design | A Green Refuge on 19th Street

Some homes just make you want to stay. This family house on 19th Street in Santa Monica finds that rare balance — cozy and open all at once.

 

EYRC Architects, one of California's most respected firms with studios in Los Angeles and San Francisco, has long understood something most of us quietly crave: a home that truly lets you exhale.

Their 19th Street house in Santa Monica is a beautiful example of that idea. Here, the landscaping carries just as much weight as the interiors — not as decoration, but as a layer of privacy and shelter that makes the whole property feel like a world of its own.

Santa Monica is one of LA's most coveted coastal neighborhoods, where well-designed homes are everywhere — yet this one still stops you in your tracks. Its sculptural simplicity is what does it.

White stucco, deep charcoal metal panels, and warm honey-toned larch wood cladding layer together with quiet precision, more like a sculpture than a house. A low gravel path and soft plantings guide you toward the entrance.

The clients were an Asian American couple — she is of Chinese heritage, born in Korea before making her life in the US; he is Taiwanese American, born in Pennsylvania. Both were attorneys, parents to two children. Life, by their own admission, had gotten relentlessly busy.

What they asked for was simple: somewhere to escape from all of it. EYRC's partner Takashi Yanai brought an Eastern philosophical thread to the project — the belief that a person is most at peace when connected to nature. It's a sensibility he's explored throughout his career, shaped equally by the mid-century modernists and by the Japanese culture he grew up in. The result is spaces that feel minimal and meditative, not cold.

The L-shaped ground floor holds the living room, dining room, and kitchen — the kitchen anchored right at the center, the natural gathering point for a family in motion. The backyard mirrors that L-shape, interlocking with the interior so that the shared family space effectively doubles.

"Maximizing the connection to the backyard was really critical," the EYRC team has said. "To blur the line between inside and out and create an outdoor living room, we brought the glass doors all the way up to the ceiling edge." Those floor-to-ceiling sliding doors open wide and sit nearly flush with the floor — no threshold to trip over, no visual interruption. The boundary between inside and outside almost disappears.

A larch wood deck fills the far end of the backyard, anchored by a generous L-shaped sofa. Dense, layered planting wraps the perimeter, creating a sense of seclusion that's rare this close to the city. The landscaping is the work of Lizz Speed Landscapes.

On the ground floor, raw concrete runs from the floors to the built-in benches and fireplace — elemental and honest. Upstairs, the material shifts: oak wood floors warm the private spaces. 

The second floor holds the primary suite and the children rooms, along with something a little less expected — a small, quiet room set aside for reading, meditation, or yoga, opening onto a sky garden where you can simply lie back and look up.

 

"We wanted to create spaces where exposure to nature — plants, light, air — is maximized. And to do that while still protecting privacy from the street and the neighbors." — Takashi Yanai, EYRC Architects

 

The meditation room carries the same larch wood used on the exterior facade as its flooring — a small, considered detail that quietly pulls the outside in. These subtle continuities are what make the boundary between interior and landscape feel genuinely dissolved rather than designed away. 

Windows throughout the house are positioned with care, so that no matter where you are — the kitchen, a bedroom, the upstairs landing — you have a view into the backyard's greenery. The effect is one of shelter without isolation. 

You feel held by the space, not hidden from the world. That balance — completely protected, yet open and connected — was the architect's quiet ambition from the start. Through the landscaping, it's fully realized. 

 

- Created by JODE Team・Photos Matthew Millman Courtesy of EYRC Architects・ Originally published on Naver Design Blog.