Landscraper ADU

Project: 1000 sf ADU

Year: 2024

We love that these ADU’s come with their own constraints and therefor opportunities. This one is that the primary residence is set very far back along the rear property line. This forces the ADU to sit in front of the house and poses the interesting dliemma of how one gets to the primary house. Does one go around it? In this case we decided to go over the ADU, siting the building into the hill right in front of the main house, burying it and making it part of the landscape. But of course we want to make an ADU filled with light and expanse, so we developed several skylights that stream light into the back of the ADU. A circular skylight sits above the shower allowing the bathroom to seem as if it pierces the sky. A large skylight over the kitchen and living room presents as a large geometric object in the room above. We had fun taking queues from Albert Freys’ Palm springs house with the large rock coming into the house, in our case we created one with the large skylight object projecting into the upstairs spaces and making a scultural object on the deck.