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Life-changing decisions rarely feel like them at first. Perhaps one small choice is made, and then another, and yet another, before something big happens. It’s the momentum that creates milestones, and architectural designer Grey Shaeffer of Willa Work studio understands that all too well.
“When I first moved to Los Angeles, Mount Washington felt like this secret neighborhood,” she says. “I felt drawn to it, but I lived in six different places before I moved into an apartment in the neighborhood.”
Grey was raised in Oregon and New Zealand before coming to Southern California for graduate school in 2009. She worked at a real estate company that “renovated hipster properties” in the city and daydreamed about the chance to update one on her own. Four years later, while habitually scrolling through listings, she came across one in Mount Washington that had a back cabin and spare lot perched on a slope. “The views were amazing,” she says. “The lot was lush and green, and that reminded me of my childhood.” Grey asked a coworker to put in an offer, and with no other competition, the place was hers. The steady yet swift quality of how this milestone appeared still stuns her.
“I had this home all of the sudden, very fortunately, but I wasn’t aware that the spare lot had been illegally purchased in a tax sale,” she says. “So I had to wait until that was resolved, and the people who bought it were very hard to get a hold of.” Grey bided her time for three years, from 2013 to 2016, building up funds and making plans for the property she would eventually build.
She imagined a hideaway of comfortable minimalism, where select materials complemented the land and created a calm, unified backdrop. “I was only allowed to do a 200-square-foot addition to an existing 460-square-foot house without submitting costly and time-consuming permits,” she says. “I kept thinking, How can I make the most open space on the smallest footprint? I kept reworking it and reworking it to see how everything would flow.”
As she tinkered with these plans, Grey met her now husband, Warren. They got to know each other in the bare-bones back cabin where she lived, departing for his place whenever it rained. And when they found out Grey was pregnant, it was finally time to work on the property—because, of course, that’s how life works. Thankfully, Grey had already completed a retaining wall between the cabin and main house, so she could focus on the other dirt in her path. “We dug underneath the deck to make room for a studio, and then enlarged and enclosed the deck on the main level,” she says, resulting in about 1,500 square feet of livable space. “The main level has two bedrooms and a bathroom, with doors that open to the living area and another back deck. So the home is very passive, because air can blow in and out almost completely unobstructed.” A Murphy bed and bathroom in the downstairs studio, plus the more rustic dual option in the cabin, completes it all.
She chose stucco, Douglas fir, leather, and cedar as the star features, which would be punctuated by details of hard-won expertise or thoughtful consideration. For instance, she learned that members of the construction team were experts in crafting horse troughs, and figured one would make for a perfectly luxurious soaking tub. So, she had it installed in the bathroom and layered a convertible ipe shower floor on top. “In the same vein of working with the materials of the location where you’re building, like stucco for Los Angeles, I also think it’s important to work within the vernacular of the builders,” she says. “If they can make a trough like nobody’s business, why not install a trough?”
The same nimbleness was applied to sourcing the salvaged doors and windows, reusing wood to reframe the cabin, and shaping excess concrete into a garden wall using a neighbor’s gifted succulents. In fact, Grey even stained every cedar plank for the exterior herself “while very pregnant,” she notes, with a laugh.
Four years and two more kids later, Grey looks back fondly on all the decisions that led her to this point. It seems fast yet slow, surprising yet predictable. “Transforming any home takes time,” she says. “There’s always a rigorous editing process happening behind the scenes, and what’s left is what’s really important to you.”
