Architects: Mayes Office
Project: Trousdale Place Home
Project Team: Colby Mayes, Bronson Haffner, Junsuke Sato
Location: Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, United States
Area: 7,200 sq ft
Photography: Nathan Irick
Text by Mayes Office
Located at the top of Beverly Hills is the newly constructed 7200 SF home on Trousdale Place. The Trousdale Place Home offers sweeping views from the Pacific Ocean to downtown Los Angeles.
In the design process it is necessary to find creative solutions to the unique challenges that arise in the course of a project’s development. The city of Beverly Hills requires rigorous construction regulations and specific design guidelines when determining site placement and views.
The first impression when approaching and entering the home is one of the most important design challenges. The aesthetics of the home and entry should create a memorable experience and orient the person towards the rest of the house in a concise way. We used a mixture of warm materials such as natural wood, copper, limestone, marble and a touch of exposed steel to create a warm, industrial, sophisticated environment. The main entry consists of crossing on a solid limestone bridge suspended over a reflecting pool. The front door is a 6’ x 9’ custom pivot door floating inside a frameless glass facade. The door is cladded with an acid wash copper finish. Attached to the door is a custom door handle made out of black walnut. There is a 14 foot high vertical green wall the leads the person from the driveway through the sunlight foyer and into the main living area. All the interior spaces were opened up visually and physically to the landscaping areas and the panoramic city views.
To complete the overall composition of the project, we added a 480 square foot detached pool house with a built in sunken fire pit and a private Jacuzzi on the hillside. Our design objective for the new pool house was to create a structure that doesn’t interrupt the city views from the main house or inside the pool house. To achieve this viewing concern, we designed a series of cantilevered steel moment frames that are supported by a second cantilever steel moment frame. This allows the outwardly facing corner to be free from a structural column or wall, allowing the sliding glass doors to completely open up to the surrounding landscape areas and city views.
