Gina Ferazzi grew up in the small New England town of Longmeadow, Mass. She has been a staff photographer with the Los Angeles Times since 1994. Her photos are a part of the staff Pulitzer Prizes for Breaking News in 2016 for the San Bernardino terrorist attack and for the wildfires in 2004. She’s an all-around photographer covering assignments from Winter Olympics, presidential campaigns to local and national news events. Her video documentaries include stories on black tar heroin, health clinics, women priests and Marine suicide. A two-sport scholarship athlete at the University of Maine, Orono, she still holds the record for five goals in one field hockey game.
Under the canopy of the enormous olive tree that shades his home, Daniel Gerwin’s 11-year-old son ascends the tree’s gnarled trunk like an expert climber while his brother, 7, reads a book a few feet away inside the house.
Standing nearby, architect John K. Chan, who recently renovated the interiors and designed a modern 500-square-foot addition, can’t help but smile as he watches the boys’ parents cook dinner amid all the activity.
“It’s so wonderful to see the house working for them,” Chan says as the family and their dog, Phoenix, circulate in and out of the house through sliding glass doors — a classic California indoor-outdoor move. “As an architect, the sweetest gift you can get from your clients is seeing the house working. Sometimes Daniel will text me, ‘This is happening right now,’ with a photo of the kids doing something we designed, and it’s so gratifying.”
“The olive tree is the soul of the house,” says homeowner Daniel Gerwin. “So we built the house around it.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Gerwin and his wife saw plenty of promise in the 1,100-square-foot home when they purchased it in 2016. Like many traditional homes built during the 1930s, the house featured a simple floor plan with two bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room with a fireplace, and a formal dining room and entryway.
Despite its compact layout, the house had many perks: It was within walking distance of a good elementary school and across the street from the Ivanhoe Reservoir. The majestic olive tree, which the couple guesses is as old as the house, was another bonus.
At first, the house was fine.
But as their family grew and they adopted a large Rhodesian Ridgeback, the single-story home’s compartmentalized rooms began to feel claustrophobic.
“The boys’ room was OK when it was just a crib and a toddler bed,” Gerwin says, noting the tiny bedroom connected to the primary bedroom through a Jack-and-Jill bathroom, “but it was not sustainable.”
Adds Chan, co-founder of the Chinatown-based firm Formation Association: “It was a traditional house carved into rooms.”
Chan, who began rethinking the house in 2016, says his challenge was to add everything the family wanted — an open floor plan, storage and natural light — on a small, triangular lot.
They also wanted to preserve the olive tree, which absorbs noise from the preschool across the street and shades the house and backyard.
“The olive tree is the soul of the house, and we feel connected to it,” says Gerwin, an artist. “It feels good to have a huge olive tree anchoring our house.”
The silvery green leaves of the olive tree resonate throughout the house, including the front door.
Daniel Gerwin and his family’s renovated Ivanhoe Vista house is built around a giant olive tree.
The modern addition, left, and the traditional home, right, can be seen from the backyard where architect John K. Chan plays with the family dog.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Chan agreed as someone interested in architecture as a cultural project. “When we do research for a house, we need to meet the client’s needs and address the practical concerns, but we are also interested in the poetics of the site, the specific cultures and ecologies of sites and their narratives,” he says, recalling the wooden cover that shielded the Ivanhoe Reservoir in the 1930s.
“The house’s sensibility is very East Coast,” Chan adds, noting the neighborhood’s Spanish, Tudor and Modernist homes by architects Richard Neutra, Gregory Ain, R.M. Schindler and John Lautner. “We decided to tailor the addition to the site’s landscape.”
The newly remodeled house, which took a year to complete, demonstrates Chan’s vision. The silvery and green hues of the olive leaves repeat throughout the house, in the living room furniture, the kitchen’s stained oak cabinets and the olives and leaves preserved in the concrete flooring.
“Every day you see the tree, you sense its roots,” Gerwin says. “It’s nice to see it resonate throughout the house.”
To open up the interiors, Chan removed walls and the fireplace, enlarged the narrow galley kitchen, and added a two-story, 500-square-foot primary bedroom and bathroom that overlooks the reservoir, connecting the family to the lake, the walking path and an olive grove in the pocket park across the street.
When you enter the house, the kitchen faces an open dining room and living room bathed in natural light thanks to the shifting rooflines that create transitions instead of walls. Adding further drama is a giant bay window in the living room that overlooks the backyard. When it frames the boys playing outdoors, Gerwin likens it to a “diorama in a zoo or natural history museum.”
The cabinets in the kitchen are painted a gray tone that echoes the olive tree outside.
(Stephen Schauer)
Walls were removed to open up the partitioned interiors of the traditional home. “A lot of exciting plane changes occur inside the house,” says the homeowner.
(Stephen Schauer)
“One of the things that I enjoy about the house is the geometry,” Gerwin says. “A lot of exciting plane changes occur inside the house. It takes a certain kind of person to want to invest time and energy into something like that. John is that person. It continues to be a pleasure for me as I live here.”
The elevated reading nook above the kitchen allows the children and guests to visit Gerwin while he cooks. It also offers a reverse panorama of the house. Instead of being shut off in separate rooms, the family can face one another while cooking and doing homework in what Chan describes as an “egalitarian” design choice.
“Socially, the kitchen is not for the servants; it’s for the whole family,” he says.
Daniel Gerwin fixes dinner while his son reads in a nook.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Because their home sits on a corner lot and is exposed to hundreds of people who walk around the reservoir daily, Gerwin and his wife were acutely aware that their new bedroom, which faces the pedestrian walkway, would have a fishbowl effect.
Chan felt it was important to connect the addition to the reservoir. “The house has its protected spaces, and oddly, as an inversion, it profoundly connects them to the lake,” Chan says. “The bedroom brings you to the lake.”
If you’ve walked around the Silver Lake and Ivanhoe reservoirs, you can’t miss the addition, with its modern spiked roof, glass picture window, corrugated roof and dark cedar siding.
The homeowners say they are comfortable with being exposed this way.
“It forces me to make the bed,” Gerwin jokes. “I often see people looking up at me from the walking path. But we aren’t in our bedroom during the day. In the morning, I can open the top of the blackout roller shades and still have the bottom portion closed for privacy.” (Chan installed a clear glass guardrail in front of the sliding glass doors for safety, allowing easy access to the windows and sliding glass doors and an uninterrupted view of the lake.)
When Gerwin looks out the bedroom window, he sees a community and, eventually, when the Ivanhoe Reservoir is refilled with water, a sea of blue.
The windows of the primary bedroom connect the home to the Silver Lake reservoir, its community and the pocket park across the street.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
The house, seen as a speck in the suburban landscape, overlooks the Ivanhoe Reservoir in 2022 before it was drained for new aeration and recirculation infrastructure.
(Stephen Schauer)
Similarly, in the new bathroom, where the pitched rooflines and angles converge, the color of the cement tile echoes the reservoir and the sky.
Below the house on the ground floor, a previously unpermitted tandem garage conversion now is a part of the house. Chan updated the side-by-side spaces to include an art studio for Gerwin, an office and guest room with a Murphy bed and a small existing bathroom.
Chan considered permitting the garage as an ADU, but it wasn’t a priority for the family. Although Gerwin predicts one of his sons may inhabit the space someday, until then, it works as a guest room for the couple’s parents and for work needs.
The art studio functions well for Gerwin, who previously had a studio in Lincoln Heights. “It’s a little narrow, but I can open the doors for ventilation, and at night, I can close the bug screen so I don’t have to scrape insects off my paintings.”
Photos by Stephen Schauer
Artist Daniel Gerwin in his studio, directly below his bedroom and facing the street.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
He can also do carpentry in the driveway and work in the evenings when his family is asleep.
“If I have a one-hour window, I can walk downstairs and work instead of driving to a studio,” he says. As the president of the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation, Gerwin also can hold board meetings in the office space.
Chan, who argues that the addition reconnects the family to where they live, says that by embracing the olive tree’s narrative, it became the house’s substance.
“It was important for the house to emerge from the foliage,” he says. “The roof’s pitch is designed to accommodate the tree growing at this angle. It has a strong presence but is integrated in its context. The large hedge and the shade of the olive tree looming over the house are all important aspects. “
To many people, the Silver Lake Reservoir is an oasis in a frenetic city. But for this family, it’s an extension of their home.
“It’s fun to see people walk or run by,” Gerwin says as he walks Phoenix along the pedestrian path. “Living near a lake is a pleasure. How many people get to do that?”
Under the cover of darkness, law enforcement officers converged on People’s Park and cleared activists from the green space early Thursday in preparation for construction of a housing complex for students.
Some resisters holed up for hours in a makeshift treehouse and on the roof of a single-story building in the park.
Police were met by protesters, chanting “Long live People’s Park” along with shouts of “Fight back!”
Activists protesting the clearing of People’s Park refused for hours to come down from a treehouse in the park but finally relented.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
A law enforcement officer points a weapon into a kitchen where activists were holed up at People’s Park.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
Some protesters retreated to the roof of a building in the park before later agreeing to come down.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
Authorities made multiple arrests as they cleared People’s Park in Berkeley.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
UC Berkeley police and other authorities clear People’s Park.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
At one point during the operation early Thursday morning, protesters ripped down police barriers and confrontations with law enforcement intensified.
Almost every day for the last two years, Vincent “VDogg” Hubbard has stood outside the Louisiana Fried Chicken at Manchester and Normandie avenues with a suitcase full of cocoa butter and a traveling chess set.
Slight in stature, with a gap-tooth smile and a blunt tucked into his beanie, the 44-year-old is South L.A.’s preeminent purveyor of everything from African black soap to charcoal toothpaste to bundles of sage. But if you’re a chess enthusiast, you’re more likely to stop by for an over-the-board “a— whooping,” where he’ll snap up your pieces with a side of smack talk before “leaving ’em with two pieces to go.”
“Just without the chicken,” he chuckled, while scanning the dinner rush for potential customers or competitors. “And I usually have ’em before their order’s up.”
As part of the tight-knit street chess community below the I-10, Hubbard is one of many formerly incarcerated gang members who used to play in prison to barter for contraband items or commissary goods. While others may drop the game upon release, chess continues to play a huge part in his life as a viable source of income in a job market that turns its back on people who’ve done time.
Vincent Hubbard poses for a portrait outside his friend’s party bus in South L.A. Hubbard perfected his chess game serving a 10-year prison sentence and now is trying to turn his skill into a career. He’s found it hard to find a job that will hire the formerly incarcerated.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Hubbard packs up his chess board and belongings after spending the afternoon playing chess outside of the Louisiana Fried Chicken.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Hubbard usually measures his wins in $20 bills, earned from speed games against a curious onlooker or a cocky passerby. Unlike the regulars, they don’t know his losses are in the single digits, only that he looks like “a real thug from the ’hood” until he begins to attack, quickly picking off pieces and relentlessly checking his opponent.
“I’m on your head like hair,” Hubbard said, recalling a recent game against a flustered opponent.
“I’m coming out with missiles and whatever. I’m coming out strong,” Hubbard said, playfully boxing the air. And with his unfettered confidence, natural talent and unconventional play style, Hubbard wants to make it known that “nobody could f— with me.” In his mind, not even five-time world chess champion Magnus Carlsen.
After all, he’s already squared off against titled players and is a two-time champion of South L.A.’s Make a Move, but there’s a big difference between winning an amateur tournament like that one and being recognized as a professional player in the highly competitive chess world.
Hubbard is already a pro in the eyes of the United States Chess Federation, but if his ultimate goal is to be one of the very few to make chess a full-time job, he’ll need to receive a certified rating. Culled from the results of several tournaments, his rating will determine how much he can charge for lessons and whether he’ll be able to compete in certain competitions, where the prize money can be in the millions.
Hubbard — a self-taught player — started that path in October by competing in his first rated tournament against established professionals from the Santa Monica Bay Chess Club. It’s a small classical tournament, where one game can last upwards of six excruciating hours. The competition is fierce, mostly motivated by ego and ratings rather than the $200 prize. That’s less than a weekly grandmaster lesson or the entry fee for the upcoming North American Chess Open. For Hubbard, though, that money could be food or more merchandise to sell. It could be rent for the house he shares with several other people waiting for Section 8 vouchers. It could even be the bus fare for the two-hour ride from South L.A. or the $25 entry fee for the club’s next tournament, which he needs for experience if he wants to keep moving up in the chess world.
Vincent Hubbard sets up outside of the Louisiana Fried Chicken for $20 speed games. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
Vincent Hubbard says he learned chess on his own so doesn’t play like others who were taught specific maneuvers. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Chess offered escapism in prison
Born and raised in the Jordan Downs housing project in Watts, Hubbard spent his childhood bouncing between foster care, older relatives and juvenile hall. Initiated into the Grape Street Crips the first day of junior high, he spent his young-adult years in and out of L.A. County Jail, where he realized chess was not only “a good way to pass the time” but a way to obtain some of his favorite snacks, whether they be noodles or Little Debbie’s oatmeal pies.
However, things took a turn when he was arrested in Oklahoma on drug-trafficking charges in 2000, just three days shy of his 21st birthday. Sentenced to 10 years in the state penitentiary, Hubbard perfected his game over the next decade, studying Aron Nimzowitsch’s “My System” and playing correspondence chess with other inmates.
“In maximum security, we’d draw a board and then shape tissue with water into the pieces.”
— Vincent Hubbard
“In maximum security, we’d draw a board and then shape tissue with water into the pieces,” he said, explaining that he’d send messages containing his moves via old chewing tobacco cans, thrown “24 cells down from the dude I’m trying to play.” And with not much else to do, Hubbard used chess as his “PlayStation,” a mental escape from prison life where he could focus on a singular goal — checkmating his opponent — by finding innovative ways to adapt to unexpected situations or setbacks.
“Chess is an outlet, and it’s a way for me to use my brain,” he said, adding that he eventually became known as the Oklahoma State Penitentiary’s “Evil Emperor.” With his ability to conquer the chessboard, Hubbard would immerse himself in the game, spending countless hours in his cell, treating his makeshift pieces like “those little feudal societies where the king’s gonna take over other kingdoms.”
He snickered, “I’m out there in the South, and I’m like, ‘Come through. Who thou plays me thou peasants?’”
In addition to playing $20 street chess, Vincent Hubbard also sells goods like cocoa butter, which he carries along with his chess set.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Between these little quips and his winning streak, Hubbard is a beloved and well-respected figure within the street chess community, said Make a Move tournament founder Jerimiah Payne.
“Everyone loves V’s charisma, and it’s really good to see somebody like that in these kinds of spaces,” said the West Adams-raised player, who began the roving event as a more “comfortable” alternative to other L.A. chess events, which can feel unwelcoming to outsiders.
“[It’s for people] from the neighborhood that would probably never compete at one of those other chess tournaments, like the … rated ones,” he said. Because, contrary to stereotypes, Payne explained that chess is a “great unifier,” before adding that Make a Move was partially inspired by seeing Bloods and Crips play together when he went to jail for burglary.
At its core, Make a Move is a love letter to the street chess community, cultivating an environment that mirrors the players’ welcoming attitudes and willingness to help one another grow. Yet despite its increasing popularity within the L.A. chess scene, Hubbard said the warmth has rarely been reciprocated when he walks into an “established” chess event. Rather, he feels a palpable chill in the air. “People be clutching their purses or their wallets when they go by. You see their body language, freezing up,” he said. To him, the message is clear: You shouldn’t be here.
Vincent Hubbard competes at a tournament hosted by the Santa Monica Bay Chess Club at St. Andrews Lutheran Church.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Breaking in as ‘the black sheep’
“When you think chess, you think of class and prestige … respect and nobility,” Hubbard said, alluding to how he’s constantly underestimated by more affluent players.
The microaggressions happen irrespective of setting. At casual meetups in bars and cafes, they’ll inch closer together, avoiding direct eye contact in favor of pointed whispers and sideways glances. At the tournament, the room goes silent and everyone stares when they think he’s not looking, especially the helicopter moms waiting for their chess prodigies. Everyone seems both curious and afraid of what could be inside his suitcase.
“[I’m] the black sheep,” Hubbard shrugged. “But I’m used to being the bad guy in the movie anyway.”
It’s “TenTrey Day” — the biggest holiday for Grape Street Crips — and Hubbard is completely “graped out” to represent his roots at the Santa Monica Bay Chess Club tournament. Dressed in head-to-toe purple, he’s easy to spot inside the beige meeting room of a small Sawtelle church, with his bright bandanna and matching camo pants and T-shirt. This time, everyone seems too scared to look at him, even when his back is turned.
For this game, it’s his turn to play black pieces, which move second and, theoretically speaking, lose more often than white. The obvious symbolism doesn’t escape Hubbard while he’s outside taking a mid-game smoke, watching his opponent ponder their next move. Coincidentally, his competition is also in a purple shirt, which Hubbard finds almost as funny as the old man who tosses a barely smoked cigarette into the gutter to avoid him.
He makes a teasing comment about the other man’s eagerness to run back inside. It’s like the way he used to speed-walk to the other side of Watts, just to learn basic chess moves on a church computer. The only difference, he laughed, is that he was getting chased through rival gang territory.
“I had to figure out all the other s— for myself, honestly,” Hubbard said. He sounds tired, his voice missing its usual bravado as he admits to having a rough start to the tournament. He’s won one game and drawn another and, after a particularly disheartening defeat, he even skipped a round to save the last of his cash, opting to play on the street instead, “because why show up if I’m gonna lose anyway?”
“A lot of these dudes, all they do is study lines. They read books. Some of them got photographic memories,” Hubbard said while nodding toward the tournament hall.
“Whereas on the street, or in the ’hood, or whatever, the average player just plays,” he explained. “They don’t understand the intricacies or the fundamentals of chess,” Hubbard sighed. “Chess is so simple but complicated. It’s easier said than done.”
While in prison, Vincent Hubbard crafted chess pieces out of paper towels and water. Now he hopes to turn chess into a career by competing in competitions and teaching others.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Evolving from a pawn
However, fellow street player and Hubbard’s longtime family friend, William “Chill” Somerville, used a more apt allegory to describe their intertwined chess journeys, explaining that everyone forgets a pawn’s innate potential — the power it has once it crosses the board.
“If you make the right moves in the right steps, it can become a rook, it can become a queen, it can become a bishop,” he said. “And life is like that.
“So if you make the right moves and steps, then you can be bigger than a pawn. Even if they looking at you as one.”
— William Somerville
“So if you make the right moves and steps, then you can be bigger than a pawn. Even if they looking at you as one,” he continued, before explaining that this is why the two decided to create Prolific Chess, a new organization that aims to make the game accessible to everyone from schoolkids to people living on Skid Row.
With a gentle demeanor and a sprinkle of gray in his beard, Somerville similarly fell in love with chess in L.A. County Jail. While he was being held on two charges of attempted murder prior to his acquittal, chess became a way to “relax,” to create and think outside of the box, which ultimately helped him realize, “You’re bigger than what you’re looking at.
“You’re bigger than what the people say you are,” he said, almost like a mantra. “You’ll become what you want.”
Since then, he’s become a Watts community ambassador and mental health advocate who wants to help people gain confidence from chess. So after years of playing against Hubbard in a shipping container on the empty lot next to his house, Somerville refurbished a party bus with a stripper pole and alligator skin upholstery into a suave mobile chess center. He brings chess tournaments, workshops and seminars to every corner of South L.A. through Prolific Chess.
Vincent Hubbard takes a smoke break during the Santa Monica Bay Chess Club tournament. After this one, he’ll have to keep competing to solidify his official rankings with the U.S. Chess Federation.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
For both men, chess was a lifeline during hard times that turned into a lifelong passion. And now, Hubbard hopes to break further into the professional chess community so that he can build a career that extends beyond the streets. He has a provisional rating with the U.S. Chess Federation that puts him in the 80th percentile of members, but he must keep competing for that rating to become official.
“I represent a lot of [the] misfortunate, or underprivileged, or have-nots,” he said. “Regular people out here that might not have opportunities.
“So when I’m playing chess, I’m representing everybody in my neighborhood. Everybody in my city … Wattsangeles.”
Hubbard smiles down at his phone, looking up which bus will take him back to South L.A. “Because how many people there get to say that they play chess, and that they’re now a professional?”
Walk past the street-facing 1990s duplex and beyond a 1920s Sears Roebuck kit bungalow, and an accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, rises before you at the end of the property. It’s a slim, two-story rental clad in inexpensive white vertical corrugated metal.
Only then do you realize this single Venice lot has four rental units.
With Southern California in desperate need of housing and state and federal laws constantly evolving to make permitting ADUs easier, the detached home by architects Todd Lynch and Mohamed Sharif of Sharif, Lynch: Architecture feels like a harbinger of what’s to come.
“When the city encouraged us to increase housing, I thought of the Venice property,” said owner Ricki Alon, who had previously worked with the architects and builder Moshon Elgrably on another project. “Given the unique site constraints, I didn’t believe they could do it. I was worried it would be too crowded and negatively affect the small guest house.”
The two-bedroom ADU was built five feet from an existing duplex and four feet from the property line.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Alon was hesitant at first, but after a persuasive Zoom call with the architects, they all agreed that a fourth unit would add value to the bustling community.
“We viewed it as a challenge and a way to transcend ADUs in an SB9 world,” Sharif said, referring to Senate Bill 9, the 2022 state law that allows homeowners to convert their homes into duplexes on a single-family parcel or divide the lot in half to build another duplex for no more than four units.
Alon loved their initial sketches despite her skepticism, and the project moved ahead.
“It’s taught me how to think differently about how things are arranged and how I store things,” Henry Schober III said of his 13-foot-wide rental.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
The large windows in the living room overlook the courtyard and give the ADU an open and airy feel.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
“We decided to go as high as possible,” Sharif said of the eventual design, a slim, two-story ADU built on what was previously a driveway. Slipped into the lot, the 1,200-square-foot ADU, or IDU as the architects like to refer to the infill dwelling unit, was built an inch from the 1920s bungalow, five feet from the duplex and four feet from the property line.
Resting a few feet from a dingbat apartment to the south, the ADU is lifted off the ground to preserve two parking spots in the alley and a swimming pool in front. “Its entire width is dictated by that two-car side-by-side dimension,” said Sharif, who teaches in the undergraduate and graduate design studios at UCLA. Lifting the volume to preserve the pool also created shade and an open space that all residents could share.
“They refused to get rid of it,” Alon said of the water feature. “They insisted on building around it.” Today she admits it was the right decision. “Now, when you walk in, you experience a wonderful, absolutely lovely environment. I’m glad they did not listen to me,” she added with a laugh.
The narrow living room, seen from the staircase, and the first-floor office and en-suite bathroom. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Even though you can’t see the rental from the street, the ADU has enormous curb appeal and a touch of glamour. A Midcentury-style Sputnik pendant light hangs outside the front door, giving it an elegant feel, and the white cladding gives it a distinctive quality from the other rentals, which are clad in orange metal and gray siding.
The driveway before Sharif, Lynch: Architecture added a two-story ADU alongside a bungalow, right, and duplex, in back.
(Sharif, Lynch: Architecture)
Up a short flight of stairs, the front door opens to the ground floor and the two-story entry, which features a compact first-floor bedroom, study and en-suite bathroom.
“We wanted every room to have a bathroom to suit roommates,” Sharif said.
Tenant Henry Schober III, a 38-year-old attorney specializing in data privacy, uses the ground floor as his office and a bedroom for out-of-town guests.
“It’s a place that I’m comfortable spending a workday in,” said Schober, who goes to the office once or twice a week. “I don’t feel like I’m trapped in my house.”
Tenant Henry Schober III takes advantage of the ADU’s rooftop deck, which offers panoramic views of Venice. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
An overhead view shows the ADU’s proximity to the modern duplex and bungalow.
(Steve King Architectural Imaging)
Up the stairs to the second floor, the main living area and kitchen measure just 13 feet wide; large windows and operable skylights add light and cross-ventilation throughout the linear floor plan.
“The windows make you feel like you’re in an amazing penthouse in SoHo,” Alon said. “It gives the room a great energy.”
The rest of the second floor houses a powder room, bathroom and bedroom. Because of limited space, there was no room for a formal dining room. However, Schober said that’s easier to maneuver than the limited storage, which has taught him to think differently about how he stores and displays things.
The pool was preserved to create a communal area for all tenants.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
“I eat at the long breakfast bar, and when I have people over, I use the common space or the roof deck,” he said.
The home’s two floors feel like three, Lynch said, “because of the way the stairway draws one upward through the IDU and then because of how the roof steps up again.”
The roof deck serves as another outdoor room, further expanding the living space. From the rooftop deck, Schober has panoramic views of Venice, not to mention ample room for a dining table, barbecue and sauna.
After renting an apartment temporarily a few blocks from the beach, Schober was still determining whether he wanted to rent another apartment in Venice.
The master bedroom on the second floor.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
“It originally turned me off to Venice,” he said. “The price points were so high. It felt like people were paying for the ZIP Code. Landlords were asking five grand for an apartment next to a parking lot.”
But when he saw the two-bedroom ADU, he changed his mind. “When I walked in, I thought, ‘I’m going to live here,’” said Schober, who is originally from Philadelphia and moved to Los Angeles from Switzerland.
“The apartment and the secluded feel changed my attitude,” Schober said. “You get the convenience of Venice and access to all the restaurants and shops, but you’re not in the thick of things. I lived in San Francisco for a decade, Europe for six years. I view the apartment as an oasis in a neighborhood that is not as transformed as others.”
Schober said the strength of the architects’ vision is that the unit is quietly tucked away in a congested neighborhood. “Since you are set back from the street, there is no foot traffic,” he added. “It doesn’t feel like I am living among a bunch of units. There is little street noise, and you would never know you live a stone’s throw from Lincoln Boulevard.”
Stairs lead up to the rooftop deck.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Perhaps most impressive, the ADU defies the notion that you can’t have parking, privacy and quality of living, including a swimming pool, on a tight infill lot with other properties.
In a sense, Schober said, “It seems the solution to the housing crisis is building up.”
“There is a community feeling, and people know each other,” Sharif said. “They sit around the pool, and it’s very intimate and private.”
After a 10-month building process, the team completed the project this spring at a cost of approximately $410 per square foot.
Looking back, Alon is grateful that she moved forward with the project.
“It’s not just a unit that brings value to the property,” she said. “It enhances the entire property for everyone. Adding housing in this condensed community is important, but this team made it something beautiful that people will enjoy. You don’t have to add a huge amount of square footage to add quality of living.”
A lucky cat figurine sets the tone inside Henry Schober III’s two-bedroom ADU in Venice.
It’s hard to say what’s cooler about the Japanese shōya house at the Huntington Library, Art Gallery and Botanical Gardens — the centuries-old wood structure that was once the center of a small farming village in Marugame, Japan, or the backstory of how it got to its new home at the Huntington’s Japanese Garden.
The shōya house’s original conical ceramic roof tiles had to be broken to move the structure. They were recreated by Japanese craftspeople, complete with a sprouting seed design.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
The journey took nearly eight years of negotiations, bureaucratic wrangling and skilled craftsmanship to dismantle, reassemble and, in some cases, re-create the 3,000-square-foot house and gardens. And starting Saturday, visitors can finally tour the compound, which will be open daily from noon to 4 p.m. (except Tuesdays, when the gardens are closed).
Los Angeles-based Akira and Yohko Yokoi donated their ancient family home to the Huntington, but the $10 million job of moving it to San Marino was far more complicated than just taking apart a puzzle and putting it back together.
Consider the distinctive conical ceramic tiles covering the pitched roof like rows of tight curls. All those silver-gray tiles had to be remade by Japanese craftsmen because the originals were mortared to the roof and had to be broken to disassemble the house. The exquisite garden outside the largest and most important room of the house was carefully mapped and measured, and every stone numbered by landscape designer Takuhiro Yamada so it could be re-created at the Huntington.
Akira and Yohko Yokoi outside the shōya house they donated to the Huntington.
(Sarah M. Golonka / The Huntington)
And outside the gatehouse that protected the house, built new because the original was damaged by a storm, the Huntington installed a terraced mini farm growing small plots of rice, buckwheat, sesame, wheat and other traditional Japanese crops, surrounded by a riot of colorful cosmos flowers. The house sits higher than the farmland, so water collected from the roof and ponds all drains down to irrigate the farm land.
So this installation isn’t just an exercise in cultural awareness, says curator Robert Hori, the Huntington’s associate director of cultural programs, who oversaw the project from start to finish. To him, the Japanese Heritage Shōya House is a quiet but effective example of sustainability — “learning from the past for a better future” — and a reminder that farmers “are really the backbone of our society.”
Robert Hori, the associate director of cultural programs at the Huntington, is framed by tall cosmos blooms in the farm area outside the shōya’s gatehouse.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Small terraced plots of farmland grow rice, sesame, wheat, buckwheat and other traditional Japanese crops outside the shōya house.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
There were plenty of trying times — more than two years of negotiating with city, state and federal officials to get the necessary approvals and occupancy permit to move and rebuild the house. And in the midst of the pandemic, when the disassembled house sat in dozens of packing crates for nearly nine months, Hori had to coax reluctant Japanese craftspeople to come and put it together so the ancient wood pieces didn’t warp in SoCal’s dry summer heat.
“When you’ve spent two years lovingly repairing this wood and then you’re told everything might be lost, that was a call to action to the craftspeople who painstakingly worked on this,” says Hori. “Even in the face of a pretty scary time, they felt like it was their responsibility to put this house back together.”
The project started with a chance meeting in 2016 during a party at the Beverly Hills home of Los Angeles philanthropist Jacqueline Avant. Hori had come to talk with Avant about a Japanese art collection she wanted to donate to the institution. During their conversation, Avant introduced Hori to her friend, Yohko Yokoi, who soon would be traveling to Japan.
“I said, ‘Oh, that will be a wonderful visit because the cherry blossoms will be in full bloom,’” Hori recalled, “and [Yokoi] said, ‘No, because I have to take care of my house.’ And then she began to tell me the story of this house.”
The front entrance for farmers and other common folk at the shōya house. The swept-dirt courtyard was for village events. Dignitaries entered through a special gate at the left.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Hori recalls Yokoi saying the house had been built after the war, “so I thought it was a prefab house from the 1950s with poor construction, built after World War II. But then she was saying, ‘We used to have a castle,’ and that’s when it came to light that this house was built around 1700, after the war that unified Japan.”
Prior to that final battle, Japan had been a confederation of warring city-states and provinces, he said. It took 100 years of battles to create a cohesive central government known as the Tokugawa Shogunate. The Yokoi family’s castle was destroyed during the war. They had been fighting on the losing side, says Hori said, but the victorious Tokugawa clan decided to incorporate all the losing factions into its new bureaucracy, to become tax collectors and shōya, or village leaders.
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The Yokoi shōya house was built around 1700 in Marugame, says Hori, and was the family’s private residence as well as a kind of community center for the village.
Inside the gatehouse, a large courtyard provided space for weddings, funerals and celebrations. Farmers and merchants entered the shōya house through one entrance, to measure and store their rice, pay their taxes and try to collect funds for other provisions. These rooms had floors made from hard-packed earth, and rustic beams hand-hewn from pine.
Adjacent to the dirt-floored rooms were the places where the family lived and worked. These raised floors were covered with rice-straw tatami mats. The wood-framed walls and beams were planed to feel as soft to the touch as satin sheets. Sliding walls with windows covered in rice paper and glass opened to reveal exquisite gardens, enjoyed only by visiting dignitaries who entered through their own special gate.
The exquisite Japanese garden of distinctive stones, pond, trees and shrubs outside the shōya’s grand room for dignitaries.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
After the military shogunate system was overturned in the late 19th century, the house became the Yokois’ private residence and went through several renovations, according to Yokoi and her husband, Akira. The last family member to live there was Akira’s mother, who died around 1988. The couple moved to California in the late 1960s, says Hori, where Akira worked as an executive for Matsushita Panasonic, the parent company of Panasonic. They visited the house regularly and kept it maintained, with the idea of retiring there someday.That plan faded, however, and eventually, he adds, the upkeep became a chore.
Hori already was thinking about a big project for the Japanese Gardens when he first met Yohko Yokoi. The Huntington’s Chinese Garden was in the midst of a huge expansion, and the discussion was how to add to the Japanese Garden to balance the two, says Hori. “This was an ongoing conversation we’d been having [at the Huntington] since 2012, and I’d been taking several trips to Japan to figure out what we should be adding next to that garden,” he says.
The Yokoi house sounded promising, so even though he had just returned from a visit to Japan, he made another trip within a few weeks so he could see the house while Yokoi was visiting. And that’s when he got the vision that sustained him through all the difficult years to come.
“I thought it had good bones when I first went to look at it, but also, I was interested in the house because it was really a conglomerate of various styles: the front room with its very rustic wood beams and style on one side, and then on the other side a formal reception room with the elegant carvings and mix of styles; a public face and private face of a scale big enough to accommodate visitors circulating through it.”
There were other signs too. The Huntington’s historic Japanese Garden, with its curved wooden Moon Bridge over a small lake and display of a Japanese home, first opened in 1912 when the West was fascinated by Japanese culture, plants and architecture. The garden fell into disrepair during World War II but was refurbished with support from the San Marino League. In 1968, the garden was expanded with a bonsai collection and Zen Court of plants and raked stones. Then in 2010, the Pasadena Buddhist Temple donated a small ceremonial tea house to the garden, which was disassembled and sent back to Japan to be refurbished before being shipped back to San Marino, where it was reassembled.
Japanese black pine (Pinus thunbergii) rises above the shōya house gatehouse.An intricate carving of farm life at the top of the entrance to the shōya house’s grand room.A soft wood walk way surrounds the perimeter of the shōya house.(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
The tea house was much smaller than the shōya house, says Nicole Cavender, director of the Huntington’s botanical gardens, but it gave them the confidence to tackle a much larger structure and create a reconstruction of village life.
“We wanted this to be an immersive experience,” says Cavender, “so it has to be productive as well as beautiful.” The fields of tall magenta, pink and white cosmos flowers that edge the farm weren’t added just to enchant, she said, “but to show that we’re actually trying to grow something. The flowers draw pollinators who help the crops grow.”
Eventually there will be koi in the garden pond by the house, and the water circulating in that pond will be enriched with their poop, she says, and help feed the farmland below. Around the house is decorative edging called rain catchers — narrow drains filled with smooth gray rocks to collect any rain or dew falling off the roof, which also drained to the farming areas below.
Three hundred years ago, the Japanese didn’t have a word for sustainability, but they lived the concept every day with this type of regenerative farming, says Hori. “It’s how you survived. We want people to understand that ornamental gardening started with the ability to move water, and to move earth, which is what we have in farming. It all came out of farming.”
Robert Hori paces in the shōya’s largest room, reserved for dignitaries. The walls slide open on both sides to reveal the garden.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Hori’s vision encompasses more nuanced lessons too. The house has few furnishings. The smooth wood decking around the perimeter of the house is patched in places where the wood was worn, but the patches were done decoratively in the shape of a small gourd. And the simplicity of the furnishings is a gentle question.
“It gets you thinking … do we really need all this stuff we have? We want this to be a living museum, and walking through the house you can really find the three Rs of sustainability — reduce, repair and recycle, reuse or remake,” says Hori.
“It was all part of a circular economy where nothing was wasted. A ‘circular economy’ is a big concept, but we’re hoping these small doses of a big concept can help people take away these lessons and understand them. As a nonprofit we are in the business of inspiring and changing lives. We can make a difference, and that’s a great thing to come to work to.”
