B&B Italia’s Charles sectional and Diesis coffee table, both purchased from Diva Group in Los Angeles, create a comfortable seating area in the living room and rest on terrazzo flooring from Arizona Concrete Repair. The fireplace is clad with Linac marble from Picasso Tile & Stonework that emphasizes the home’s rectilinear architecture.
“Each decision reinforced the previous one,” Byrnes says. “There’s this rhythm to the structure, and each element talks to the others.” For example, zinc strips in the terrazzo floors and horizontal veining in the living room’s marble fireplace coincide while further enhancing the home’s architectural lines. From below, the structure appears to float above its concrete foundation. “I wanted the house to feel like it was magically transported to the mountain with as little disturbance as possible,” Byrnes says. During construction, Byrnes tinkered with the placement of windows to emphasize certain views while disguising others. Floor-to-ceiling expanses of glass, for instance, provide unparalleled vistas in the main living areas. The guesthouse above the garage, on the other hand, has high and narrow windows that frame the mountain range while cropping out neighboring houses. “Because of the way it’s sited, you never experience the neighbors from inside the house,” he says. “Being both the architect and the general contractor allowed me to execute subtle ideas, such as window placements, during the construction that we might not have been able to do otherwise.” Actually constructing the house, however, was not without its challenges, as site constraints forced Byrnes to build the foundation a little at a time while the team worked its way down from the far end of the lot. “Since we couldn’t build the house from the bottom up, we had to start at the top of the site and work our way down,” he says. A glass bridge connects the main living areas with the master suite, providing a bird’s-eye view of the lower-level art gallery. Here, the owners’ paintings and sculptures are displayed against a concrete wall. “The concrete walls are holding back the mountain,” Byrnes says. “I wanted the house to tell its own story about what’s structural versus what’s not.”