In order to build a new house for his family in Los Angeles, which is situated in the Santa Monica Canyon just a block from the ocean, Eric Moss collaborated with his own studio. The structure, known as “A+M House,” has a distinctive shape that is narrow at the bottom and widens toward the top.
Moss looked to the work of American designer John Entenza, widely regarded as one of the pioneers of Modernism, when creating the Pacific Palisades home for himself and his teenage children.
Entenza established the publication “Arts & Architecture” in the 1940s, which has been credited with “acting like sunshine on West Coast architects” and giving some of today’s most well-known figures a platform, including Richard Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright. Entenza started the “Case Study House” program through his magazine, which saw the top architects of the day construct experimental homes following the post-World War II housing boom.
“The house is very much conceived in the intellectual spirit of discovery that originated with John Entenza’s Arts & Architecture Case Study Houses of the 1940s to the 1960s, with its affinity for new materials and construction techniques.
The difference in conceptual content, in this 2022 rendition, is that the A+M house belongs less to a shared confidence in form and shape and space and material types, and more to a personalized conception of contemporary architecture.”
The house was built with an upward curve, loosely resembling the shape of a guitar, to make up for being on a small piece of land. The building’s smooth, green-toned exterior, which has been finished with an industrial coating to waterproof the wooden frame, has corners that change from rounded to pointed edges as they approach the top of the structure.
There are three stories of rooms inside. A skylight in the home’s atrium fills the space with light, and as you ascend the stairs and look out the floor-to-ceiling windows, you can see out over the neighborhood. Highlights include a bowl-shaped theater room with built-in stadium seating and a roof terrace with views of the ocean.
