Open-Door Policy

Not every architect is willing to admit complete strangers into their home. But when Erla Dögg Ingjaldsdóttir and Tryggvi Thorsteinsson of Santa Monica-based design firm Minarc got a call from future clients Bruce Horwitz and Kelly Contant, who’d seen images of Minarc projects at the CaBoom design festival, they decided an invite was in order. The Icelandic designers had the couple over for an informal visit, giving Horwitz and Contant a chance to see their open-plan Mar Vista home and, more importantly, an opportunity to observe how Dögg Ingjaldsdóttir and Thorsteinsson—along with their three daughters—lived in it. And out of it. With its disappearing glass walls and central-command kitchen and dining areas, the indoor-outdoor house was tailored to let Mom and Dad cook and converse while the kids play in the yard, get wired on Wii or do homework, all within easy sight.

For Horwitz and Contant, who have four kids, three full-time dogs and a constantly rotating mix of foster pets, the approach was captivating. “They had an understanding of how a family house should work,” says Horwitz. “I remember in the beginning of the design phase when Tryggvi showed me a computer-generated version of the house where from one vantage point in the kitchen, I could see the pool, the yard, my office, the dining room, family room and even part of the living room. I was so happy.”

Not that Dögg Ingjaldsdóttir and Thorsteinsson replicated their own house when designing and building a home for their clients. Located in Venice and completed last year, Horwitz and Contant’s 4,500-square-foot, six-bedroom, two-story home is more than twice the size of its Mar Vista inspiration. It’s got soaring ceilings and enormous planes of uncurtained windows that give sweeping outdoor views from every room in the house, bathrooms included.

To soften up the right angles and lack of architectural ornamentation, the designers kept many of the materials warm and organic-feeling. Richly patterned, burnt oak floors are used in many of the ground-floor areas, and even wrap up onto the walls in the family and living rooms. The effect, says Dögg Ingjaldsdóttir, “is to trick the eye, to give it a sense of not quite knowing when the floor ends and the wall begins.” And by designing around many of the lot’s original sycamore and magnolia trees, they were able to create a space that feels protected by foliage, not barren of it.

Then there are the less obvious details: Every common area has more than one point of entry to encourage effortless flow; interior ground-floor walls don’t reach the ceiling; and the few doors that are found on the ground floor were installed by the owners and not included in the original design. “They wanted the whole house to have a feeling of water flowing down a river and hitting rocks, to keep it moving,” says Horwitz. Poetic, yes. But in terms of practicality, the couple opted to install doors on the bathrooms and master bedroom.

The overall effect of such architectural openness is still intact, and means that the clients can almost always see (and hear) their kids—a positive for them. “Some people might not like this; I love it,” says Contant, although she notes that the master bedroom, located at the front of the house on the ground floor, is conveniently far from the four kids’ rooms, all on the second floor. But, the couple is quick to point out, it’s the central kitchen/family room/pool area where they spend most of their time, not the peripheral bedrooms.

To increase the gravitational pull to the home’s heart, Dögg Ingjaldsdóttir and Thorsteinsson strategically positioned the area to capture views of almost the entire ground floor and as much natural light as possible. “We come from a place in the world where rooms are very small because it’s so important to heat them,” says Thorsteinsson. “Here in Southern California that’s obviously not the main concern, so this is about exploring both the ideas of openness and privacy, maintaining that balance. When it came to the orientation of the house, our goal was to create natural ventilation and keep the bad, afternoon sun out of it, while still getting tons of light.”

The result of such a high-functioning, form-pleasing space, the owners say, is that they do in fact spend much of their time in the command center of the kitchen/dining area. Homework is done while dinner is cooked, and swimming, TV watching and relaxing can all happen simultaneously in different areas that are nevertheless linked by carefully planned sight lines.

Which is just what the architects hoped for. “The kitchen area is really the heart of the house,” says Dögg Ingjaldsdóttir. “We want to design for people to maximize enjoyment and minimize effort. You don’t want to be stuck in a kitchen; you want to be with your family. After people pick up their kids from school, you really only have two or three hours to be together, to eat, do homework, talk. Why would you want to run off to separate areas to do all of this?”