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Large exterior and interior windows--like those overlooking the living
room from the airy office (above)--make the house feel larger than its
3,200 square feet.
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Kanner's early drafts of the house busted the boundaries of both quaint
and Modern, proposing a decidedly boisterous pink-and-aqua-colored house
surfaced in materials ranging from black lava rock to Astroturf. Partly
because of Zimmer-man's prodding, Kanner ultimately took a more elemental
approach, working backward from the site's constraints and Pacific
Palisades' residential zoning codes. "The site drove the design,"
he says. "It just became a more minimalist wrap of an idea. The house
is about space, light, and the outdoors. In a way, it designed itself."
Building codes, for example, quickly determined a two-story plan. Kanner
then met his most basic goal--to create "a sunny home embracing the
outdoors"--through a series of careful moves. By pushing the house
nearly to the setback on its north side, he gained patio space to maximize
the southern light. Next he took advantage of the sloping site, putting
the house's public spaces--living room, dining room, and kitchen--on what
is essentially the daylight basement level. With the bedrooms tucked behind
the garage, the house faces the street with a single level broken only by
a three-story tile-clad stair tower that stands apart and slightly askew.
"When you feel the architecture just click, as though it couldn't have
been anything else, it's due to a true understanding of the site and the
plan and section," he adds. "With more restraint it becomes a
clearer picture."
Although it passed muster with the community review board, the house still
manages to throw a few good-natured elbows at the surrounding midcentury
vernacular. The garage, for example, with its upwardly jutting roof, looks
a bit like a vent, and the stair tower punctuates Kanner's ensemble of forms
like an exclamation point. At the entrance, semitranslucent panels disrupt
the usual suburban privacy with a titillating hint of the activity inside.
In a more subtle expression of his Pop tendencies, he textured the rest
of the house in an undulating "scratch coat" of plaster sprinkled
with rebar spacer cubes that catch light for a texture of shadows. "I
didn't want to pay for the final smooth coat of plaster," Kanner
admits. "But it also creates a nice opposition to the tile."
Passersby are quick to offer opinions, pro and con, about the house's fit
with the neighborhood. But for Kanner the idea of context had several layers.
Its one-story "public" side matches the scale and rhythm of neighboring
homes, while the two-story "private" side remains obscured. Though
many of its materials differ dramatically from those of the residences surrounding
it, for Kanner the rough white stucco and smooth blue tile speak to the
house's wider location between the mountains and ocean. But the most important
context, he says, was the nearby Eames house, not to mention Pacific
Palisades' numerous other Modernist houses by Eames, Richard Neutra, and
Eero Saarinen. "They represent progressive thinking that was here early
on," he says. "We didn't need to play off the more traditional
houses built after them."
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In many ways the house synthesizes Kanner's Pop Modernism--as seen in
this In-N-Out Burger he designed (above)--with lessons learned from his
Pacific Palisades neighbor the Eames House.
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Once inside, the house unfolds from the foyer with a view all the way through.
The midcentury inspiration--particularly of the Eameses--blossoms as designerly
flourishes and simple functionalism commingle in a palette of modest
materials. For example, the house is animated by a theme of plywood connections
between rooms. It lines the upstairs hallways, separates dining and living
areas with a floating cabinet, and connects the master bedroom and
bathroom with a cylinder that emerges from the wall as a shower on one side
and something akin to a tree trunk on the other.
Expensive materials are, in Kanner's words, "saved for where they can
count"--marble slabs for the kitchen counters and bathtub tops, a terrazzo
hearth, and a tall patio water sculpture by the late artist Eric Orr, a
family friend. The master suite is grand but in surprisingly offbeat ways.
One side of the bathroom, for example, is sheathed by a western curtain
wall of glass, the steel brace frame's cross-members dramatically bursting
through a plaster sill right next to the tub.
Kanner's porthole windows--a feature of virtually every building he's done
in the last decade--are used here with great restraint, thus hinting more
at ships than cheese. But his experience designing retail spaces for Puma
and Armani is visible--or, in a sense, invisible--in the house's lighting,
virtually all dimmable uplit fluorescents glowing from behind soffits
and recessed coves. In the end, Kanner's Pop sensibility, a bit like the
light, is indirect--a warming glow on this cooler form of Modernism rather
than grandstanding for the spotlight.
Kanner sees the house as "the family version" of Modernism. "I
don't want it to be a museum," he says despite admitting more than
a little uneasiness about his seven-year-old daughter Caroline's desire
for a backyard swing set. ("I may have to design one," he adds.)
But in other areas he relished her collaboration. Noting her love of stars,
Kanner personalized Caroline's bathtub surround with midnight blue tile,
adding shiny squares of glass backed with silver leaf. Directly over her
bed hovers a round skylight through which, Kanner proudly notes, they once
used binoculars to see the rings of Saturn. "She's taken a kind of
pride about living in a unique house," Kanner says, recalling Caroline's
excited anticipation of hosting her school's monthly father-daughter party.
"One of the joys has been watching her understand what Modernism is
about."
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