Architect James Meyer updates a 1950s classic for life in the new millennium
Architect James Meyer approached redesigning his clients’ midcentury, single family residence on Hermosa View Drive in Hermosa Beach with an eye toward unveiling its original beauty, while adapting it to meet the twenty-first-century needs of its residents.
“The home was already a beautiful building that had been sort of neglected over the years,” Meyer recalled. “For me, it was a discovery process to try to restore [its] architectural integrity and realign things…to help [the clients] expand on their original vision.”
The clients, a design-savvy couple with three young children, spotted the home by chance in a local newspaper. They were expecting twins at the time and needed a bigger home to accommodate their growing family. Like Meyer, they recognized the immense potential of the existing structure, but wanted to open it up and maximize family space.
A mutual acquaintance introduced Meyer to the clients. Meyer shared their love of contemporary art and admired their “funky and cool tastes.” From there, a friendship developed. A close architect-client rapport is something Meyer and his team value at LeanArch, the Los Angeles-area design/build firm he founded in 2001.
“[We take] a neighborly kind of approach to our work,” he explained.
Meyer credits his affable, professional demeanor to his South Bay upbringing. The Cleveland native moved to Torrance as a toddler. After working for large architectural firms in various cities along the East Coast, he settled in Manhattan Beach in 1997.
“The office has sort of a South Bay attitude…a really relaxed casualness about it,” he explained. “I always look back to my roots in terms of how I treat a client.”
In order to give his Hermosa View Drive clients the extra space they needed, Meyer would have to dig a basement level under the home next to the existing garage. This addition would transform the split-level, three-bedroom home, into a two-story home with an additional bedroom—currently serving as a children’s playroom—and a much-needed multipurpose space that could function as a media room, family room, library and office.
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Trust me
“There was sort of a leap of faith on their part to get on board with the fact that, ‘Okay, we’re going to be scraping out all the earth underneath your house and putting it all back and building rooms under there,’” Meyer said.
Meyer also didn’t want to jeopardize the modern design idiom that characterized the original home. He was immediately struck by the midcentury flavor of the neighborhood, which boasts many ‘50s- and ‘60s- era homes, and wanted to reenergize the Hermosa View Drive residence within that context.
“To be able to work on a midcentury-era home was something that I was really interested in doing,” stated Meyer. “It’s a typology that I really like. …So there were certain things about the house that I insisted on keeping.”
One of the original design aspects Meyer championed was the home’s red brick facade. Initially, the clients considered cladding over it with stone tile or getting rid of it altogether. But Meyer convinced them to preserve the brick in homage to the residence’s midcentury construction.
“That was a building material that was used a lot at the time and I really felt we should somehow pay respect to that history,” Meyer explained.
The re-use of brick became a major feature of the remodel. To create a more contemporary feel, Meyer and his clients painted over the brick, settling on a glossy, gunmetal gray. The look was repeated in the home’s interior, after a chance discovery revealed more brick concealed behind layers of drywall around the living room fireplace. A bold, colossal pillar of gray brick now anchors the room and its communicating spaces.
“Now, it’s the centerpiece of the home, which I’m really in love with,” Meyer said.
Open and seamless
On the main floor, the living room opens onto the kitchen and dining area, which in turn open onto a balcony with a panoramic ocean view. Like many homes from the same era, the kitchen had originally been cut off from the dining area, which limited the circulation of light and air. For Meyer’s clients, eliminating walls and opening up the living room, kitchen and dining area to create a seamless space was a top priority. Large, floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors, custom designed and built by LeanArch, further the visual and physical continuity between the kitchen and dining area and the ocean-view balcony.
Opening up the main floor proved structurally challenging for Meyer, who had to come up with creative solutions to avoid going through the roof, which the clients had recently outfitted with solar panels. In order to avoid disturbing the solar panel system, Meyer had to reinforce the structure from underneath. This also meant redirecting the ventilation system laterally. To address this need, Meyer incorporated a “drop ceiling” of warm-toned wood, which extends from above the cooktop to the wall above the kitchen sink and provides an organic complement to the sleek, industrial surfaces found elsewhere in the kitchen.
The vibrant pops of bright, high-gloss color in the kitchen represent LeanArch’s predilection for fun, whimsical details. The clients chose the dark orange backsplash for the sink, but the canary yellow of the kitchen island was a subject of major debate. Meyer loved the shade and managed to convince the clients of its merits. Ultimately, it became a signature design element in the house.
“We do that often. A bright color as sort of a focal point in the house,” Meyer said.
The south wall of the kitchen is a panel made of ipê, an exotic hardwood the clients had used to build a patio fence prior to the remodel. To create continuity, Meyer repeated a parallel panel of ipê that flanks the home’s front door. Both the south kitchen wall panel and its parallel panel penetrate the home’s façade, drawing the eye towards the exterior. Meyer’s goal was to incorporate these panels as “small moments in space, instead of interruptions.” He didn’t want them to feel like barriers and some sage advice from his father, whom he often brings to construction sites, helped him avoid that.
“We were standing in the kitchen and we were looking out…through the framing [at] the view of the Peninsula,” Meyer recalled, “and he [said], ‘Wow. This is a great view!’ And I said, ‘Well, actually that’s going to be a wall there.’ And he [said], ‘Oh, that’s unfortunate. You guys should cut a window right through there.’”
A half an hour later, Meyer consulted with his clients and decided to add a small, rectangular window “on the fly.” The result is a breath-taking view of the Palos Verdes Peninsula from the kitchen cooktop. The ability to make a last-minute design modification — Meyer framed and installed the window that same afternoon — is one of the benefits of LeanArch’s orientation as a design/build firm, which provides both architectural design and construction services.
As Meyer explains, “There’s a sort of continuum of creativity that occurs throughout and…allows us to have the flexibility to sort of look for opportunities once we’re [already] in the process and make it better or improve upon it.”
Self portrait
One space the Hermosa View Drive clients hoped the remodel would improve was the master bedroom on the home’s upper level. They wanted a serene environment that connected indoor and outdoor spaces. Meyer installed walnut flooring, which provided an earthy contrast to the low-maintenance, industrial-looking porcelain tile flooring on the main level. He connected the suite to an elegant outdoor patio via floor-to-ceiling sliding glass panels. The patio itself features a dual function fire pit/coffee table, custom designed by Meyer, and a zen-like water element.
A black and white photograph hanging above the bed in the master suite documents the remodel. The extreme close-up shot, taken by the client during construction, depicts metal scraps discarded during the welding process. Meyer was so impressed by the client’s photographic documentation of the building process that he uses the images during lectures he gives on design/build.
“He was able to capture…guys standing in wet concrete, guys excavating out under the house and putting up shoring, operation of the machinery…the day-to-day activities you don’t normally see,” says Meyer. “It’s such a memorable part of the whole experience for me.”
For the master bathroom, Meyer looked to materials for an organic palette. He chose a quarter-sawn white oak for the cabinets and teak for the bathtub frame. The teak was chosen for its durability and its nautical reference. Installed around the exceptionally deep tub, the teak vividly recalls a boat deck. Boating references abound in Meyer’s work because he admires the design efficiency of boat interiors.
“There [are] certain…restrictions and confined spaces that are just solved really well when you look to boats,” he said.
Meyer looked for similar design solutions when trying to solve the problem of the downstairs bathroom. Just off the basement’s multipurpose room, Meyer had a small, windowless space where he could install a bathroom. Although he incorporated an outdoor, beach shower just outside the multipurpose room, the clients requested a shower in the interior bathroom, as well. Meyer didn’t want to further divide the space, so he opted to tile the whole room and mount a showerhead on the wall and put a drain in the floor. The bathroom is tiled in green limestone, creating a jeweled, cave-like atmosphere.
“The whole thing is tiled and you can just splash around in there or whatever you want,” Meyer reasons. “It turns into one big shower stall.”
When the remodel was complete, the home looked as though it had always been that way. Meyer’s goal of treading lightly and revealing the underlying beauty of what was already there has been attained.
“We took a lot of cues from the existing house,” he said. “At the end of the day, when you evaluate a project, it needs to just look natural, not forced.” B
