“I tell my clients to think about their home in five years, when the current trend has passed.” — Architect Dean Nota
(Second of three parts.)
Pat Killen said of his first visit to the South Bay in 1980, “It was like, what happened? I mean, is there a fence here that says you can’t practice architecture south of LAX?” The 26-year-old had just arrived in California with a degree in architecture, fresh from Kent State.
A decade earlier, architectural critic Reyner Banham made a similar observation about what passed for architecture at the beach. He labeled it “Surfurbia.”
Shortly after that first visit, Killen began to explore the architectural potential of the beach cities’ narrow, ocean view lots with his design for the Sherin House on the Manhattan Beach Strand.
“It took its cues from the nearby lifeguard towers. Its 78 degree windows and canted ‘fin wall’ running through the middle of its face were bold and unprecedented, but still spoke the local language,” Easy Reader editor Mark McDermott wrote in a 2002 story about South Bay architecture.
Killen passed away last summer, at age 61. But by then, his many local commissions, abetted by architects of similar ambition and the area’s surge in ultra wealthy residents, had made Manhattan Beach a showcase for contemporary architecture and a on fixture AIA home tours.
The realist
Architect Michael Lee lives in an 1,100 square foot, beach cottage, built in 1923 and previously owned by his grandparents Hazel and Robert C. Lee. By contrast, his office and calling card is a spare, modern, mixed use building with brushed aluminum accents, two blocks up from the beach, walking distance from his home.
In “Better is the new more in Beach City Architecture,” an essay Lee wrote for Easy Reader in 2013, he described the bittersweet ambivalence he feels about his work.
“Somewhere along the line, my specialty as an architect became tearing down houses like my grandparents’ and building bigger homes, sometimes much bigger homes, on the same size property. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Often the old house that we tear down is tired and worn out and the new owner wants something more comfortable for his or her family. Property values have gone up, times have changed, and our grandparents’ 1,100 square foot, two-bedroom one-bathroom home is now a 3,000 square foot, five-bedroom, three-story-over-full-basement home with an elevator, a wine cellar, a home theater and a mechanical/telco room that looks like it came out of a nuclear submarine.
“I am usually excited about the start of a new project, but occasionally I feel a pang of remorse when the bulldozer shows up. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, maybe I’m sentimental, or maybe sometimes the little old house is better in some way than the new house I’ve designed. I don’t know. The one thing I do know is that some of the smaller homes have a spirit and character to them that is difficult to replicate in a larger home on the same size property.”
On balance, though, aside from being economically inevitable, Lee believes the changes in beach architecture have been positive.
To illustrate the changes he’s witnessed since he opened his Manhattan Beach practice in 1991, Lee told a story, from early in his career, of an architect friend who was giving a builder friend a hard time for his poorly designed, cheaply built homes. The builder responded by saying, “Design and quality don’t matter. I can sell anything in 90266.”
Not today, according to Lee.
“People are more demanding and as a result, quality has improved,” he said. The mantra has changed. “More is better” has become “better is better.”
Improvements in Manhattan Beach architecture have paralleled the rise in wealth. In the 1970s and 1980s, a redwood deck with a hot tub qualified as a home improvement, even if the homeowner did it himself. Larry Wolf, co-founder of Shorewood Realty, said the first house at the beach he knew of with air conditioning was the John Street home Killen designed in the early 1990s for Wolf’s partner Arnold Goldstein. After air conditioning came elevators and wine cellars. Now, geothermal heating is common, which explains what look like oil derricks on residential construction sites. Geothermal heating requires drilling down several hundred feet.
Lee said solar power, once rare, is now standard. Solar power is being spurred on by California’s 2020 deadline for Zero Net Energy (ZNE). New homes must produce energy equal to what they draw from the grid.
Home automation, spurred on by the Internet of Things, has also been added to the architect’s palette, Lee said. Through the Internet of Things, smartphones control security, lighting, home entertainment systems, blinds and toilet covers. The Internet of Things can easily add several hundred thousand dollars to the cost of a new home, Lee added.
Basements are another popular enhancement embraced by the ultra wealthy. Manhattan Beach homes are limited to three stories above ground, but money and nature are the only limits to digging down in the soft sand. Today roughly half of the new homes being built in the Beach District (between the ocean and Valley Drive) have basements, according to Manhattan Beach Planning Manager Lori Jester.
Last August, resident Paul Gross complained to the Manhattan City Council that his home had suffered “six figure damage” from neighboring new home construction at 1700 The Strand. Gross’s new neighbors paid $16 million in 2014 for the 30-foot wide, 90-foot deep lot.
The damage resulted from inadequate shoring while the new owner dug down three levels.
“They’ve been working on the house for over a year. They’ve used 110 tons of rebar and 400 cubic yards of concrete and have yet to reach ground level,” Gross told the council.
“Luckily, they have committed to fix the damage to my home,” Gross acknowledged.
The occasion for Paul Gross’s complaint at the August council meeting was a hearing on mansionization. The staff report proposed further “codifying” construction rules. It included a 1993 Declaration of Rights of the Residents of Manhattan Beach California, drafted by then councilman Steve Napolitano.
The 11th and final residents’ right reads, “That city certified architect photos… be posted at the proposed site for at least one month prior to granting of building permit to allow for residents input regarding compatibility with neighborhood and community.”
Architects, developers and Realtors who addressed the council at the August meeting all protested. Councilman Mark Burton expressed concerns about “unintended consequences.” The council referred the ordinance back to staff for further study.
The popularity of basements can be traced to the backlash against mansionization, which dates back to the 1990 council zoning restriction with the apt acronym of ZORP (Zoning Ordinance Revision Program). ZORP’s purpose was to reduce the appearance of “bulk” on the city’s small lots by establishing a complicated ratio between lot size and lot coverage.
In addition to encouraging basements, ZORP triggered another unintended consequence — lot mergers. In 2005, former Silicon Valley billionaire Robert DeSantis received council approval to merge three 33-foot wide lots in the 200 block of The Strand, totaling 9,997 square feet and valued at $29 million. He then commissioned architect Grant Kirkpatrick to design a 12,000 square-foot home, dubbed by neighbors the “Tommy Bahama” house. The design inspired the current wave of Caribbean plantation architecture, which has even spilled over into commercial architecture. Baja Sharkeez owner Greg Newman said when he was planning his new restaurant Tower 12 on Pier Plaza in Hermosa Beach, that he took his architect to the DeSantis house and said, “I want it to look like that.”
Complaints about the size of the house prompted the City Council to impose a moratorium on three-lot mergers in 2007.
“It’s not impossible to get our small town atmosphere back,” declared then planning commissioner Wayne Powell at a meeting that year. Two years later, Powell’s populist position would earn him a seat on the city council.
In 2008, the council replaced the moratorium with restrictions that limited lot mergers to square footage totaling roughly the size of two average lots, according to Jester. Those limits remain in effect. In the beach area, where lots average 2,700 square feet, the limit is 7,000 square feet. Inland, south of Manhattan Beach Boulevard, where lots average 7,500 square feet, the lot merger maximum is 15,000 square feet. And inland, north of Manhattan Beach Boulevard, where the average lot is 4,600 square feet, the maximum allowable square footage is 10,800 square feet.
Realtor Alex Wolf, Larry Wolf’s son, explained that the desire for what other wealthy communities would consider modest size homes and Manhattan residents view as mansionization traces back to the subdivision of the sand dune lots for summer cottages 100 years ago. Those lots were typically just 30 feet wide and 90 feet deep.
By comparison, the average lot in Palos Verdes Estates is 13,000 square feet. But despite that fact, Peninsula homes, long aspired to by Manhattan’s upwardly mobile, now are cheaper than Manhattan Beach homes. Last summer the median price in Palos Verdes Estates was $1.9 million, versus Manhattan’s $2.2 million, according to Zillow. The difference per square foot was even more dramatic — $739 in Palos Verdes versus $1,039 in Manhattan Beach, or 40 percent more.
One explanation for Manhattan Beach home values surging past Palos Verdes’ may be that, with the exception of “bulk” limits, Manhattan Beach architects are unfettered. Palos Verdes Estates requires red tile roofs and art jury approval. Neighboring Rolling Hills requires single story, ranch style homes.
The theorist
“Why I like the beach is because there are no stylistic limitations. We get some great architecture, some not so great, and lots in between. Legislating design never works. It guarantees mediocrity because the people involved are untrained,” said architect Dean Nota, whose office is in Hermosa Beach but whose clients are primarily in Manhattan Beach. Nota was one of Lee’s instructors at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).
The two collaborated on the AIA Honor Award winning Swedish Pro-Tech building at 2100 Pacific Coast Highway in Hermosa Beach, which merges Nota’s signature austerity with Lee’s practicality. Lee is also a general contractor.
Nota was a member of the Southern California Institute of SCI-Arc’s first graduating class in 1973. He subsequently worked for the school’s legendary founder Ray Kappe. Among Kappe’s signature works is a 1980s Manhattan Beach Strand home that suggests a sleek yacht and is now owned by Matt Jacobson, Facebook’s head of market development, and his wife author Kristopher Dukes.
Nota agrees with Lee that the influx of wealth has improved local architecture.
“Until 10 years ago, the South Bay suffered from the builders’ get-rich-quick mentality. Build as cheaply as you can, sell and move on. Now builders are hiring architects and the quality is better,” he said.
And like Lee, though with greater apprehension, he accepts the inevitability of the Internet of Things.
His apprehensions are philosophical and practical. Nota is a modernist. “Modernism is based on the old fashion notion that less is more. The less we encumber ourselves with stuff, the lower our stress level is and the more we can enjoy the environment. Reduce clutter, that’s my objective,” Nota said.
In terms of practicality, he echoed Orson Welles’ observation that “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” Or, in this context, the absence of financial limitations.
“I’m intrigued by this stuff, but it comes at more than a dollar cost,” Nota said. “Think of what happens if you buy a high performance car. There are maintenance consequences. If a homeowner wants to change the time his lights come on, he has to call a programmer, who doesn’t always get it right.”
“People don’t want their homes to be their hobby,” Nota said.
He recalled the enthusiasm for solar heating in the 1970s when he worked for Kappe.
“Everyone wanted it, and most of the systems were out of service within five years because of the constant maintenance. In the ‘80s, Reagan removed rooftop solar panels from the White House.”
“We live in a beta testing culture. We let the customer do the testing for products like Teslas, that aren’t 100 percent developed,” he said.
Nota’s concerns about reliability and complexity of home automation were addressed in an Economist magazine article last summer, titled “The Great Convergence.”
“The tactic of pumping out new software as fast as possible and then issuing patches later to fix flaws in the code may be tolerable if all that is lost is data, but… in order to avoid lurid headlines about cars crashing, insulin overdoses and houses burning, tech firms will surely have to embrace higher standards.… There have already been instances of nefarious types taking control of webcams, televisions and even a fridge, which was roped into a network of computers pumping out email spam… The wireless heart monitor of Dick Cheney, America’s former vice-president, was modified to stop remote assassination attempts.”
“Who needs a smart fridge anyway?” the Economist article concluded.
Last month, access to the New York Times, Boston Globe, Netflix, PayPal, Twitter, Amazon, Airbnb and other large web sites was interrupted for nearly a day by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS), utilizing not personal computers, but millions of wifi connected Internet of Things devices, such as home security systems, home appliances and DVRs.
Despite his aesthetic, Nota respects the client’s right to make final decisions.
“People think architects call the shots. And some are like that. But most of us are facilitators. We translate your idea of how to live, into a home. I never say no to a client, unless the client wants a Cape Cod. Then I tell them you need a different architect,” he said, deadpan.
“I’m still bothered by the ‘style du jour,’” he explained. “Today it’s Caribbean plantation. Before that, Cape Cod. Before that Mediterranean…
“I’ve always felt that the most important thing isn’t the style, but the experience of being at the beach. How do we want to live in this community of small lots and high density. Modernism is about living in one’s own time and looking forward. Not reinterpreting the past. Not that that’s a bad thing. But it’s not compatible with 30 by 90 foot lots with ocean views. I tell my clients to think about their home in five years, when the current trend has passed.”
“There are people who build a home for their family and people who build for investment. Those are fundamentally different ways to think of architecture.”
“The market wants one thing of a new home, that it be as big as possible. Developers know that every square foot equates to money in their pocket,” he said
The choice impacts the community at large, not just the individual homeowner, Nota contended.
He illustrated the point by noting he has designed only one spec home. Since going on the market in 2004, it has flipped four times.
By contrast almost all of the homes he has designed on commission over the past 25 years are still lived in by the people he designed them for. ER
