Johnston Marklee

Porch House . Los Angeles

Porch House is a concrete house built upon a small pad at the top of a sloping hillside. Expansive views of the Pacific Ocean and Will Rogers State Park informed the design to allow the main living space to transform from an indoor to an outdoor experience. While a standard house typology provides living space on the ground floor and private rooms above, the Porch House is reversed in order to maintain an unbroken progression from the street, thereby allowing the living room to expand vertically.

The residence is separated into two distinct volumes, characterized by the punctuation of openings within the mass. The solid volume houses a split level mezzanine and garage, and is utilized as a buffer to engage the topological difference between the street and the site. The open volume houses the main programs of entertaining and living spaces, defined by the structural rhythm of the concrete colonnade.