A house and studio designed by two architects for themselves has two faces: a studio workplace fronts the street, its roof following the slope of the road and its trio of doors opening onto an entry court screened from the street by a wall of landscape. The living portions of the project, on the two floors below the studio, face the canyon and the back garden, 30 feet below the street. There are two zones of overlap; a study at the top of the tower at the level of the studio, and a series of rooms under the driveway/entry court, may be inhabited by either activity. Only the front door and stair of the living quarters reach to the level of the street.

The house is on a steeply sloped site in Santa Monica Canyon. A tower, 17x17 x 45' high, and a block, 20 x 60, are placed on a hill: the tower at the bottom, rotated to face the ocean, and the block near the top, parallel to the street and facing the canyon. The tower, standing free of the hill, is the house of the individual, a house of origin and of destination, with a place to sleep, to eat and gather, and to work. A simple place, for one with few attachments, few possessions. The block is a loft container, made up of platforms built out of the hillside and embedded in it, which contains spaces for other activities and attachments which one develops over time and begins to believe are essential in a consolidated life: children and family members, a professional studio space, automobile storage, space for play and entertaining. In addition to the tower and the block, two pairs of walls complete the definition of spaces. A frame wall and a curved wall connect the tower to the block, and run perpendicular to the hill. A retaining wall and a wall dislocated from the block mediate between the hillside and the block and run parallel to the contours.

The sectional organization of the program for the studio house into working, living and sleeping levels is overlaid with a sequence of spaces defined by walls and volumes. Two types of spaces are developed: spaces within the walls of pre-conceived volumes and spaces between walls, those which are resultant both in intention and conception. In this way, there is an attempt to create both the predictable, the catagorizable spaces, and the less predestined spaces, the in-between places where the unexpected, the unprogrammed, occurs and is encouraged to occur. The design provides the range of places which a self-sufficient environment like a live-work house must include: places of security and places to be at risk, places of contemplation and places of interaction.


Project: Canyon House, Santa Monica, CA

Client: Mark Cigolle, Kim Coleman

Architect: Cigolle & Coleman Architects: Mark Cigolle, Kim Coleman

Structural Engineer: Dimitry K. Vergun & Associates, Isaak Basman

Landscape Consultant: Nancy Goslee Power & Associates

Contractor: Cigolle X Coleman