Most concept houses start as a picture. This one started with the Los Angeles zoning code and the street it would stand on.
Before any image was made, we set an imagined lot in flat Brentwood Park, south of Sunset Boulevard: 150 by 290 ft, level, about an acre. Acre lots are rare here; most lots in the park are about half that. The zone is RE20, and the cap on floor area is 35 percent of the lot, with a 20 percent bonus when the upper floor is no more than three quarters of the floor below. On this lot that is 18,270 sq ft, and the City counts more than rooms: every solid roof, so the loggia, the pool house and its portico, and any floor under a ceiling over 14 ft a second time. We kept one tall room, the entry hall, and paid for it twice. The house counts 16,903 sq ft, its upper floor 72.5 percent of the first. It has 15,249 sq ft of living space on two floors, and a basement of 7,948 sq ft that is not counted, because the floor over it stands no more than 2 ft above the ground.
The street told us the rest. Brentwood Park was laid out from 1906, and its old deeds set houses 50 to 100 ft back. Today the code asks for a front yard of 40 ft at most, but the houses on these streets stand a median 57 ft back behind deep lawns. Ours stands at 75, behind an 8 ft clipped hedge. In a front yard a hedge counts as a fence, 3.5 ft by right, so the plans show ours built under a Zoning Administrator's approval and say so. Inside iron gates a gravel circle runs round a stone urn. The garage is under the house, down a ramp at the side, so no garage door faces the street. An old coast live oak stays on the front lawn and a sycamore in the back garden, and nothing is built or dug under either crown.
The look is the 1930s Los Angeles Georgian: red brick in Flemish bond, a gray green slate hip, a white dentil cornice, a pedimented door, and a five part plan of main block, hyphens and wings round a garden court. Here the height limit is 36 ft, and any roof flatter than 3 in 12 is held to 30. A slate hip at 6 in 12 runs out of height over a deep block, so the main block stays 42 ft deep and the extra area went into the wings. The ridge stands at 35 ft 10 in. The flat roofs over the hyphens sit at 17 ft, behind balustrades.
The fire map surprised us. On the state's 2025 fire hazard map nearly all of flat Brentwood Park is Very High. A cedar shake roof is out, and so is the deep vented eave. The slate is a Class A assembly. The cornice has no overhang and no vents, and the slate stops in a lead lined box gutter inside it. The attic is unvented. The first 5 ft round every wall is brick, bluestone or gravel, with no plant against the house.
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: 613 light fittings, with no downlight over a seat, a bed or a beam; 110 speakers plastered over out of sight; 89 air supply slots in cornices and door heads, and no grille anywhere; 51 curtains. Each is on a sheet, with a schedule.
Then we checked. A script runs 14,665 checks on the plan data every time it changes: the area against the cap, the upper floor against the bonus, every ridge and chimney against the limit, every room's clear size, the distance from every tree, and the serving route from the kitchen to the dining room, which never crosses the hall. 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.