Granada Form Carves a White Stucco Cube in Echo Park into a Family Home, Garden Room and Neighborhood Coffee Stop

Angelino Heights is the corner of Echo Park that Los Angeles holds up as proof it once had Victorians. Into that setting, Granada Form has dropped something with no gingerbread at all: a white stucco cube roughly 25 feet on a side, cut through with sharp rectilinear openings. It is an accessory dwelling unit, the secondary building that California's housing reforms have made the most common new house type in the city. Here it is also the home of its designers, architect Isaac Watters and interior designer Sydney Wayser. Both are musicians, and Granada Form served as its own general contractor.

The interesting part is not that the cube is minimal. Plenty of ADUs are white boxes. What stands out is how much life the designers fit into the backyard-unit format without letting it feel like a backyard unit. The building holds a two-bedroom family home over three levels, counting the roof. It sits in a gravel garden that works as an outdoor room, and the property has become a neighborhood stop: Granada, a weekday coffee counter, operates from 1451 Carroll Avenue. The ADU is being tested here as civic infrastructure rather than as overflow housing.

A Cube That Refuses Ornament, Then Earns It Back

From the street, the building reads in fragments. A tall slatted timber fence screens the ground floor, so what you see first is the upper stucco mass and its openings. One square cutout frames a timber stair, which turns circulation into a kind of display window. Another recessed upper window sits deep in the wall, so the thickness of the volume does the work that trim and brackets do on the Victorians nearby.

We like that the cutouts are subtractive rather than applied. The facade has no cladding changes or color blocking, only depth, shadow and the occasional glimpse of wood behind. A wave-profile polished steel bench against the white wall gives the base one playful, reflective element, and an orange tree in fruit does the rest. The restraint is deliberate, and the garden is trusted to soften it.

Up Through the Roof

The roof is where a 25-foot footprint gets its extra square footage. A recessed stair opening punches through the top of the cube onto a planted terrace, and from there the view runs out over the hillside neighborhood. Looking back down, the white plaster stairwell becomes a vertical light shaft that ends in flowering shrubs and the timber fence below.

This is the most useful lesson in the project for anyone designing small. The stair is not tucked away as a cost. It is the spine that ties garden, home and sky together, and each end of it opens onto something planted.

A Ground Floor Built Around One Long Table

The ground floor is a single open room organized by a long white dining table with spindle-back chairs and paper pendant lamps. The white stair floats above the timber kitchen island, so the stair, kitchen and dining area share one volume rather than being split into rooms. In a house this compact, that choice makes the plan feel generous instead of efficient.

The edge toward the garden is handled with unusual care. A curtain hangs between perforated steel posts beside a glazing wall, so the boundary between inside and garden can be thickened or dissolved by hand. It is a soft, almost theatrical device, which seems fitting for two musicians who presumably think about rooms in terms of how they sound and how they host.

Stone, Oak and a Piano in the Kitchen

The kitchen island is the one place the palette gets loud: veined green and gold stone, set against timber cabinets, with an espresso machine on the counter and an upright piano just behind. Given the coffee counter on the property, the espresso machine reads less as a lifestyle prop and more as a working tool. A built-in bookshelf at the end of the island and grey stools make it a place to sit, not just to cook.

Above it, the open-riser stair with a white wire mesh guard rises over oak cabinetry. The mesh lets the stair stay visually light while meeting the practical demands of a home with a child. Storage is tucked under the stair rather than given its own wall, and in a building this small that kind of overlap matters.

Built-Ins Doing the Heavy Lifting

Wayser's interior training shows most clearly in the furniture that is not furniture. A built-in oak bench sofa anchors a living corner beneath framed prints and beside a low gold table. A curved white desk with open shelves and tall drawers fills another corner, and a peg rail and a low front-facing bookshelf turn a plain wall into a usable surface.

This is how small houses should be fitted out. Every built-in absorbs a function that would otherwise need a freestanding piece and floor space around it, and the oak gives the white shell a consistent warmth from room to room.

Bedrooms Scaled for a Child

The upper floor includes a child's room, and it is treated with the same seriousness as the rest of the house. A built-in window seat and desk nook catch afternoon sun, a pale wood side table holds a mushroom lamp, and a bird mobile hangs in view of a palm outside the window. Nothing here is precious, and the built-ins leave the floor open for play.

It is worth noting how often ADUs are imagined as studios for a single tenant or a grandparent. This one assumes a family, and the plan is shaped around that from the start.

Ochre Tile and a Balcony Off the Bedroom

The bathrooms bring in the second strong color: ochre square tile, paired with a floating oak vanity, a round mirror, a rain showerhead and, in the main suite, a freestanding tub. A metal bench, a monstera and a dotted orange artwork set the approach. The tile is warm enough to read as a continuation of the oak rather than a clinical break from it.

A small balcony with potted plants, screened by a sheer curtain, gives the bedroom its own outdoor edge. Even on the upper floor, every major room seems to have access to some kind of planted exterior.

A Gravel Garden as the Real Living Room

The garden may be the project's strongest piece of design. Flagstone stepping stones cross gravel and moss toward a concrete table and benches under a palm. Two white metal chairs sit among silvery eucalyptus. People gather under an overhanging branch in front of the house. The lot is landscaped as a sequence of small outdoor rooms rather than a lawn with a building on it.

Gravel is a sensible choice for Los Angeles: permeable, low maintenance and forgiving under foot traffic. It also lets the ground plane read as continuous from fence to front door, which supports the sense that the house and garden belong to one composition.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings make the stacking logic clear. The ground floor plan places the house within its garden, with paths, seating, planted borders and a parked car all accounted for on the lot. The second floor holds two bedrooms, closets and the bathroom with its freestanding tub, all organized around the stair landing. The roof deck plan shows a long table for ten with potted trees at the corners, so the top of the cube is designed as a dining room as much as a terrace.

Why This Project Matters

Los Angeles is building ADUs by the thousand, and most of them are prefabricated boxes slotted behind existing houses with little thought about the garden, the street or the people who will live there. Granada Echo Park House shows what the type can be when the architects are also the residents and the builders. It is a full family home, a garden and a roof deck, and it has a public role, all inside a footprint most people would treat as a granny flat.

It also makes a quiet argument about context. Rather than imitating the Victorians of Angelino Heights, the cube relies on depth, planting and use to fit in. Its openings, its garden and the coffee counter on the property give neighbors reasons to look in and stop by. For a typology often accused of eroding neighborhood character, that is a useful counterexample.

Granada Echo Park House by Granada Form (Isaac Watters and Sydney Wayser), Angelino Heights, Los Angeles, United States, completed 2025. Photography by Justin Chung.

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