Jayna Cooper designing and built house for herself on busy La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. The 1,600-square-foot house satisfies all the zoning and site challenges (noise, privacy, security) to a T. Because the house is on such a high-traffic street, the city requires complete turnaround space for a car. With such a small property that means that almost the entire ground floor is dedicated to the driveway, carport, and turnaround space. she designed a structural steel system to cantilever a portion of the house and separate the stair tower into its own massing component.
In the second floor, there are two bedrooms and baths. The third floor designed like a large open loft with living, dining, kitchen, and a small office. The third floor boasts 360-degree views of Los Angeles, lots of natural light, and a large balcony off the dining area. Having outside space in California is a must and Cooper maximized Los Angeles’s agreeable climate with the fourth-floor roof deck that takes up the entire 600-square-foot footprint, and a small backyard garden with a patio and fire pit.
For security, Cooper limited ground floor access and secured it by doubling up on security systems and, using leftover materials, designing a front fence and gate with a solid top half for privacy and a transparent bottom half to keep any fence-jumpers from having a place to hide. For the inescapable noise, Cooper buffered the sound by placing bathrooms, cabinetry, and insulated windows against the street-side wall. [Jayna Cooper]
