Design Ideas #2

You may have seen this house featured in Dwell Magazine or noticed it in parts of season one of the Showtime series Californication, either way, this memorable design exemplifies some of the best elements of Californian modern home design. Architects David Hertz and wife Stacy Fong built this Venice, California home for their personal residence, drawing from Balinese influences to give the home the intended resort-like feel. Sections of the home are connected via bridges and walkways that open onto a central courtyard and lap pool, creating an open layout that blends with the surrounding outdoors.

Other amenites include a home theater, exercise room, firepit, and outdoor kitchen. The firepit lounge area in the courtyard is a great focal point for the house, and the accordian door seen to the right of the firepit helps to open up the interior space to the outdoors. The large wood frame windows enable natural light to flood the interior spaces and contrast nicely to the treated concrete walls. While the overall look of this home spells modern design, some of the elements seen here like the the open layout, accordian door system, and the blending of outdoor and indoor living spaces have been incorporated into the design of the Project Noe house. Pictures and background on the Hertz-Fong home were cited from this article in |Dwell Magazine|. |David Hertz Architects|

More Foundation

The picture on the right shows the 12 foot tall walls of the future media room and one of the 2′ x 4′s used to help support our wall against the neighbor’s house. Picture 1 and 2 below show the supports for the one foot thick suspended concrete slab on the garage level. Picture 3 is a view towards the street that shows the side of the neighbor’s house and our wall. In order to build a foundation that had adequate bearing capacity, we needed to underpin the neighbor’s foundation by 20 feet. Underpinning extends the foundation support to depths that provide greater bearing capacity and prevent foundation settling. In this case we used footings and constructed a 20 foot tall wall using shotcrete as seen in Picture 4. Picture 5 shows one of the workers beginning the framing process by laying down the floor sill. The 2 x 4′s used for the framing of the home will anchor into the sill.

Foundation May ’09 Cont.

The nearly 14 feet tall portion of the foundation shown here is what will be the media room on the second floor. The concrete walls are well suited for sound insulation, making this space ideal for a home theater. In another picture, the backyard stairwell is being prepped for waterproofing and forms. One section of the backyard will feature an outdoor BBQ area spanning 25 by 20 feet and the other section is an elevated backyard area that will have landscaping, grass and Jaccuzi connections.

Due to the location of a neighbors house and the walkway that runs the length of the lot, the West side of the property gets lots of direct sunlight for much of the day. Some of the windows on the top level facing West will be floor to ceiling, taking advantage of the surrounding views and the natural light provided by the large windows and skylights.

Foundation May ’09

The pictures below show the foundation about three-fourths of the way complete. The crew is pictured using the shotcrete method to construct one of the walls of what will be the media room, which is located above the garage level. Requiring nearly 30 cement trucks carrying 9 yards of concrete each to complete, the new foundation is nearly ready for the framing of the house to begin.

Foundation April ’09

With the excavation of the site complete, the difficult process of building the foundation begins at the rear of the property. In total, about 260 yards of concrete were poured, reinforced by a tied rebar beam cage. The varying grade elevations add to the difficulty, requiring one of our retaining walls to stand nearly 20 feet tall. This wall, like most others for this project, were constructed using a method called shotcrete, a process that involves spraying the concrete under pressure and smoothing the walls by hand.