Tribe Studio Architects

This new family house in Venice Beach, California, abstracts the local vernacular into a hovering cottage form.

Designed for a busy, creative Australian family in LA, the Venice Beach house brings Aussie informality and attention to craft to the Californian beachside neighbourhood. The design heroes the natural landscape. Majestic mature figs frame the site to the West and South creates green outlook, privacy and habitats as well as controlling the sun and microclimate. Distant views out the East borrow more mature vegetation, including an utterly baroque bougainvillea.

The house arranges itself to create intimate, generous and district landscape views. Arranged around a pool, the ground floor public spaces of the house pinwheel to make an intimate cactus court, playspace around a giant fig, and a outdoor dining area. Architecturally, they are treated like the leftover space beneath the cottage form above, propped up on blade walls.

The bedrooms are arranged along the southern elevation to enjoy controlled sunlight all day long. They are intimate house-shaped rooms with careful apertures framing landscape and elevated gardens. A series of small and large voids punctuate the rooms, facilitating stack effect ventilation and privacy.