Sticks & Stones / Steel & Glass. Anthony Poon
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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 no wasteful vestibules, niches, and hallways.
Not only did such straightforward, though not always obvious, approaches simplify the construction of the home and thereby save tremendous amounts of money, but the ideas delivered powerful, dramatic spaces of architecture. The design was not about crown moldings, vaulted ceilings, and arches; rather, the homes represented elemental aspects of architecture: light, proportion, scale, and space.
To save even more on costs, we found materials and finishes that were affordable but delivered the same sense of quality as is found in a luxury estate, such as porcelain floor tile in lieu of marble, textured precast concrete veneer in place of exterior limestone, or prefabricated cabinets of Italian high-finish laminates instead of custom wood or lacquered cabinets. We even created a new front-entry door concept, filling a fiberglass-shell door with concrete so as to affordably provide quality, security, and acoustic insulation. These ideas, alongside dozens more, delivered a high-end modern home at a budget previously considered impossible. We even planned to use prefabricated elements such as roof trusses that would be high in quality but save a tremendous amount of time and money.
In the first year of our design work, research, and development, we were designing without a physical site in mind since the developer had not yet purchased any properties. We planned in the abstract without a particular climate, orientation toward a particular view, specific topography, or solar direction. We were creating designs so potent in their simplicity that they were adaptable to any terrain, city, and general locale.
At the end of this first year, and after many presentations to potential investors, Alta Verde successfully landed a large capital commitment from an international investor and also obtained construction financing from two California lenders who embraced the Adler/Poon vision.
Things were about to move very quickly. Alta Verde’s first deal was in Palm Springs at a development called Escena. In 2010 and 2011, Poon Design developed four home prototypes for 130 lots on 21 acres. All four of our prototypes were three-bedroom homes, between 2,200 and 2,600 square feet, fitting on an average lot size of just 7,200 square feet.
We utilized many of the ideas from our first year of research, which we then adapted and enhanced for this desert climate. These ideas included extended roof overhangs for passive cooling and protection from the heat, drought-tolerant native landscaping, and the use of regional building materials. The green home scheme provided the base design with a reflective, energy-efficient cool roof, electric-car charger setups, LED lighting, and a 2- to 6-kW rooftop solar array.
The media following the project coined it “Modern for the Masses,” certainly a clever and appropriate moniker at the time. Danny Yee, our creative partner and graphic artist, dubbed the new kind of projects “This Century Modern,” a nod to the ever-popular Midcentury Modern that signaled the first phase of a different building style in California and around the world. Danny’s phrase