OUTSIDE IN – LAZAR DESIGN/BUILD

by Jennifer Capo 

The Butterfly Roof House -Designer Steve Lazar

Brian Thomas Jones Photography

Y ou walk through a pre-entry pivot door and it’s as if you’re inside a light filled portal, which serves as a transitional space between exposure of the outside world and the privacy of the inside home. The illusion intensifies as you look straight through the home’s main entrance into an atrium and past a great room with a sunken den that opens up to the backyard pool. Your eyes move up to second story, through operative skylights, to the gracefully inverted wings of the roof.  

 

Pre-entry provides a neutral zone from outside world

 

You remind yourself that you’re in the tree section of Manhattan Beach but somehow you feel magically transported. You are inside designer/builder Steve Lazar’s “Butterfly Roof House,” but it feels like you are somewhere pacifically far away. 

 

“I want it to feel like the home is coming out of the earth and not put upon the earth,” said Lazar. This 3,600 square foot home incorporates Pacific Rim design aesthetics with an emphasis on open spaces, geometric angles, lush foliage, and Mangaris wood with a natural oil finish. 

 

The big challenge for most builders in the South Bay is to create an open environment with natural light and still maintain privacy. Lazar’s clients tore down the existing home on the 40 ft. by 112 ft. lot and gave the designer a blank canvas to create a home experience that would reflect their family’s needs in a unique way.  One request, from the wife, was to create an individual space for her husband to keep his loose ends. This inspired three separate entries: a his-garage entrance, a her-garage entrance, and a guest entrance.  Lazar also designed an oversized inverted roof with clerestory windows, open panels, and four ventilating skylights in the center to allow the home to breath, to give it life. 

 

The inverted wings of Butterfly Roof

“They allow direct light in and this opens up the house to the sky,” said Lazar. “A regular roof would cut off the sun but the inverted and clerestory windows protect from weather and lets in sunlight.” 

 

As you walk through the main entry you arrive in an atrium. 

 

“The entire house wraps around this enormous palm tree and foliage in a squared circu lar fashion that is consistent on every level of the home,” Lazar explained. “On the second level where the sleeping rooms are, you can wonder across a bridge and marvel at the sight that the trees are higher than you are.” 

 

The upstairs master bedroom opens up to the atrium and faces the backyard of bamboo and tropical foliage, creating a resort-like feel. Lazar believes it is critical in all of his designs to incorporate the outdoors. 

 

“To invite the outdoors into the house and to allow the indoors to radiate out into the open space,” said Lazar. “The inside and outside become one.” 

 

The interior wall disappears and opens the home to the outdoors

The Butterfly Roof House doesn’t reveal itself from the street level. The mostly wood structure conceals its interior from the neighbors and provides the ultimate sense of privacy. It’s a marriage of form and function. 

 

Lazar developed his craftsman’s hand and vision from years of working in construction, handling and shaping wood. This inspired him to become a builder/designer and now his finely crafted wood is a main feature in many of his homes. Lazar had the satisfaction of putting his craftmanship to work by constructing a small portion of the winged roof. 

 

“The Butterfly Roof House was built as if it is part of the earth coming up,” he said, “ the trunk of a tree.” 

 

For more information visit www.Lazardb.com. To contact Jennifer Capo, jencapo@mac.com. 

Going Nowhere

By Jennifer Capo

 

She moved so quickly that we only caught a glimpse of her silver boot hop on the train.  It must have been the rain pouring down that blurred our vision.   We lost sight of her as the doors shut a split second after she boarded.   It wasn’t even time to for our tailing guy to jump on.   She must have known she was being followed.  I scanned the windows through my binoculars from back to front to find her porcelain face.  As I scanned the rows again, her big clear blue eyes came right into focus as if one eye filled each lens and she was looking directly at me.  She just blinked a few times and then stared with a curious gaze as if she could see right into me.  I had to lower my binoculars from the intensity.  I thought to myself, “What kind of person can see me all the way up here on this tall building?  I whispered aloud,  “Not possible.”

 

 I slowly lifted the binocs again and perused the passengers getting settled until she came back into focus again but this time she stared right at me and started laughing.   “What’s so funny,”  I said aloud with a smile.

 

“What is it?”  Bill asked.  “You got something?” 

 

I steadied my hands and kept peering at her. Wondering if my mind was playing tricks on me and she really could somehow see me with the naken eye.

 

“Nope.”   I said to Bill.   “Got nothing.”  Bill put down his equipment and lit up smoke.

 

I kept my gaze locked on her and deliberately blink my eye three times in a row to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind.   She just looked down and stared at something on the floor.   I let out a sigh and thought about how age is beginning to affect my reasoning…or maybe it was actually age that was making me realize the more I know that the more I realize how uncertain our world has become…and then she shyly turn her head in my direction and blinked real fast three times and then started laughing and stuck out her tongue.

 

I felt my arms go limp as I heard a loud bang on the ground.  The binoculars were still in one piece by the time I picked them up, but Bill was pissed.

 

The trained shoved off and I noticed that something inside of me dropped too.

She Laughed until She Cried

Painting Childhood

I snuggle in my warm down jacket and watch the steam from my coffee lift up into the air.  The coffee shop is cozy with couches and plants and tries a little harder than the typical Starbucks situation.    My girlfriend sits across from me and her eyes are sunken in.  Her father had a heartattack and just died.   He’s gone and she’s experiencing death for the first time.

“Now that the funeral is over, I don’t really want to go back to work and face everyone.”  Natalie says.

“I know.   I felt the same way when I lost my mom.”  I try to commiserate and say.  “I read a pretty interesting line in Joan Didon’s book about grief that said, ‘everyone thinks that once the funeral happens, then it’s over, but that’s not true at all, the hardest part is just beginning’,”  I continued. “It was something like that.”

Natalie rarely had real conversations with me, so I wanted to be honest with her and tell her that it’s going to hurt.   I knew, I had some deaths behind me.

While Natalie leafed through a magazine, my mind wandered to a memory of my mother.

I must have been about 7 years old as I brushed my cheek against the shaggy multi colored rug trying to hear underneath the door.    My parents were pretty social back then and they were in the family room with friends, laughing so hard, that I wanted to be a part of it.  I bent over and put my ear against the small opening of the door.  My little brother ran over and did the same thing.   “Shhhhh.” I whispered.   My mother was laughing and she didn’t stop.   It sounded like a laugh attack and I just couldn’t help my self as I felt this little stir in my chest and my throat got all tickley.   I tried to push the feeling down by holding my breath but my mom was laughing so hard that it sounded like she was crying and I just let out a big belch of laughter too and I couldn’t stop either.   My brother did the same.

“I just wished I would have taken that trip with my dad,”  Natalie said.

BEACH DWELLINGS: SWEET RENOVATION

by Jennifer Capo/ Twitter @jennifercapo

Exterior twilight view from back of p_house

Tucked in among the neatly packed postwar homes along 190th Street in Redondo Beach is designer Robert Sweet’s straightforward yet starkly inventive transformation, the p_house.

As you walk through the front door and put the world behind, you land in the middle of a modest Southern California dream.  If you walk a few steps further, you arrive on the back deck with the curious thought, “Am I outside or am I inside?” If you turn around to look for the windows or doors as an afterthought, you won’t find any.

“The whole wall just disappears and the deck extends the living room out,” Sweet said. “You really blur that boundary between indoors and out.”

View looking outside towards back and inside from pool

Sweet, 32, received his architecture degree from the University of Kansas and formed his own design studio, ras-a inc, in 2007.  He has already four completed projects, three projects in the works, and ten projects with Dean Nota.  In 2008, he designed the p_house (pool house) as his own live/work residence.

The project was technically a remodel.  Sweet chose to keep intact the original 920 square ft. footprint and grew the design vertically to 1,420 square ft. by adding a second story master suite.  He shifted the focus of the house towards the backyard, creating outdoor living space and fully taking advantage of the open-doors-year-round Southern California climate.

Passive solar design keeps this modest home affordable to maintain, and extends to the outside: a partial second story provides shade for the back yard, while the home’s single story side allows the pool to get late-afternoon sun.  A high-efficiency wood-burning stove and strategically placed windows and ceiling fans mean reduced heating loads in the winter and no need for air conditioning during summer.  Custom 14-foot sliding glass doors pocket into the wall spilling the living room outdoors.

4ft Skylight in kitchen opens up the room

Any home design has a unique set of site-specific problems to solve.  The p_house sits off a busy street, creating a need for privacy and noise reduction without losing airflow and light.  To resolve the issue, Sweet closed off the front wall and installed a strip of clerestory windows for ventilation.  Floating stairs with open treads push warm air up through the stairwell to escape out the master suite’s expansive operable windows.  A 4ft sky light in the kitchen and above the stairwell filters in natural light from above and opens up the room.  

Sweet’s environmentally responsible solutions are inherent in his design approach.  He doesn’t attempt to call attention to this aspect of his work, but instead suggests that this is the natural direction architecture is evolving towards. Sweet emphasizes sustainability by recycling the original home’s foundations and external framing where possible.

“I don’t like to get too exotic with my materials,” he said. “I like them to be easily accessible, attainable. They’re not coming from a different continent or country, so that alone is a very eco-friendly aspect.”  Local materials include fiber cement siding rather than less durable wood siding, FSC certified cedar, and stucco. Sweet stresses the easy availability of such materials.

“Its nothing too special,” Sweet said. “But maybe I detail it in a special way or use it in a manner that is wasn’t intended to be used.” 

 

                          Front of house. Original footprint remains intact

The p_house reflects the airy light-filled quality that Sweet works to maintain in each project. www.ras-a.com

photography: Robert Sweet, ras-a inc.

Home Designer Robert Sweet: Beach Magazine

We have a change in plans for the launch of the new section in Beach Magazine:  BEACH DWELLINGS.    Robert Sweet’s P-House will be the feature that kicks off the 2 page layout of all-things-home.    Sweet has his finger on a simple, straightforward, and honest design approach.

Look for the coming article in the next few weeks.   You’ll love the simple ways that Sweet takes full advantage of the Southern California climate!  

The feature will be photo heavy layout for all of you visual people.

If you know of a special home or architect in the South Bay, please send me information and I will check it out.  

Thanks!

At Static Beach

The sound of the beach goes global from a little room in Manhattan Beach 
by Jennifer Capo
Published May 14, 2009/Easy Reader

It’s Sunday morning in North Manhattan Beach. The breakfast joints are bustling, surfers are gravitating towards the ocean, and dogs are sniffing around for a blank canvas to take a potty break. A little light peeps through the blinds covering a mysterious, unnamed little storefront squeezed between a neighborhood gym and a barbershop on Highland Avenue. 
Behind the blinds, Static Beach is in motion. Mark Sutherland, Bridget Oberlin, and Danny McGreal sit around a radio console wearing headphones as they engage in an intimate conversation that will be bounced, via satellite, to a million listeners all over the globe. Sutherland, the founder, sits at the controller and talks over the ending of a song. 
“Danny, did you stop at Long John Silver’s on the way here?” he asks. 
“No I decided to skip the meal and just drink. I find that food gets in the way,” replies McGreal, who isn’t entirely joking.
The small, unpretentious recording studio is filled with buttons, knobs, blinking lights, a living room couch, a vision board with a map of goals, a small fridge for Danny’s stash of “personality medicine” (Singha, preferably), bright orange rectangular sound boards strategically placed on the walls, opened wine bottles, and a desk shoved in the back corner that serves as a storage space for unused equipment. 
The music winds down and the On Air sign lights up. McGreal, a paralegal who had never been in radio prior to Static Beach’s launch a-year-and-a-half ago, can’t take anything seriously. He famously (or infamously, depending on who tells the tale) played Uno at his grandfather’s funeral. His role on the show is in keeping with this predilection. He sits a few feet away from Oberlin, a fiery, cute redhead and radio veteran with a razor-sharp wit and a slightly more serious bent, like a hometown prom queen escaped to the big city.
“Basically, what I do is I kind of derail the conversation,” he says, proudly. “Mark and Bridget have a conversation, and then I say something stupid that puts an end to it.” It’s not corporate radio. It’s not loud advertisements, forced conversation, and a list of FCC-imposed rules and regulations. Static Beach Radio is a three hour independent radio show broadcast through XM/Sirius and a handful of FM affiliates. Its concept is to invite listeners worldwide – a map of recent listeners shows Humble, Texas; Lead, South Dakota; and London, England – to grab a refreshing beverage, escape to the beach and join in the conversation laced through melodic laidback tunes by musicians such as Jack Johnson, No Doubt, and Eric Hutchinson. 
“I wanted to set this up cause I missed what radio felt like 20 years ago before all the corporations swooped in and bought up all the radio stations,” Sutherland said. “This is kind of what they felt like.” 
The show is also a conceptualized dream that came out of Sutherland’s stymied attempt to launch his own radio station to serve the South Bay. Sutherland, a twenty-year radio vet and corporate escapee, hit an insurmountable roadblock – the matter of the $100 million or so it would take to buy a radio frequency – and took an imaginative leap. 
When it comes to reaching for a new business venture or a sought-out dream, there is the kind of people who step down from their ideas, concepts, and projects when the impossible appears, when obstacles drop in front of them, and bang them on the head, one after another. Then there are those that watch the disappointments, the “it’s-not-possible, the it’s-not-gonna-happen” appear on the road blocking the way, and instead of turning around, they get a ladder and climb right on top, grab a cup of coffee and contemplate the possibilities. 
What Sutherland saw was something bigger. He saw a way to take his little slice of preferred paradise – the idea of the beach, generally, and Manhattan Beach, specifically – and go global. He saw his past, present, and future all coming together to create something boundlessly different. He saw Static Beach. 

Radio Boy
It was winter in the middle of suburbia in a town called Worthington, near Columbus, Ohio. The year was 1974. 
Golden Earring hit the charts with “Radar Love” and disc jockeys were the local superstars. They had the sexy voices that lingered through car radios and filled the living rooms of households all over town. If you were a boy walking around with a Christmas list at this time, chances are that it included an Evel Knievel action figure, a Gashapon Godzilla, or The Six Million Dollar Man Viewmaster reel.