Brooks + Scarpa’s new apartments reinvigorate the 1950s courtyard typology—an indigenous architecture of LA’s West Hollywood—for this 100% affordable mixed-use housing to shelter unhoused youth

Venice, California, USA

Brooks + Scarpa have completed the new four-story, 35-unit Rose Mixed-Use Apartments in Venice, California as community housing—a $20.6 million permanent supportive housing development that takes its design cues from the nearby historic Horatio Court, built in 1919 by Irving Gill.

Designed for Venice Community Housing, the 100% affordable apartment structure is situated directly across the street from Whole Foods, just seven blocks from the beach and adjacent to the toney shops and restaurants on the eclectic Rose Avenue in Venice.

The U-shaped, 20,900-square-foot building itself contains 35 affordable housing units that top a base dedicated to commercial space, while a landscaped elevated courtyard serves as the social heart of the complex.

The courtyard typology has existed in Los Angeles for more than a hundred years. It promotes pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods as an alternative to sprawl, creating usable space in the center of the project, instead of unused, leftover space outside of the building volume.

According to Ken Bernstein, director of preservation for the Los Angeles Conservancy, “a lot of the courtyard apartments build prior to the 1950s, especially in Hollywood and West Hollywood, were part of a search for indigenous architecture,” he says, “as much as an attempt to create neighborliness.”

More than any other multi-dwelling housing, courtyard apartments “make you feel like you belong to a place.”

For people living around the courtyard, the space provides a sense of safety and privacy; the courtyard is a quasi-public space that mediates between the home and the street.

Offering shelter and comfort, Rose Apartments eschews the typical neighborhood defensive apartment buildings with solid walls and fences in favor of a carved-out and raised central court, a beacon in the neighborhood that celebrates social space by de-emphasizing private space.

Strategically placed windows, purposeful exterior circulation, and units that wrap the outer-most edges, the 35 apartments are spatially apart, yet visually connected to each other and the street below.

The courtyard is only one aspect of a successful design.

Rose Apartments builds on this southern California housing typology, but unlike those traditional buildings, it is more idiosyncratic – creating increased security, privacy, and openness, while connecting to the greater community outside the building’s walls.

By including affordable housing within this project, it allowed the developer to take advantage of California State Assembly Bill AB763 for increased height and density, increasing the project density from an area average of 12.30/DU/A to more than 110 units/acre.

This much-needed affordable housing provides low-income and disadvantaged populations housing in an affluent area of town where low-wage workers are critical but unable to afford to live.

It also contributes to much-needed affordable housing in short supply in Los Angeles.

Like many of the traditional courtyard structures before it, the main exterior material at Rose Apartments is exterior cement plaster.

However, at Rose, walls are scalloped to give depth, relief, and texture, a quality that affordable housing projects typically undervalue.

These walls also include surface-applied sparkle grain that makes the façade shimmer as people pass by.

Sunlight and bright lighting conditions make the façade soft and silver in just a few seconds: a quick-moving phenomenon that bends light and casts shadows depending on the time of day.