Building Small / Living Large

By: Elizabeth Marcellino | December 30, 2009 | Design Lifestyle

Downsizing.

The word conjures up bad news: a company firing employees, a family cutting back on its already tight budget. But jettisoning some of your old baggage can be a good thing. It can clear your mind, set you free. Less is, quite often, more.  Malibu architect Bruce Bolander, 45, who designed his first project here nearly 15 years ago, knows that. He believes that smaller can be better and designs to a very human scale.

Better, not just from an environmental perspective — though a modestly sized house blends more readily into nature and wastes fewer resources — but also better from a design perspective. Making efficient use of limited space presents a more interesting challenge for an architect than just linking room upon room and results in a more dynamic design.  “There are very few people that need a 5,000-square-foot home. Almost no one needs 10,000 and no one needs 15,000 square feet,” Bolander says, (though not without worrying about alienating some potential clients).  But he doesn’t blame the homeowners themselves as much as he faults the permitting practice.  “The process is so painful and takes so long” that homeowners are incentivized to build more than they need rather than take a chance of living through a second round, he says.

Owners also sometimes scale up with an eye toward a higher selling price — assuming that more square footage will trump design appeal for a future buyer — something Bolander hasn’t found to hold true.

But as the economy tanked, gut-punching even those affluent enough to finance a new house up in the hills or along the coast, Bolander began to see a change. Whether or not it’s enough to call it a trend isn’t clear, but he’s seeing more clients that value smaller, truly lived-in homes over those that run lot line to lot line.  He’s designed an 1,800-square-foot house in Malibu Lake for a family of three with a dog. The lot is 16 acres, so obviously the couple could have built a much larger home.

“They just don’t want to build more than they need,” Bolander says.

Another client, who recently renovated a home on one of the canals in Venice, also went small — building out half the square footage he was entitled to by lot size.  The owner liked the pitched roof of the original house and chose to limit room sizes on the second floor to keep the shape intact. But he also opted for gardens and side yards instead of more indoor space.  The kitchen, dining and living area that Bolander designed is compact but very functional. There’s also enough texture in the design and materials used that small doesn’t translate into boring.  The adjacency of outdoor areas expands the rooms, both visually and functionally.

The importance of permeability between what’s inside and what’s out is especially true in what some would call a tiny home that was designed by Bolander within a mere 900 square feet on Las Flores Canyon.  When the glass doors of the living room slide open to the outdoor deck, the materials used for the outdoor floor and ceiling visually mimic the finishes inside. And an additional couch and two chairs become part of the living room — not to mention the vast expanse of canyon beyond the railings.

“It doesn’t feel small because there’s so much indoor-outdoor space,” says Rayna Schein, who lives there with her fiancé, Rob Flachs.

The interior is “virtually the same size” as the pre-war, floor-through apartment in a West Village brownstone the couple lived in before leaving Manhattan, which may be part of the reason they’re so happy there.  But what drew them to the house was its “point of view.” Their key criteria was that their new home “had to be interesting,” and when they saw Las Flores, “the clouds parted,” Schein says, laughing. “It was just perfect.”

The design inspired them to downsize. A continuous wall of storage that morphs from kitchen cabinetry to bedroom closets and drawers means that “everything’s put away,” Schein says.

So though they initially moved in dressers and other bedroom furniture, they ultimately found they didn’t need it, deciding, “Let’s get rid of more stuff,” Schein says.

Other than occasionally wishing for a separate guest room, the couple seems to thrive in the close quarters.

“You can’t stay mad when you’re always so close,” Schein says.

Not that Bolander thinks most people can live in less than 1,000 square feet, especially with a family. Down the hill, there’s another house — more reasonably scaled to 1,600 square feet — which the architect designed in 2003.  The concrete, steel and glass residence is still smaller than many in Malibu, but has plenty of wide-open living area. Like most of Bolander’s work, it is modern and comprised of simple, clean lines.

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