Most concept houses start as a picture. This one started with the La Cañada Flintridge code and a live oak.
Before any image was made, we set an imagined lot in the city's estate zone: 150 by 360 ft, level, the street to the south and the garden running north toward the San Gabriel Mountains. Estate lots here are long and deep, and so is this one. On it the City would allow 12,550 sq ft of floor and roofed area, and it counts every solid roof: the garage, the loggias, the pool house. Above 10,000 sq ft a house needs a conditional use permit and a hearing of its own. We held the study to 9,986. Below it sits a lower level of 4,320 sq ft, fully under grade so the City does not count it, and in the garden an 800 sq ft guest house, which the code allows on top of the cap. The house itself is 12,424 sq ft on three levels.
The arrival is the Flintridge kind: an iron gate 20 ft in from the street line, a drive that bends round the oaks, and a court 80 ft across, held by the house on three sides, with a coast live oak left standing in the middle. The code protects that oak, and its roots reach further than the code's ring. So nothing is built or dug under its crown. The court there is gravel on a stabilizer laid on the old ground, and the front door, 162 ft from the street, is in view from the gate, past the trunk.
The look is one the City's own design guidelines name, Mediterranean and Italian Renaissance: warm white plaster, round arched openings in cast stone below, smaller windows above, low hipped roofs in red clay tile. The height limit is 32 ft from the lowest grade. Over a two story center 36 ft deep, a pitch of 3.75 in 12 is the most that fits with its ridge tile, and the ridge stands at 31 ft 10 in. The same guidelines discourage overall symmetry. Our garden front is symmetrical on purpose and the court front is not. That is a point we would expect to argue at the hearing.
The whole city is in a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, and a deep Mediterranean eave is where embers get in. We kept the 3 ft eave on the main block but closed it: a boxed plaster soffit with no vents, heavy timber brackets, an unvented attic, a mortared stop at every open tile end, and a 5 ft band of gravel and stone round every wall.
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: 516 light fittings, with no downlight on a beam; 77 speakers behind painted panels or plaster; 61 air supply slots in the shadow of a cornice or a beam, and no grille anywhere; 35 curtain pockets. Each is on a sheet, with a schedule.
Then we checked. A script runs 7,230 checks on the plan data every time it changes: the area against the 10,000 line, every ridge against the limit, every room's clear size, the wall beside every opening, the distance from every oak. 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.