Avondale Residence
Location: San Marino, CA
Date: 2020
Category: Single Family Residential
About this Project:
Scope: Interior Architects and Landscape Designers
Floor Area: 13,243 sf
Site Area: 1.9 acres
Renderings: HansonLA
The Avondale Residence is a protected building in historic San Marino, its exterior permanently coded to its original form. It cannot be altered and it cannot expand through attachments. The windows in its façade are both precious sources of natural light and not enough on their own to draw the outdoors into its 14,000 square-foot depths. Its renovation is an artful negotiation of these challenges and a reconciliation of the house with its two-acre landscape.
Though the envelope of the Avondale Residence could be nothing more than painted, its interior is reconfigurable. For its new design, HansonLA mapped the trajectories and throws of light from its fixed windows and cleared the indoor obstacles that minimized their reach. The carving through and opening up of the house’s insides allowed for a reordering and custom treatment of the house’s spaces. The ceiling of the foyer is sculpted into the curving shapes of the client’s favorite piece of jewelry. It spans upward to the roof and unfolds into a skylight that fills the entry and adjacent rooms with airiness and sun. Each space after is a unique expression of craft—each a composition in stone, wood, and fabric that carry and transform the light through the house.
Though the Avondale Residence is limited in its footprint, its site is vast and accommodating. HansonLA brings the house and its outdoors together by understanding the two as an interconnected ecology. Its new design stitches building and nature in a combination of routes and zones. A formal vehicular court creates a sense of arrival and welcome. On the opposite and back side of the house, a series of pools, decks, and shade structures offer a choice of reflective, sport, and social experiences. A selection of pavilions, linked by stepping paths, activate the yard as a series of destinations.
