A D B | K A A D E S I G N
From Tower Grove Drive, looking out
from a wonderfully designed home whose
precipice is a hillside in the southern
Santa Monica Mountains, the view is truly
grand—a sweep that extends dramatically
past Los Angeles to the Pacific. And yet
the home itself is intimately attuned to
the site-specific setting right outside its
expanse of its windowed walls.
KAA Design, a boutique studio in Los Angeles, helmed the
three-year project, which produced a sustainable two-story
structure at its heart. e architecture, a warm, elemental
mix of wood and stone, featuring clean lines and other
early-modernist undertones, is best understood as an
engagement with both the landscape and its homeowners,
a couple much inclined toward nature, whose previous
home was far more traditional than the Tower Grove
contemporary they now inhabit. And while their view from
the top is certainly magnificent, so too is the hillside, a thing
of real beau, honest and humanly scaled, a harmonious
blend of natural and manmade environments.
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is is the point. "One of the things that we bring to the
table is a holistic design approach that really looks at
the project as not only a house on a proper or a hill, in
particular, but a house integrated with the hill," says Duan
Tran, partner and principal architect at KAA Design. "How
will the architecture and landscape come together to create
an indoor/outdoor experience?"
e answer is swi and assured: "We do this collaboratively,"
says Tran. In working together from the outset, a KAA
Design project not only has a sense of aesthetic, but a
visual logic as well. With Tower Grove Drive, the collective
approach produced a fluidi not only felt, but pervasively
so, from the motor court to the courard garden and
beyond. Fundamentally important to all parties was that
the architecture be sensitive to nature—to try and, as Tran
puts it, "stay out of the land as much as possible, but to
work with the hillside." Tree placement, plant selection and
the use of gray water from the house to help irrigate the
landscape were all facets of the exterior scheme.
