god will have his little joke

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since this week started with a joke, i think it's fitting to end it with one--but one of a more cosmic (and architectural) nature.

consider: a few years ago i was faced with the question of how to take a tiny, decrepit, plain-jane little canyon cottage and make it over into something special. [and since i can't for the fucking life of me find the file containing most of the preliminary photos and sketches, this one will have to serve as the "before" shot (click on any of these pictures you wanna see better).]

doesn't get much plainer than this, does it?

understand: i'd worked on a lot of high-end houses, and this was by far the smallest, most humble structure i'd ever taken on. but unlike the others, this one was mine--and when all was said and done, i would expend more time, energy and emotion on this little house than all the others i'd ever worked on put together.

from the start, i was faced with two challenges: (a) make it fresh and contemporary, yet at the same time keep it from standing out like a sore thumb among its rustic neighbors; and (b) do it with very little money.

the first problem was solved when i happened upon this great pair of too-tall doors in a salvage yard and designed the whole facade around 'em on the back of an envelope in about 10 minutes--i slashed off the overhangs, bumped out and raised the plate on the gable to accommodate the doors, added complementary windows, threw in some arched windows over the doors to give the whole thing a kind of playful pseudo-palladian flavor, added a similar raised, bumped-out gable at the kitchen--and voila! it was done:

[i think this was the first measured drawing i did--i can't find the lovely finished one--but you get the idea.]

clean and simple, right?

yeah--well, this was the last easy thing that ever happened with this house as long as i owned it.

because (if by reading this blog you haven't figured it out yet) i am a classic neurotic perfectionist, and this little house became the perfect outlet for all my compulsions; consequently, i obsessed over every last fucking detail of its design and construction to the point of near bankruptcy, illness and insanity.

just to touch on a couple of the highlights:

1. siding. to fit properly into the neighborhood, cedar shingles are pretty much de rigueur. but since cedar shingles (a) rot, (b) curl and darken, (c) require ugly trim to cover their edges, and (d) are prone to fire and are thus no longer allowed by the city of los angeles in canyon regions unless specially treated--what's a homeowner to do?

answer: you're fucked--give up, save money and time, do what everybody else does these days and go with stucco or hardboard siding. hell, your budget's limited, time is money and nobody really cares but you, right?

right--unless, of course, you're me.

in which case you elect--at great cost--to go with high-grade natural cedar shakes, and to dip each and every one in an ungodly expensive semi-transparent stain/preservative of just the right carefully-considered shade, so that they become not only beautiful and preserved unto perpetuity, but also relatively fire-resistant and thus acceptable to the city. (oh, and it helps when you have a mom in town for a visit who volunteers to dip the shingles--little did she know what she was signing up for).

2. trim. conventional construction--especially with shingles--requires cover-up trim at edges, corners, and around windows and doors, right?

yeah, fuck that: as does any self-respecting modernist architect*, i despise trim. so i spent a lot of time coming up with a detail that would minimize trim and give me the clean--yet simultaneously cabin-y--look i wanted.

would it be unnecessarily expensive, require weeks of extra time, precision cuts and color-keyed caulk to pull off? well, of course it would--but again, this doesn't matter when you're mkf and you're building a mini-monument to ego and posterity.

3. windows. ah, yes, windows--architects just love to throw in crazy windows on their dream facades, even though they know they're impractical and will never make it into the finished project.

again, unless you're mkf--when i couldn't find windows in any catalog anywhere that would conform to my vision, i looked at having 'em custom-made. and when that proved to be cost-prohibitive, i did what nobody in their right mind does--i made 'em myself.

(you starting to see a pattern here?)

back to the story: slowly (because i was doing most of it myself), painstakingly and with great effort--my little house started to take shape.

at first, it wasn't much to look at:


yeah, it looked like that for awhile--and yeah, my neighbors loved me (but since i'd long since been branded the neighborhood eccentric, nobody gave me too much grief).


but then, shingle by torturous shingle--and almost in spite of itself--it started coming together.



(and aren't those just the cutest little porch lights you've ever seen?)

and then, finally, it was done:


i can safely say that the finished exterior of this little house is one of the few things i've ever done in my whole life that ended up looking as good to me in actuality as it did when it was but a flicker in my mind's eye.

and, exhausted and broke as i was on the day on which this picture was taken (not even having sufficient funds for pavers and sod to finish the landscaping), i knew in my soul that--thanks to my painstaking attention to quality and detail--it would look just as good 20 years from now. and somehow that made it all worth it.

but there was supposed to be a joke in here somewhere, right?

well, get ready to laugh: i decided to drive up my old street a couple weeks ago, just to see how the place was holding up.

and how's it doing? judge for yourself:











did i mention that my mother hand-dipped every one of those goddam shingles?

* * * * *

years ago, i got 86'd from a jobsite because i was thought to have thrown a hammer at a carpenter who had fucked up one of my details (that's his story, anyway--i've always maintained that had i really meant to hit him, i would have).

all in all, it's probably best that age and having shit to lose tends to mellow one out.


update: you wanna see the inside, click here.
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*in re-reading this post--and in the interests of full disclosure--i realized i'd used the term "architect" rather loosely; while i did graduate from a good school of architecture and practiced for a number of years, i feel i should tell you that i never sat for the licensing exam apprentice architects must take and pass after their internship in order to legally be able to refer to themselves by that term.