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HODGETTS + FUNG

Viso House

Hollywood

Project

A three bedroom house set on a steep ridge in the Hollywood Hills.

Site Response

One cannot build in the Hollywood Hills without respect for those who have built there before. In this home there are echoes of Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, who helped to establish a vocabulary and style suitable to the unique social and topographic environment to be found in Hollywood.

Architectural Strategy

In the Viso House, we thought to explore a typical builder's vernacular in the search for an inexpensive but elegant design for a hillside house of two thousand square feet.

Materials

Painted stucco, aluminum sash, and standard details are used throughout. Openings are of a modest dimension, in keeping with the builder's tradition, but configured in a manner to suggest unique volumes. Intersections and articulation of materials also respect common practice, and are consistent with the limited budget of the project, while a carefully described geometry articulates a series of overlapping living spaces.

The finishes are simple and elegant; plaster walls, clear anodized fenestrations arranged to articulate spacial relationships through pattern and geometry, and interior and exterior terraces designed to extend views beyond the limited footprint of the house, while dramatizing the precipitous slope beneath.

Spacial configuration

A precipitous site and crowded adjacent properties were defining conditions in the physical layout of the house. By the orientation of the living volumes toward selected views, a configuration was defined which eliminated undesirable context while underscoring the client's enthusiasm for both Griffith Observatory and the Hollywood sign.

Internally, a cylindrical volume ratchets to become a foyer on the first level, a bridge-like transition on the main level, and a study on the upper level, while proving a strong visual axis of resolution for the splayed geometries of the primary accomodation. Direct from the entrance and through the tower in the dining/kitchen area with a double-volumed living space immediately adjacent to it. The master suite, one flight above, has a glass block enclosed bathroom and a balcony that peers over the living space below. Two additional bedrooms are accessible from a private hallway, one story below and off the front entry. A dense, yet continuously evolving staircase keyed to the cylinder offers access to complementary sequence of landings, overlooks, and necessities, including a subterrainean washstand.

This is a house designed to embellish the lifestyle of its owner, as well as a house designed to assume a confortable contextual presence in the Hollywood Hills.