Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects Turns a Santa Monica Garden into the Main Room of a Family Retreat

The 19th Street House sits in Santa Monica's North of Montana neighborhood, a leafy grid of family lots where most new houses either max out the envelope or hide behind hedges. Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects designed it for two attorneys and their two children, a family of Taiwanese and Chinese heritage who asked for one thing above all: a place to step away from a busy working life. Reportedly, one client wanted a great yard and the other wanted a great room. Both wanted the house to have a strong center.

What makes the project worth your attention is how literally EYRC resolved that split brief. The great room and the great yard are not two spaces negotiating for priority; they are one space with a retractable wall in the middle. The architecture does its most important work at the threshold, and nearly everything else, from the massing to the restrained interiors, is arranged to keep that threshold uncluttered.

Three Volumes, One Calm Street Face

From the street, the house reads as a stack of distinct volumes: white stucco at grade, a gray garage door, and a larch-clad box sitting above. The timber upper level gives the frontage warmth without fuss, and the stucco below keeps the entry quiet. It is a composed, almost reticent facade for a neighborhood where houses often perform for passersby.

Around the back, that same timber volume cantilevers over the dining room, giving the glazed ground floor a deep, shaded brow. The overhang is doing real climatic and spatial work here: it tempers the Southern California sun, frames the view out, and makes the dining room feel sheltered even with its glass walls fully open.

The Wall That Disappears

The key detail of the house is the pocketing sliding glass wall. When open, the glass vanishes into the white wall and the polished concrete floor runs straight out toward stepping stones, lawn, and a timber deck. There is no visible frame left to mark the line between in and out, and that is the point.

We would argue this is where EYRC's long engagement with Japanese spatial thinking shows most clearly, particularly the idea of ma, the meaningful interval between things. The garden here is not scenery viewed through a window. It is a sequence: concrete, threshold, stone, grass, deck. Each step is measured, and the gaps between them carry as much weight as the surfaces themselves.

A Living Room Built for Music and Light

The L-shaped living and dining zone is furnished sparingly: gray and cream sofas, round wooden tables, and a grand piano that clearly matters to the household. Interiors by Jodie Neve Design keep the palette soft so that the dominant materials remain the concrete floor and the daylight moving across it.

Exposed concrete on the ground floor is a sensible choice for a room this porous. It handles foot traffic from the garden, holds a little coolness, and visually continues the hardscape outside. Upstairs, according to project descriptions, the bedrooms shift to white oak floors, a clear move from public durability to private comfort.

Kitchen as Hinge

The kitchen sits at the center of the plan, acting as both connector and soft divider between living and dining. White cabinetry and stone counters lead the eye directly to the dining table and its navy upholstered chairs, then out through floor-to-ceiling glass to birch trees. For a family that asked for a strong heart to the house, this is it: the place where you cook, watch the children, and see the garden at the same time.

The glass chandelier over the dining table is the one decorative gesture that rises above the restraint, and it works because so little else competes with it.

Gardens on Every Side

Lizz Speed Landscapes planted greenery right up to the building's edge, so the house never appears to sit on a lawn so much as within one. The birch grove behind the living space softens the light, and the home office opens onto a clipped hedge garden on the side yard, a smaller, more formal outdoor room for focused work.

That side garden is a useful reminder that retreat does not require acreage. On a suburban lot, EYRC and the landscape team have given nearly every room its own patch of planting to look at, which is a far more practical definition of calm than any amount of empty floor area.

Why This Project Matters

The 19th Street House is not formally radical, and it does not need to be. Its value lies in how precisely it answers a common brief: a family wants space and a yard, and wants them to feel connected. Rather than splitting the lot between a big house and a leftover garden, EYRC made the boundary between them operable, so the two needs share the same square footage depending on the day.

For architects working on infill residential lots in mild climates, the lesson is clear. Spend the budget and attention on the threshold: the pocketing wall, the continuous floor, the overhang, the planting at the edge. Keep the interiors quiet enough that the garden can take over. Done well, as it is here, a house becomes a retreat not by closing itself off from the city but by opening completely onto its own back yard.

19th Street House by Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects, Santa Monica, California, USA. Landscape by Lizz Speed Landscapes; interiors by Jodie Neve Design. Photography by Matthew Millman.

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