A new neighbor had just moved into the adjacent office suite. As he was leaving his office, he heard our music, saw food, drinks, and a group of people enjoying themselves, and wandered in to introduce himself.
Andrew Adler looked around our studio, examined the giant glossy prints of our projects, studied our conference room with a presentation from earlier in the day and work areas littered with remnants of the week’s creative process, and talked to a few architects in the room.
Adler found me and said, “We could do great projects together, and we should talk.”
Adler and his newly formed residential development company, Alta Verde Group, had exciting ideas. He had previously developed successful urban infill condominiums and apartments in Texas, garnishing a myriad of accolades for breaking boundaries in housing design and urban development. He had just relocated to build and sell residential homes in Southern California after the real estate crash of 2007.
The country’s economy was slipping fast into a recession, and distressed land was available at reasonable prices to purchase and develop. In some cases, such land was already destined for detailed communities, with roads, sewer, and electrical lines already in place to service surveyed plats awaiting beautiful new homes. The business model was for a developer to build the homes at his or her risk, with the intention to sell them at a profit. In most cases, this common speculative plan was successful, but in an economic downturn, many developers’ plans went unrealized. The land remained vacant, and cleared land was selling at bargain prices.
Alta Verde was looking to buy this land and construct homes, but with an all-new, innovative approach. Adler envisioned cutting-edge design, unique but affordable materials, and yes, environmentally conscious structures. He imagined clean lines, uninterrupted glass walls, and dramatic interior spaces—all on a budget. Adler saw in the work on our walls a sympathetic creative partner in Poon Design. In our custom-built residences, he could see our desire to do things differently—to accommodate while engaging an artistic process.
We knew that with so much cool, advanced, and affordable design in every device from cars to laptops, the new generation of home buyers would expect the same in their homes, but at reasonable prices, especially in California.
For the Alta Verde project, we banned the words “prefab” or “tract home” from our lexicon; those words simply would not fly with our client.
Our vision was to bring the essential elements of good design—proportion, light, scale, space, authenticity, and flexibility—and apply advances in smart technology, sustainability, and new materials. We wanted to be at the forefront of a new chapter in California modern design. Adler and I were in agreement as to what would be allowed and what would be eliminated from the design dialogue. No Mediterranean-Spanish-inspired stucco boxes for us. No overly thick faux-adobe walls, with small windows that limit a connection to the California landscape. No inefficient, costly, and heavy clay tile roofs, and no wedding-cake-style decor of plaster that lacks authentic beauty or inherent visual detail.
We also believed that a key aspect of great residential architecture was no longer about the one-off experimental custom homes that show up on the covers of magazines. We believed, and still do, that today’s home design should not focus on creating a singular architectural jewel for one family to enjoy; the higher value and impact of good architecture can happen on a community scale.
That was all well and good. We were ready to dive in. But the real challenge to our concept? Cost per square foot. Large budgets make marble and grand staircases de rigueur; Adler challenged us to adjust our creativity to what he called “democratizing good design.”
This concept is not new. Michael Graves famously adapted his original high-end Postmodern tea kettle into an accessible and stylish item for Target. Graves had first designed his famous colorful kettle years previously for Alessi, an Italian kitchen-utensil distributor that represented some of the most well-known architects and designers of the time, such as Ettore Sottsass, Philippe Starck, and Zaha Hadid. Many of Alessi’s products are so celebrated that they are exhibited in the permanent collections of museums around the globe, including MoMA in New York City.
The tea kettle Graves designed for Alessi was priced at several hundred dollars for the cooking-obsessed collectors of exquisite design. The Target kettle was nearly exactly the same in concept, aesthetic, and details. The delightful vision of Graves’s design, originally available only to the wealthy, became accessible to the average shopper at Target, who, though shopping on a budget, still sought original, smart design.
Andrew Adler had the same thought about homes. The only hurdle now was financing.
For Adler and his Alta Verde Group to present the idea of a new class of homes and find investors, they needed developed architectural ideas, graphics, and presentations to show off in the pitch. With the real estate capital market having a hangover from the recent crash, locating leverage for construction was going to be a challenge, and even more so for modern homes in a conventional marketplace. Alta Verde had to create their capital program in stages and was not yet prepared to hire us as their full-time architecture company to design these homes in detail. But I felt this opportunity for exploration would reap great rewards, both in exposure and in personal merit.
With some risk, we agreed to provide one year of free design service in exchange for securing the future contracts to execute the projects. We would create a repertoire of architectural designs to entice investors. If Alta Verde was successful in finding the appropriate project funds, Poon Design would land a full plate of exciting new work. The bet on the vision and the players was made.
From 2009 to 2010, Poon Design planned groundbreaking homes that were starkly modern, open and sleek, and also welcoming and timeless; the last two adjectives are typically used to describe a successful house design.
Month after month after month, toiling late at night in eight-hour nonstop design sessions totaling hundreds, even thousands, of hours, Adler and I dedicated ourselves to a journey toward the unattainable ideals of creative perfection. Complementing my architectural skills, Adler brought his own design talents, an intuitive understanding of art and aesthetics, and his insights into emerging demographics. It was a remarkable and stimulating collaboration.
An upcoming chapter speaks to my training in classical music; with these homes, we composed structures in a relationship akin to a musical partnership. My design studio became an open workplace where Adler and I, alongside the architects at Poon Design, improvised and pioneered new ideas for a stale housing industry. Back and forth we drew, revealing our belief that shelter is more than a roof over one’s head. Rather, it is also a form of art. We explored ideas of sculpture and composition, massing and scale.
We also investigated new ideas in infrastructure for lighting, mechanical, and plumbing systems as well as solar power. Our homes had expansive walls of glass and tall sliding doors for bright, airy interior spaces to connect to the outdoors. The public aspects of the homes—living room, dining room, and kitchen—were combined into one large, flexible, loft-like space with high ceilings and a sense of grandeur and luxury. We researched new materials, green ideas, landscape concepts, and construction methods that would be inventive to the market, fast to construct, and within a developer’s budget. As for speed, a custom home can take years to build, whereas our type of production home was to take less than half a year.
Again, the homes had to be built for a fraction of the cost of a custom home. We had to delve even deeper into the challenge of balancing quality with style by revisiting every building spec of a home. Instead of having multiple ceiling heights, as is common in a custom home, we limited our designs to two: eleven feet for the public spaces and nine feet for the private spaces (bedrooms and bathrooms). We also designed extremely efficient floor plans with
