Most concept houses start as a picture. This one started with the Beverly Hills code.
Before any image was made, we set an imagined lot in the flats north of Santa Monica Boulevard, 80 by 200 ft, the size of real lots on those streets, and read the rules that would govern it. On that lot the house, the garage and the pool house together may have 7,900 sq ft above grade. The study counts 7,844. The rest of the house is a full basement of 3,956 sq ft, which the City does not count, and which by its rules is a whole level or none. In all, 11,088 sq ft on three levels.
The look is a Paris town house: cut limestone, tall French doors with thin iron rails, a slate mansard. A true French roof is steep, and a steep roof over a main block 44 ft deep would stand far above the 34 ft limit. So the mansard is short. A slate slope at 70 degrees, 7 ft tall, stands behind a stone cornice at the 22 ft plate, and a low zinc top runs to a ridge at 31 ft 11 in. How the City reads a mansard against its height rules is the first question we would put to its planners.
An architect looks for the tells of a fake: stone on the front and plaster round the corner, dormers with nothing behind them. We drew the stone on every face, the wing, the garage and the pavilion included. We raised the ceilings of two bedrooms and the upper gallery into the roof, to 12 ft 9 in, so each of the five dormers lights a room.
New houses in California are asked for solar, and panels on a slate mansard would spoil the street front. Ten panels sit on the low zinc top, 6 ft in from its edge. We checked the line of sight from 204 points along both sidewalks and the road, and none of them sees a panel. They do show from the air and from upper windows across the street.
From the plan data we built one model of the whole lot. Every view in the gallery was set up inside that model first, then finished as a rendering. We also drew what pictures leave out: 480 light fittings, with no downlight over a sofa or a bed; 87 speakers; 49 air supply slots in the shadow under the cornices; 39 curtain pockets. Each is on a sheet, with a schedule.
Then we checked. A script runs 7,743 checks on the plan data every time it changes: rooms against the cap, heights against the limits, every door against the floor it opens onto. Where an image and a drawing differ, the drawing governs, as it would on site.
We went this far for a house nobody ordered because this is the part of building that clients and architects rarely get to see from a contractor: the reading, the coordinating and the checking that happen before a crew shows up. Akopi Builders has been building in Los Angeles since 2014. We would sooner show how we prepare than tell you about it.
The images on this page are renderings of a concept design, not photographs of a built home.