “library sleeve” spills out and up ( enveloping fridge and pantry) to anchor the living room. The open kitchen has a long, maple island and lightblox and polycarbonate lined counter behind. A window seat was added below the south facing windows looking over Duane Park. Above we included a backlit perforated ceiling designed to be seen from outside. The patterned ceiling acts as a personal marker in an anonymous, big city and animates both street and home.

Before

KoningEizenberg

Remodel City / Santa Monica, CA Completed / 2008

Before

KoningEizenberg

Remodel

City / Santa Monica, CA Completed / 1994

The Erenberg remodel is composed of subtle curves of form and saturated colors which animate the simple artist studios sited to create a sequence of varied indoor and outdoor spaces linked to a 1920’s Spanish Colonial cottage. Husband and wife artists required additional bedroom space and independent work spaces. For reasons of economy, the existing 1920’s Spanish cottage was minimally changed. These cottages are popular and familiar in Los Angeles but adding to such a form is somewhat troubling. The usual approaches to such additions are either cloyingly in “style” or boldly architectural. The former seems architecturally pointless and the latter often uncomfortably trivializes the existing.

We sought a path that accepted and enjoyed the existing house for what it was. We looked to the personality of the residents and the plasticity of stucco as a lead to the approach.

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

Remodel City / Venice, CA Completion / 2002

KoningEizenberg

Before

KoningEizenberg

After

Remodel

City / Kenter Canyon, CA Program / 800 sq. ft. addition Completion / 1986

The existing house, designed by Quincy Jones in 1950, has a distinctive low-slung gable roof that hovers over concrete block, wood siding, and a wall of sliding glass to the south. To this, the client wished to add about 800 sq. ft. of bedrooms and bathrooms, and enlarge the kitchen without compromising the integrity of the original house. There was insufficient room to “invisibly” add bedrooms to the east along the line of the ridge, and additions north and south in the “50’s gable style” only resulted in clumsy overblown forms. Consequently, the existing rectangular gable-roofed form was not violated and new space was added in complementary, autonomous forms: the bathrooms in a painted glass two-story cube, and two bedrooms in the curved wedge built into the up-slope.

KoningEizenberg

Remodel

City / Santa Monica, CA Program / 600 sq. ft. addition, 1,300 sq. ft. remodel Completed / 1993 Awards / 1996 National AIA Honor Award; 1995 Architectural Record Record House; 1994 AIA California Council Honor Award

In this house we played to our interest in extracting the extraordinary out of the ordinary suburban context. An understanding of the compositional language, scale and ornament of the existing home allowed the addition to slide invisibly into its location. The covered dining area responds to limited budget and planning controls, manipulating conventional expectations of the sequence of indoor and outdoor spaces.

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

KoningEizenberg

Remodel

City / Santa Monica, CA Program / Two 1,800 sq. ft. units Completed / 1983

The California Ave Duplex provides two units arranged around a common courtyard on a small 46’ x 110’ lot.

Each unit has private outdoor spaces as well as a studio space designed to accommodate working from home.

The duplex is an early example of the firm’s innovative approach to housing.

KoningEizenberg

City / Santa Monica, CA Program / 3 units condo Completed / 1992

The Given triplex is a three-unit speculative condominium development in the Ocean Park neighborhood in Santa Monica. At first, glance the triplex appears to be a familiar, craftsman-inspired development with “broad curb appeal,” as realtors describe it. Craftsmanlike material and proportions are used intentionally to solidify the eroding neighborhood texture of the few adjacent older building and open spaces; this quiet strategy belies the program’s density. An idiosyncratic layer with slightly altered roof pitches, voluminous interior spaces with generous windows adds present day vitality and confirms—for those who insist that past architecture is better than what we build now—that current architecture may well offer as great a potential as adhering to past traditions.

KoningEizenberg

Other Koning Eizenberg Remodels:

BOGEN RESIDENCE REMODEL

COHEN RESIDENCE REMODEL

City / Santa Monica, CA Completed / 2003

City / Santa Monica, CA Completed / 2002

TUPELO LANE REMODEL

BACH RESIDENCE REMODEL

City / Los Angeles, CA Completed / 1998

City / Santa Monica, CA Completed / 1993

MARSHA MOORE ADDITION Completed / 1989

KoningEizenberg

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KoningEizenberg

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