Los Angeles, California, USA

Positioned on a steep through-lot, the JArzm House by John Friedman and Alice Kimm is a three-story building that offers expansive views of the surrounding landscape, while providing a livable and playful space for them and their three children.

Adhering to values of transparency and connectivity, their JArzm House, named for the initials of each family member’s first name as well as architecturally inventive, open, and highly crafted.

The project has been awarded a 2023 American Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

JArzm House is located in an area that features several noteworthy Schindler, Neutra, and Lautner houses.

An early design decision was to flip the program: a detached garage topped by an ADU sits at the foot of the site; the 3-story main house with a swimming pool is placed above and accessed from the street at the top of the site.

Two kids’ bedrooms are located on the top floor, along with public living spaces that include an open kitchen and dining area.

These spaces overlook a pool deck two stories below and have views over Silver Lake Reservoir and out to Dodger Stadium as well as hills to the east and north.

The living room area includes the house’s single staircase, which connects all three floors.

Moving down, the middle floor holds the master bedroom suite, laundry room, two home offices, and a third kid’s bedroom, which is accessed by a glass bridge to give it some separation and individuality.

The bridge spans a triple-height slot of space sandwiched between the bedroom and stairs, bringing natural light into the center of the house.

This slot offers spatial release through a sense of vertical expansion and connection with the sky (via a large skylight) not often found in tight urban infill houses.

At the bottom floor, a multipurpose family room opens up to the pool deck.

This floor is level with the top of the ADU, which is an urban roof garden covered with an aluminum sunshade.

The sinuous form of the sunshade structure plays off the curves of the main house, and the pool deck and roof garden together create a middle ground suspended between the streets at the site’s top and bottom.

The decision to embed the main house in the middle of the sloped site has had a significant impact: first, the roof of the house sits a few feet below street level; access to the front door is down curving concrete steps that transition into a stainless steel staircase which sets one down into a quiet entry courtyard framed by curved walls, white-pebbled ground, tall succulent tree, and sky.

The neighbors feel that pushing the house down was a gift to them because, whether as residents occupying the hill directly above to the west or as pedestrians on their daily walks, their view out over Silver Lake Reservoir and beyond is not obstructed by yet another infill house.

Instead, it is now foregrounded by a richly sculpted groundscape of drought-tolerant plants and gently curving landscape walls. Inside, the house’s mass is lowered and not aligned with the other houses on the block which are, without exception, level with the streets either above or below.

The family and visitors can look out both sides into a forest-like landscape of trees and foliage, rather than into their neighbors’ homes.

Their views along with those of their neighbors are expanded rather than blocked, a reversal of normative urban life.

Contrary to civic and institutional projects for which rigorous initial research coupled with careful massing and planning studies set the stage for the final architectural design, the architects were able to relax into a mode of organic thinking with their own house.

The white envelope is neither box nor blob but rather a hybrid expression of the kinds of sinuous curves found in the work of architects like Alvaro Siza (for whom the architect worked in the late 1980s) juxtaposed against the crisp massing and careful attention to views found in the work of Southern California architects including European transplants Schindler, Neutra, and Lautner.

The exterior entry sequence is influenced by Spanish, Portuguese, and Iberian landscapes and architecture, with its professional quality and thickening of the threshold.

There are numerous hybrid aspects to the design of JArzm House: its planning nods both to Adolf Loos’s Raumplan in the delineation of bedrooms and bathrooms (celebrating the individuality of each occupant), while espousing spatial fluidity in the free-plan public areas and sections.

Transparency was used not only to connect inside with outside, but inside with inside, weave Raumplan and free plan into a network of interconnected spaces whose degrees of separation at any given time are controlled by shades, doors, partitions, and the free will of their users. Indoor-outdoor living is also a celebrated hybrid condition at JArzm House.

When the sliding glass doors at the dining area are completely recessed, dining is essentially taking place outdoors.

Likewise, the living room wall opens up completely at the corner; hanging out in that space feels almost like occupying an outdoor cabana.

At the ground floor, the family room and the pool deck operate as one space, and below that, the ADU opens out to its large patio via a floor-to-ceiling pivot door and window.

An unexpected organizing element in the plan of JArzm House is a construction crane that runs the length of the kitchen and is centered above the 14’ long kitchen island.

Spanning over the dining area, it can pick up the dining table, extend it over the guardrail of the balcony that runs the width of the space, descend, and set it down poolside two stories below.

The bold yellow crane is visible from elsewhere on the hills and streets below and is a provocative piece of industrial gadgetry that contrasts strikingly with the many bits of custom architectural innovation, designed by Friedman and crafted by longtime fabrication collaborator Chris Berkson, scattered throughout the house.

Windows bring daylight into the deepest recesses, the triple-height slot adjacent to the stair and glass bridge draws in unexpected illuminations, and surprising views from interior spaces through other interior spaces enable a constant connection to trees, the hills, and the reservoir below, and the sky.

At the same time, there is no overabundance of glazing; the modulation of solidity and transparency allows inhabitants to feel sheltered, and each room is additionally enriched by the trappings of evolving family life – art, furniture, and decorative objects collected or made by family members and friends throughout the years that hold cherished memories and traces of mundanely remarkable adventures.

The interiority and domesticity of family life are, at JArzm House, treasured and framed by the architecture.

The higher office sits on a raised false floor outfitted with a large trap door to access space underneath for storing supplies/files, earthquake preparedness kits, etc.

How the requirements of functional domesticity give rise to architectural exploration, spatial delight, and elevated craft (and how the functional and workaday are the foundation for achieving artfulness and architectural innovation) are hallmarks of JArzm House that place it firmly within the rich lineage of experimental Southern California domestic architecture.

After years spent working for other clients and navigating myriad personal desires and restrictions which, in addition to always-present zoning and building codes, budgets, and siting constraints, end up (and rightly so!) compressing and shaping a building’s resultant architecture, the architects found welcome freedom in the design of JArzm House.

Project: JArzm House
Architects: John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects
Lead Architect: John Friedman
Landscape Architects: Kathleen Ferguson Landscapes, Matson Walter
General Contractor: Bonomo Development Corporation
Client: John Friedman Alice Kimm, JFAK
Photographers: Benny Chan/Fotoworks