Well Designed Small Spaces

This evening we drove over to Venice to have dinner with an old boss of Douglas’s from several years ago, Linda Chen. She lives in Manhattan now, and came out to LA to house sit for a friend of hers. She called Douglas to get together, and he volunteered to cook Thai food. (He made red curry – sooo gooood!)

There is a strange phenomenon in LA, which is, the closer you get to the beach, the smaller everything gets. We call it three-quarter sizing. The houses are all tiny bungalows with no yards crammed right up next to each other. There is no parking – who can afford a garage, or a driveway for that matter! Everything feels crammed together and small. And the closer you get to the beach, the more everything is pushed up against each other. The house we went to is just a few blocks from the beach, so you can imagine what we saw from the outside. A small green stucco bungalow, squished between two other smallish houses.

What a surprise I had when we walked inside the front door!

The inside of the home had been beautifully remodeled with a large, very open addition to the back of the house, essentially doubling the original square footage.
We walked through the front door to a long hallway lined with beautiful black and white photographs, to a large open space containing the kitchen, eating area and a living space. The south wall was a series of two large plate-glass windows that turned out to be sliding doors opening onto a small yard. Upstairs was the master suite in an enclosed loft. The original house area had a small bedroom and bath, an office space and a media room. The house was probably all of 1500 sq ft in total.

It felt really fun to be there. Addison and Elias loved having so much space to move around in. I don’t know which I like more, the idea of having open space to live in (since we don’t have open space) or the idea of well-designed space. Probably both. I think I came away with a feeling that I wouldn’t mind living in a small house with a small yard, if all of the space could be well-used without feeling crowded.