Most concept houses start as a picture. This one started as a plan set.
Before any image was made, we drew the house the way a real job is drawn: a site plan with the setbacks, two floor plans, four elevations, a section through the stair, and a room program that adds up to 9,112 sq ft. The lot is imagined, but its rules are not. The house and the pool sit 100 ft back from the bluff edge, and nothing is built on the bluff face.
From that plan data we built one three dimensional model of the whole lot. Every view in the gallery was set up inside that model first, then finished as a rendering. That is why the pier you see from the dining table is the same pier you see from the pool, and why the stair lands where the plan says it lands.
Then we went back for what pictures usually leave out. A real room has lights, sound, air and curtains, and each of those has to go somewhere. So we drew them. The set has 337 light fittings, each one placed for a seat, a wall or a work top, with no downlight over a sofa or a bed. It has 57 speakers, flush in the ceilings and the terrace soffits. It has 18 air supply slots that read as one dark joint between two ceiling boards, and 18 curtains in recessed pockets. Each is on a sheet, with a schedule.
We also changed our minds, on paper. The first kitchen was weak, so it was redrawn around one oak wall, one stone niche and one stone island, and the pictures were made again. The powder rooms were plain, so they were redesigned, and a new sheet of wall elevations was drawn before any new picture.
Last, we checked. Each image was compared with the plans and with the other images, and what disagreed was fixed or listed. 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.