modern interior design firms los angeles

this cool house is a remodel of a 1940's house located in brentwood, california the architect kurt krueger has managed to update the building with a fresh new look through the use of some clever materials, spatial definition, and knocking out some walls to give the home a more spacious look without increasing the overall square footage or

increasing the building envelope. well, here he is. hello kurt, great to see you again. nice to see you as well. thank you so much for inviting us to see another one of your projects. now i've gotta tell you, this is probably the smallest house that we've ever done on "behind the gates" and i want to do it for a good reason. i wanted to show viewers you can create a luxury home in a small space and that's

what it's all about here, right? absolutely. at this house we had a small house to work with so there's key things that you need to be aware of when working with a small house that we can talk about. well first of all we're the front yard here which is kind of like backyard right. yes. it's like a rear yard but it's like we're in the front here

but the streets just on the other side. it is and again this is a very small lot: 50 foot by 100 foot so there's really no rear yard in here so this is the rear yard that is the front courtyard. well you've done a wonderful job already we can tell obviously great heavens of water so you are hearing the traffic noise right yeah yeah so tranquil sitting here and this

is a great thing because this is a fire pit a great place to kind of like just really enjoy on a saturday afternoon if it gets too warm we've got this kind of apparatus here. that's right yeah so this is a screen that can as an awning that can move back and forth to give you different levels of sun shades so that you can pull it all the way back to see

the sky or pull it all the way across for complete blockage of sun. just love that because it gets really hot here in california in the summer so what a wonderful place to just dwell. and one of the other key things out here as well as for privacy that we looked at was creating a fence that

allowed you to see out but doesn't allow people on the street level to see in just perfect. okay so timbers of wood is really big in this design? absolutely and this is a douglas fir wood that we use throughout for the doors and windows as well as the exterior of fencing. okay what was the house like before? it's a remodel, right? it is a remodel.

it was originally a 1948, a mid-century modern house. it was blue stuccoed with some japanese-esque touches that they tried to make over the years so it was in a quite disrepair. can we get inside and take a tour? let's see it. so this is original roof line here? yes, so the original roof line; the slope roof

was all original like i said the framing of the house, the roof lines everything was kept as original. what we did was we stripped everything of the finishes and then refinished everything. we should tell people there's a team that does this. you're the architect and the builder you guys work very closely together. yes, so reza parnian, rhino construction

this is was a design-build collaboration between both of us so that was critical in this because when you start going into a project like this especially an existing house you find all kinds of things. you don't know what you're getting into once pull the drywall back you don't know what you've got, right? that's right.

the nice thing between our two firms is that he's part of construction--hands on and i have some hands-on with him in the design so he's out on the site during construction unlike other architects where he's hands-on so he's making sure things are done correctly. so you have to do a lot of on your feet improvising and sometimes the difficulty about doing

that in the traditional method where you have an architect over here and a contractor over there and not as a team is that you it's more difficult to be quick on your feet and to do different things and to just explore and try out new things on site rather than trying to do it independently. making the most of the existing house

kurt and this team created new openings for windows doors and skylights and removed unnecessary walls which allow the main living area to feel as one large space yet within it some smaller and more intimate zones. what we wanted to do was really incorporate the entire space we have a small home and to make it feel as open as possible. well there's hardly any walls

here i mean and they're see-through. absolutely and that was one of the key things for a small spaces is making it as open as possible so it feels larger but within that space creating those partitions that are see through that you can still keep a visual connection but at the same time have different zones for sitting so you don't always feel

like you're in the middle of everything that's going on; you can have alcoves of conversations. another key thing for a small spaces to focus on the details because you don't have a large house that is you have all this extra visual eye candy to look, at it's very important to look at the smaller things that people notice--the everything down to

door handles, baseboard, the cabinetry, the smaller things really matter in a small house because people are much more... they're close to it and they stay put a lot more than they do in a larger house where you walk around much more. that is so interesting. you're really good at what you do, aren't you? oh, if you say so, i'll take your endorsement.

i mean just on that, looking at the kitchen here, that splashback right there is just so clever, i mean is that a ceramic tile? no that is a natural stone and interestingly enough we have that repeated here, as well as the fireplace, as well as the master bathroom. he brought some tile in which i'm sure he showed you in the bathroom which was

from italy and the costs associated with it are astronomical, so we started looking into how could we do that here. spoke to a few people and we basically did the kitchen backsplash here at probably a quarter of the price. this was inspired by a stone that we had seen that's an italian stone--that we love but we also knew that importing it and costs

were maybe prohibitive. so what we did was, i knew what that stone was so between myself and my partner, who's the general contractor, we worked with our stone manufacture and found a way to waterjet it so that we got the exact same effect... oh my gosh. absolutely and that's, so we did all this locally but this was a

custom product that they then installed in the field and saved us all a lot of time and expense. we got pretty much the same, the same sort of a look as we wanted to with the italian tile, so that's where the collaboration comes in because from a practical point of view, from a builder's points of view, and then you've got the architect coming in. a lot

of times architects have these sort of grandioso sort of like you know, visions and it's difficult to then implement that to put that into construction. that's one great thing about using an architect is they will go to that extra. you'll stretch yourself to get that look. because you're buying into that look. and you do not want to let that idea go. yes.

and you'll do whatever it takes to make it happen. you have to take pride in what you do and yes and always pushing the boundaries is something we pride ourselves in and when we're also the general contractors it makes a big difference because we're able to have that flexibility to do that. price point what are they looking at to

kind of get this kind of a kind of look this kind of a look when you take everything in with it indoors and outdoors strip everything down and basically you're basically building a new house with the exception of a new concrete floor and the framing you're looking at upwards of a million dollars for this. perfect. okay now the master

bedroom suite was a real problem. let's go check that out. okay. ok, so here's the master bedroom suite. it's really quite big. it is big, and what we tried to do is make it feel bigger than it originally was. originally this bedroom was the master suite however there was an awkward addition here where this wall is. where there was a

that was their master bathroom just in that corner. in that little space? yes, and there was this extra space here that was just completely wasted so what we decided to do with this was make this into a small study area with a window looking out and then this into a reading zone where we added a couple of extra skylights that allow a little bit more natural light

into this north east corner of the house which is very dark--tends to be the darker area of the house yeah. the small zones work really well here but still work when the house needs to be a large space such as entertaining and by the way i don't see a television here. why is there no television in this room? there is a television in this room, but we don't want it

to basically look like there's a television in this room so behind that one panel there as you can see behind me there is a television but sometimes it detracts from the design when you have you know an electronic piece of equipment in there so trying to come up with a little design of a track to basically be able to push this back and

forward and then obviously when it's over on this side it's still part of the design so you never ever lose any of this design by doing that. okay, one more question i do want to ask you and what you've done really well here this was a very dark house and there's so much light here. for the people watching at home how can they get lots of light in

their home? well the main way is to look at your exterior wall so you can do a few things you can open up exterior walls by adding new doors and windows one great thing to do is adding high windows so like those transom windows that you see in our background here which are high windows that allow more light in than you with low windows the

other thing is skylights; additional skylights that we've dotted especially across this main space which allows you to have a bit of a procession but all along the way you have an even amount of light and one of the things the owners love about this is that in most any time the day until it's dusk is that you can have all the lights off and still have a

sufficient amount of light in this space. there's skylights everywhere. how do you open them? obviously, there must be a remote? because they look pretty high. there is, well there are two different ways you can have a remote and it can be an electronic that most people desire. our homeowners were a bit unique about this and they actually wanted the manual, hand crank in order to get exercise they thought it

was a fun thing to do to open them up by hand so they did not want to have the motorized one. i'm getting the motorized one. i would too. [laughter] he was quite happy with the fact that he just wanted to crank them. we went through it several times with him. we said please don't do it. it's going to be much much better if it's electrical, but at the end of the

day you can't force someone to do something especially if they're your your client and they're paying you. you've been amazing, thank you so much. thank you. i had a wonderful time.

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