Interiors
glass ridge house
Tucked in a suburban cul-de-sac in La Cañada Flintridge, Amanda Gunawan and Joel Wong have built a quiet homage to their collective experiences and inspirations in the backdrop of their adopted homebase of Los Angeles. The couple have become well known in the LA design community for their architectural and design firms OWIU Design and OWIU Goods. With a portfolio including Baroo, Sua Superette, among a long list of residential projects for notable Asian-American tastemakers; their aesthetic and design philosophy have helped shape “the look” of Asian-American small business in Los Angeles.
An element of OWIU’s success can be attributed to their particular way of finding balance in their multi-cultural influences – creating a visual language between the shared elements between cultures while paying respect to the locality and context of each project. This visual language wasn’t manufactured but was built through years of travel throughout Asia. Both were raised in Singapore but moved through Asia fluidly. They studied at Sci-ARC together and have been splitting time between Los Angeles and Asia ever since. This diverse Asian perspective was set against a Californian education, creating a design perspective that finds balance in both the western and eastern elements.
Their personal home was meant to be a map to their built design philosophy, each room and element a small shrine to all the experiences that brought them here. When they happened upon the Terracita property it felt fated. Originally designed by Ray Kappe in 1973, the founder of their alma-mater Sci-ARC, the house had a distinctly modernist orientation compared to the rest of the neighborhood. More abstractly, Amanda Gunawan remembers an almost spiritual pull to the relationship between the house and its surroundings. The home had been badly neglected for the past 30 years but the landscape and the architecture had grown together over the years in a harmonious way. They wanted to honor this element in the overall design of their home.
The relationship between indoors/outdoors is a bridge in both eastern and western design. Both venerate the natural elements and OWIU sought to marry eastern philosophy around natural elements with a distinctly Californian landscape and palette. Moving water is a constant feature in the home. The sunroom was transformed into a built-in stream enclosed in glass to create the feeling of continuity between the residential and the wild. A koi pond wraps the entryway of the house punctuated by a minimalist Japanese rock garden and a small walkway meditative steps. The once curved pool was remade to be more seamless with the landscape so one can see the tree-lined hills from the luxury of water. From every window of the house, one can overlook water or trees or hills – the existing nature is as elemental to the design of the home as any other element.
In order to bring a natural element from Japan, they enlisted the help of their friends at Kuboki Tatami, a family-owned Tatami specialist working from Fukushima Prefecture since 1740. From this experience they started integrating tatami into their design elements. They wanted to represent this traditional craft in a modern application in their home by adding it to unexpected elements of the design. They lined their sunken pit living room in tatami, naturally adding warmth to the space as well as additional seating as many Asian cultures sit on the floor for casual socializing. The bed frame is also lined with a custom treated black tatami, adding a subtle texture and drama to the otherwise minimalist space.
Tea being an important practice of their daily ritual, the couple built a tea bar tonally and spatially apart from the kitchen. Framed by a textured marble stone, the centerpiece of the bar are the custom ceramic tiles by their friend Hashimoto Tomonari, a Japanese ceramic artist working in Shigaraki. The tiles are reminiscent of his larger works, using natural materials like rice and millet to create a unique iridescent marbled glaze.
Every detail of the house sparks a memory, a story, a reason – all giving the house an inherent lived-in warmth despite it being new. Characteristic of the couple, the decorative elements are a mix of travel finds, gifts from friends, special artisan pieces, as well as objects that simply bring joy and sentiment. Hanging prominently in their living room is a large vertical abstract painting made by the owner of the frame shop in Koreatown that Gunawan frequents.
Most fixtures are custom built by their construction company Inflexion Builds, built with careful attention to mold organically with the natural lines of the structure. A signature of the firm has become kitchens and countertops, making functional work and entertaining spaces. The countertops in both the kitchen and dining room bar are made for communal dining and active kitchen work. The dining room and kitchen are conveniently adjacent but use color and space compression to emotionally transition the rooms. The kitchen prominently features a high ceiling with glass windows maximizing natural light and highlighting the light wood lining the kitchen. The dining room features a dropped dark redwood paneled ceiling and a blackened wood bar to create a heavier tone in the room.
A consistent inspiration for OWIU’s design work has been ryokans, Japanese inns. The inspiration is less structural as it is in sentiment. Meant to be places of quiet retreat, highlighting a clear division between the world outside and the world within – OWIU has always thought of homes as sanctuary, a safe meditative space within cities. Their personal home does exactly this, hidden in the hills of Los Angeles and still minutes away from downtown.
When looking to build their own home they looked to build their own experiences, memories, and learned design philosophies into the existing bones of the structure. It’s in this marriage of legacy and intervention where OWIU finds its design sweet-spot. Their reimagining of the space is both a small prayer to the existing nature and the legacy of the architecture, dressed in their personal experience and the design principles that have formed their visual language.
Land Size: 2 acres
Location: Los Angeles, California
Construction By: Inflexion Builds