Project study · Rancho Palos Verdes
A hillside house on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, off Phantom Drive, taken down to its framing and rebuilt around four materials and a view it had been ignoring. This is the design story — what was chosen, what was removed, and what the light does now.
Seen from the road as it stood, the vocabulary was the one the Peninsula has been repeating since the turn of the century: sand stucco, a terracotta barrel-tile roof laid in long overlapping rows, window openings cut small and finished round at the top. Inside, the grammar held. Travertine underfoot. Cherry-stained millwork. A curved stair wearing scrolled wrought iron. Rooms that closed politely behind their own doorways, each one a separate small decision about where a family was allowed to sit.
What the lot was offering, meanwhile, was light and distance — ground that falls away toward the water, palms tall enough to hold the late sun, an ocean that turns up in the construction footage the moment the roof deck is cleared. The rebuild is easiest to read as a single argument: the house should look at the thing it is standing on. Everything in the photographs below is that argument being made in materials.
The finished rooms are unusually disciplined about it. One pale floor runs from the front door through the living zone and out toward the terrace without a threshold, a border, or a change of material to slow it down. The ceilings lift into white vaults where flat soffits used to sit. The palette keeps to a short list — marble where the eye is meant to stop, white oak where the hand lands, blackened steel wherever something has to hold, glass wherever a wall would only have been in the way.
What follows is a room-by-room reading of those decisions with the construction record underneath them, because they are the same story told at two stages. Hold any finished image on this page and the room that used to be there fades back in.
The film
The tour moves the way the plan does: in at the entry, past the open-riser stair, along the single pale floor, through the living zone to the marble hearth wall, and out through the glass. Watch the ceiling line rather than the furniture — it rises and falls with the rooms, and that is the move the rest of this page keeps returning to.
The palette
Slab arrives only where the room wants a full stop: the waterfall island, the fireplace wall, the wet room, the laundry counter. Because the veining is mirrored across the joint, each installation reads as one continuous drawing rather than a set of panels that happened to arrive together.
Oak is used almost entirely where a person touches the house — cabinet fronts, stair treads, the floating shelves beside the fire, the vanity, the bedroom floor. It is the warm register in a house that is otherwise white, and it keeps the minimalism from turning clinical.
The dark line is structural or it is nothing: the stringer under the oak treads, the frame beneath the dining table, the fittings in the wet room, the bar seating at the island. Nothing black in this house is decorative trim.
Where a guard, a screen or an enclosure was unavoidable, it is frameless — the stair guard, the shower, the lit shelving of the wine display. The house keeps its sightlines by refusing to let safety and separation turn into joinery.
One uninterrupted floor finish carries from one end of the main level to the other. No transition strips, no change of tone between zones, no carpet island under the dining table. It is the quietest decision in the project and the one that makes the plan read as a single room.
The walls and ceilings are white, but the ceilings are vaulted and the openings are large, so the surface is never flat for long. Light does the modelling that mouldings and colour would have done in the previous house.
Room study I
The public half of the plan, photographed from the same positions the original rooms were shot from. Hold each frame to bring back the house that stood here — the travertine, the beige, the closed corners — then let go and watch what replaced it.
Hold for the room that was hereEntry and stair hall
The curve and the ironwork go; an open-riser oak flight on a steel stringer lets the floor read continuously underneath it.
Hold for the room that was hereKitchen
Soffit downlights and raised panels out; a bookmatched marble island, integrated appliances and a ceiling that finally goes up.
Hold for the room that was hereLounge and wine wall
A formal room nobody used becomes a lounge organised around a lit glass-shelved wine wall and two curved chairs.
Hold for the room that was hereLiving room hearth
The carved mantel and stained cabinetry are replaced by a single marble slab wall, a linear fire and two floating oak shelves.
Hold for the room that was hereDining room
Carpet and rustic timber give way to a black steel-framed table on the pale floor, under one oversized photograph.
Plates
The hearth wall, the stair and the terrace edge, photographed wide. Between them they cover the whole logic of the main level: one surface to look at, one object to move through, one wall that opens.
Stage footage
The terracotta barrel tiles come off in stacked rows across the open deck — the single clearest moment in the whole record, because the profile of the house changes before anything inside it does. The same footage picks the project back up at the drywall stage, when the new white volumes are legible for the first time.
Underneath
Nothing in the finished photographs looks difficult, which is the point and also the deception. Open plans of this kind are paid for in structure: walls that were holding the house up have to be replaced by something shorter and stronger, and the lateral bracing they were quietly providing has to be put back somewhere else. The construction record below is what that costs, in framing rather than in finishes.
Original bearing walls came out. Temporary shoring posts appear in the frames, then built-up beams landing on posts, strapped with steel connectors, pick the load up — that is why the ceiling above the kitchen island has nothing under it.
Plywood shear-wall sheathing was installed with its nailing visibly closed up along the panel edges and anchors tied down at the sill. Every wall of glass in the finished house is paid for by bracing that ended up somewhere you cannot see.
The small punched and arched openings were cut away and re-headed as broad rectangles, dimensioned for the new glass walls and sliders rather than for the stucco elevation that used to be there.
Ceiling joists were reframed to vault the main-level ceilings — the white volumes in the kitchen and living room are structural work, not a plaster detail applied afterwards.
All of it happened on a sloped hillside site behind temporary fencing and debris containment, with the ocean visible from the roof deck once the tiles were gone.
Stage footage
Shot with the main level down to raw framing. The vaults that make the finished rooms feel tall are visible here as raw framing, and the plan is readable end to end for the only time in the project — you can stand at what becomes the entry and see clear through to the openings that become the glass walls.
The light
Daylight in this house is not a lighting scheme; it is four framing decisions that happened long before anyone chose a fixture. Each one shows up in the footage as rough carpentry and in the photographs as atmosphere.
Reframing the ceiling joists turned flat, soffited rooms into vaults. Vaulted white surfaces catch light at more than one angle, so the same window now lights the room twice — directly, and again off the slope above. It is why the kitchen reads bright even in photographs taken away from the glass.
Swapping units into the original arched holes would have kept the old house's rhythm. Instead the openings were reframed square and wide, headers and all, and the new window and door units were staged against the framing to suit the new dimensions rather than the other way round.
A closed curved stair with iron balusters is an object you look at. An open-riser oak flight on a blackened steel stringer, guarded in frameless glass, is an object you look through. The pale floor continues underneath it, so the hall never becomes a separate room.
One continuous pale material, with no thresholds, spreads the daylight rather than chopping it into zones. Combined with white vaults above, it turns the main level into a single bright field that changes tone from the entry to the terrace edge as the day moves.
Stage footage
The open-plan framing sequence, with the new wall openings roughed out. This is the clearest proof of the trade the whole design rests on: closed rooms and small punched windows exchanged for long headers, wide openings and a plan that runs uninterrupted to the terrace.
Room study II
The private rooms were treated as a set of separate material experiments rather than a continuation of the public palette — darker, more enclosed, more specific. Hold each image to see what the same room used to be.
Hold for what stood here beforePrimary suite
Carpet and a carved four-poster replaced by an oak floor, a full-height slatted headboard wall, and a glass wall onto the palms and the water.
Hold for what stood here beforePrimary bathroom
The travertine tub deck becomes a black marble wet room: full-height slab, frameless glass, a freestanding tub and matte-black fittings.
Hold for what stood here beforeLaundry
The room that usually gets nothing gets walnut cabinetry, integrated shelf lighting, and marble taken up the wall as a backsplash.
Plates
The wet room and the oak vanity, wide. Both are arguments about restraint: one dark and enclosed, one pale and floating, neither of them carrying a single decorative element that is not also doing a job.
Start a conversation
Most projects like this one begin with an owner who can describe the feeling of the finished rooms long before anyone can describe the framing. Tell us the house you have, the neighbourhood it sits in, and the rooms that are not working — we will come back with the design questions worth answering first, and what they imply structurally.