Residence / Los Angeles
Home improvements
How do you improve on perfection? For the owners of the Birtcher-Share House it meant asking what the architect would have done and matching his humility at every step.
Doss and Adel Mabe had just settled into a small cottage in Mount Washington, a hillside neighbourhood in northeast Los Angeles, when the low, lean, redwood-clad house two doors down suddenly went up for sale. At the time they couldn’t manage another move and a Hollywood couple bought the house instead. Yet the Mabes’ fixation grew stronger as they befriended their new neighbours and experienced the house more intimately. Doss, an architect, had heard of the property’s modernist designer Harwell Hamilton Harris but was by no means a student of his…
