BENSON HOUSE
Calabasas, California

Photo courtesy FOGA

Designed for a Loyola Law School Professor and his family, this house was to be built for less than $80.00 per square foot. Situated on a small hillside site in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, the house is made up of two separate building elements joined by second-story bridges. Breaking down the scale of the building to make very simple pieces with very short spans fulfilled the difficult requirement for privacy within such a limited space and was found to be cost effective. The differentiation of the pieces and the relationship of the different forms to each other and to the spaces they create is intended to provide these simple living and sleeping boxes with visual richness.

Both buildings are cut into the existing slope. The resultant deep spaces between the building parts and the retaining walls are suggestive of a moat; wood bridges and connecting stairways lace the two buildings together above ground level. The brown-shingled tower houses the bedrooms while the lower structure, clad in gray asphalt shingles, contains living/dining and kitchen areas. Two table-like carports and a redwood rooftop deck on the smaller box were added during a second building phase. A rough carpentry wood railing extends from an exterior stairway to enclose the deck and its roofs cape of protruding skylight and chimney volumes. As-yet-unbuilt roof elements include a small log-cabin structure atop the tall building and a steel drawbridge/stairway which would link the cabin to the carport roof.

The element of fantasy that instills this project resulted in part from consultations with the clients' children, who suggested the log-cabin tree fort and for whom a secret passageway-closet-stairway was designed to allow access to the roof from their ground floor bedroom. The parents' bedroom occupies the double-height area upstairs and contains a mezzanine study. The bedroom tower is visible from an enormous light monitor in the kitchen of the adjacent building. Windows are placed throughout both structures in such a way as to offer views of adjoining building parts and the trees and sky beyond.

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