This 350-Square-Foot Silver Lake Shed Became an Expressive ADU

Retaining some part of the shed was required, but vertical opportunities inspired the design partners to approach it like sculpture. “Roger wanted some eye candy from the street,” Keith says. “Something to say ‘hello’ and ‘peekaboo’ from behind the other house and attract or entice people.” At the time, Keith was looking at Herb Greene’s Prairie Chicken House in Oklahoma. “It was like, how can you put this funky hat on an ADU?” Corie says. The iterative process landed them on a periscope skylight that soars 18 feet, waving to passersby and glowing like a lantern after dark.

Keith and Corie challenged their clients to keep the house tiny—it’s humble 350 square feet—instead of maxing it out to the 800 feet allowed by city code. “Some people think the value of a project is in its size, but to us, quality of space is an equally valuable metric,” Keith says. And it was one that enabled them to dedicate more budget to bold design decisions, plus create 400 square feet of thoughtful outdoor living space, capitalizing on L.A.’s great weather. “The size, of course, ended up being perfect,” Roger says, “and everyone who stays at the house is just madly in love with it and doesn’t want to leave—literally. The design, with the soaring height of the steel frame of the building, the skewed skylight, and the large doors and windows make the space really open, airy, and comfortable, and even feeling kind of big.”