Los Angeles-based practice Walker Workshop has designed a family home that features light-filled and creamy interiors in Los Angeles, California, United States. 

Named Rustin Canyon, the home is situated on a lot on facing canyon nestled in between Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades. The project site is heavily wooded and lush with vegetation, including coast live oaks and California sycamores. 

The surrounding and vegetation also complement the home in all colors, while ensuring privacy.

The house was designed for a family who have two children. The studio acted both as the architect and the general contractor of the house. 

The studio was also responsible for the design of several key elements, including the steel window system and the dining room furniture so that the design of the house was able to preserve its holistic language from outside to inside.

The house simply contains four rectilinear wings creating protruding corners that house different functions of the home. On the north side, there are three bedrooms with their bathrooms - all bedrooms are connected to the central space of the home. 

While a bedroom and a living room with bathrooms are designed on the south-east side, a garage is placed on the south-west corner. These parts are also connected with the heart of the home which includes a large living room and kitchen. 

The four walls of the single-storey home are made of floor-to-ceiling glass. "This allows nature and light to be drawn into the center of the house at any time of day," said the practice.

On the north wall, the studio designs a small fireplace surrounded by a terrarium-like garden filled with succulents. 

The kitchen, described as the "kitchen cathedral", is facing the south and features a soaring 15-foot-high (4.6-metre) ceiling, terminated by a plane of rhythmically framed glass. The kitchen can be the protagonist of design as it frames the full vegetation outside and has a breathing interiors. 

This “kitchen cathedral” features light colored marble countertops and simple cabinetry and looks out to a grove of melaleuca trees.

Inside, the architects chosen simple and warm material palette to complement the exterior language of the home. They used smooth stucco on exterior walls as the material helped the walls to be reduced in scale.  

Meanwhile, the material allowed "small variations in height and depth to reinforce the spoke-like character of the plan and create discrete moments for nature and views to be celebrated."

"To an extent the interplay of these simple stucco volumes and planted areas are a modern and minimal interpretation of the classic hacienda style home that was dominant in this region a century ago," added the practice. 

Other key design components include a walled courtyard which was created to make a private play space for two children of the family. 

In addition, it includes a large skylight in the floating ceiling of the master bedroom that looks up into the branches of one the existing coast live oaks on the property.

Floor plan

Section through entrance

Section through kitchen

East elevation

West elevation

North elevation

South elevation

The interior design was led by Lisa Petrazzolo, with art provided by Creative Art Partners.   

Walker Workshop was founded by Noah Walker in 2010. The studio designs modern projects based on "warmly minimal principles" that also integrate essential elements like light, material, space and the unique qualities of each project’s location.

Project facts

Project name: Rustin Canyon

Architects: Walker Workshop 

Project Team: Noah Walker, Elena Baranes, Nicholas Katona

Interiors: Lisa Petrazzolo, with art provided by Creative Art Partners.

Location: Los Angeles, California, United States. 

All images © Joe Fletcher

All drawings © Walker Workshop

> via Walker Workshop