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V enice, California, has been described as a state of mind, a beach community in which artists and architects have been comfortable stretching their artistic limits since World War II, when it became home to the Beat Generation, and then the cradle of the Light and Space art movement. But at this point in Los Angeles history, Venice has also come to represent a major real estate phenomenon that is convulsing the old pattern of suburban development. As properties are sold at major prices, new owners are enlarging existing structures or building new ones at a much bigger scale, reflecting the increase in underlying property values. Inflationary values are producing steroidal results.
Steven Ehrlich, who first bought and remodeled a Craftsman-style house here decades ago, before a long interlude living in Santa Monica, returned to familiar but changed territory when he bought a corner lot to build a new home for himself. He was susceptible to the usual real estate pressures, but was also thinking large to accommodate his wife, Nancy Griffin, and family. The house had to be generous and hospitable enough to entice three grown children back for visits.
Pushing the envelope is a metaphor for most architects. But for Ehrlich, it meant building the house not only out to the lot line, but also establishing the height limit across the site. He erected translucent walls at the edges of the property to claim its entirety as a private outdoor precinct, and then extruded the lot line up with a structural cage that establishes the envelope of the site in three dimensions. Rather than simply designing in terms of square footage and plan, he thought in terms of volume and section. By conceiving the house as filling the full site and thinking spatially at the outset, Ehrlich vastly increased the apparent territory of occupation of the postage-stamp lot, which measures 132 by 43 feet.
The architect, however, never proposed a mindless McMansion, or even a Modernist McMansion, that...