California home blends indoors and outdoors through design and materials

A pavilion-style home located on a hillside in Los Angeles’ Sherman Oaks neighborhood, the Ridge Residence was designed by its owners, architects Peggy Hsu and Chris McCullough, of the firm Hsu McCullough, to embrace the surrounding topography while offering seclusion from the outside world.

It was this hillside setting that initially drew the architects to the site, as it offers both a connection to nature and an inherent sense of privacy. “The area is less densely populated on the hillside, and most properties have deep backyards,” says Hsu. “Our backyard frames an uninterrupted view of Fossil Ridge Park, which can never be developed, so there’s just a natural landscape featuring a hillside of oak trees and unique wildlife.”

While the rear of the property connects to nature, the street-facing façade creates privacy and filters the sometimes-harsh California sun with a large timber-batten brise soleil — a screen of vertical wood blades that control the solar heat and sunlight that enters the home.

Constructed from Western red cedar, the screen’s height matches that of neighboring homes, making Ridge Residence appear to be a piece with its surroundings.

This layered materiality also intentionally creates a distinct connection between the exterior and interior by crossing the threshold into the house. The smooth charcoal-colored stucco and reclaimed timber siding of the exterior continue into the house, guiding the arrival sequence and creating continuity. The irregular, natural flagstone floors also appear both inside and out.

Overall, the layered façade and dark material palette of stone and wood creates, says Hsu, a “cave-like cocoon that is comfortable inside, but also allows natural light to bounce into the space.”

The architects’ personalities are also apparent in the home, particularly in the primary living space, where McCullough’s love of music is revealed through an extensive record collection that spans an entire wall.

The kitchen is located at the rear of the home, beneath a generous picture window that captures the western sun and provides sightlines to the street. Given its proximity to the living room, its aesthetic relationship to the rest of the house was an important consideration.

“The kitchen is almost like a stage for the living room, so we wanted to ensure it felt like it belonged in the overall context of the room.”

Hsu and McCullough looked to Fisher & Paykel for appliances, tapping into the company’s integration capabilities and refined aesthetic to match their vision.

Not only are the column refrigerator and freezer integrated seamlessly into the cabinetry, but the black glass induction cooktop is the perfect complement to the charcoal timber joinery.

The downdraft range hood allows for considerable design flexibility. Here, the team helped the architects specify a retractable exhaust that was installed behind the induction cooktop, so when it’s not in use it can disappear into the counter space.

The unusual and textural mix of indoor-outdoor materials in the primary living spaces continues throughout the home. Upstairs, the master bedroom and a den are generous in size, and a roof garden is planted with native landscaping, blending the form with the hillside.

“Because the home emerges from the ridge, there was a conscious effort to select darker earth tones for the exterior materials,” says McCullough. “All the existing trees were left in place, and the home’s features were designed with them in mind, and there are planted garden roofs at the front and back of the property.”

Ridge Residence’s raw tactility results in a meaningful and rational relationship to its surroundings. As the timber silvers from the sun and the roof gardens grow, there is the sense that this home will be enveloped by its environment, melding into – as opposed to extruding from – the hillside upon which it sits.

To read more about Ridge Residence and see other projects from Fisher & Paykel, click here.

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