ARCHITECTURE : Brilliantly Bare : This Concrete-Block Home Is So Low-Tech It’s No-Tech
SO BARE IS THE dining room of the house Michael Folonis designed for his family in Ocean Park, a mail carrier walked through the front door thinking that he was in an apartment lobby. But when people call the Spartan room high-tech, the architect laughs. “This is no-tech--as dumb a system of construction as building a garden wall.” In fact, it’s a brilliant match of art and practical constraints, pretending to be simpler than it is.
Folonis, 42, studied at Southern California Institute of Architecture and UCLA, worked in Frank Gehry’s office, and now divides his time between a Santa Monica practice and teaching at Cal Poly Pomona. He, his wife, Julie Chambers (business manager for Los Angeles architect Frederick Fisher), and their three children had outgrown their rented house in Santa Monica but wanted to stay in the neighborhood. The houses they could afford were much too small, so they decided to build on an empty 25x80-foot lot eight blocks from the beach. During the six months it took to complete the paper work, Folonis sketched ideas on how to make best use of the site within the $120,000 budget. So thorough were his notes that the working drawings took only two weeks to complete. Construction was equally smooth. Folonis and Chambers were their own contractors. The walls were up two weeks after the foundation was poured, and the house was completed in just seven months.
The couple’s goals were to stretch the space and the dollars as far as they could and to combine openness with privacy. The first floor makes a virtue of its raw surfaces: concrete block walls, concrete floor, Finnish ply cabinets and a raw steel staircase with treads cantilevered from the supporting beam.
Folonis says the room reminds him of how cool and secure he felt in the Claremont river-stone house where he grew up. Chambers was initially skeptical but has come to love its 12-foot ceilings and the way the room stands up to the assault of children.
Money saved on the first floor was put into the second: a wood-framed, mahogany-clad, copper-roofed pavilion sitting comfortably atop a solid base. A master bedroom at the front is separated from the two children’s bedrooms by a patio, where a ladder leads up to a roof terrace. There and downstairs, big windows face south onto the street. Smaller windows along the sides are low, to allow for a view of the plants and to avoid looking into a neighbor’s house, and high, to supply light for the children’s raised bunks.
It is hard to believe that so spacious and inventively detailed an interior, which reaches almost to the edge of the site and the 26-foot height limit, could have been built on such a tight budget. Folonis explains that to achieve this, it was essential to be flexible with the design and to turn any subcontractor’s shortcomings to advantage. The mail carrier probably didn’t notice, but the glass panel around the letter slot was added to make up for a door that arrived 4 inches short of the frame.
