Design, Bitches
Looking to Build a Granny Flat in Your Backyard? Meet the Firms and Designs Pre-Approved in LA
Adding a backyard home in Los Angeles is now nearly as easy as buying a barbecue.
Homeowners who for years have wanted to build a granny flat in their backyard, but dreaded the red tape, can now choose from 20 pre-designed homes that the city has already approved for use.
The shift, made official last week, will speed up a weeks-long process and bring more badly needed units to an overpriced market. It also has the potential to elevate the 14 startups and firms building the next generation of homes.
The designs for the stand-alone residences range from a 200-square-foot studio to a 1,200-square foot, two-story, two-bedroom unit. And many of the homes are filled with design flourishes, reflecting the diverse architecture of the city, from a house in the silhouette of a flower to one with a spiral outdoor staircase leading to the roof.
It's no surprise. The program was spearheaded by Christopher Hawthorne, a former architecture critic at the Los Angeles Times and now the city's chief design officer.
The firms are primarily local and startup architecture and design firms, while others are well-known with a history of building granny flats, also know as accessory dwelling units, or ADUs.
The standard plans avoid the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety's typical four-to six-week review process and can allow approvals to be completed in as quickly as one day.
Some aspects of the plans can be modified to fit a homeowner's preferences. Eight other designs are pending approval.
Mayor Eric Garcetti believes by adding more such units, the city can diversify its housing supply and tackle the housing crisis. Recent state legislation made it easier to build the small homes on the lot of single-family residences. Since then, ADUs have made up nearly a quarter of Los Angeles' newly permitted housing units.
Because construction costs are relatively low for the granny flats – the pre-approved homes start at $144,000 and can go beyond $300,000 – the housing is generally more affordable. The median home price in L.A. County in January was $690,000.
Here's a quick look at the designs approved so far:
Abodu
Abodu
Abodu, based in Redwood City in the Bay Area, exclusively designs backyard homes. In 2019, it worked with the city of San Jose on a program similar to the one Los Angeles is undertaking.
In October, it closed a seed funding round of $3.5 million led by Initialized Capital.
It has been approved for a one-story 340-square-foot studio, a one-story one-bedroom at 500 square feet, and a one-story, 610-square-foot two-bedroom.
The pricing for the studio is $189,900, while the one-bedroom costs $199,900 and the two-bedroom is $259,900.
Amunátegui Valdés Architects
Connect Homes
Design, Bitches
Escher GuneWardena Architecture
First Office
Fung + Blatt Architects
Fung + Blatt Architects is a Los Angeles-based firm founded in 1990.
The city has approved its 795-square-foot, one-story, one-bedroom unit with a roof deck. It estimates the construction cost to be $240,000 to $300,000, excluding landscape, site work and the solar array. Homeowners can also expect other additional costs.
Taalman Architecture/ IT House Inc.
LA Más
Jennifer Bonner/MALL
Massachusetts-based Jennifer Bonner/MALL designed a "Lean-to ADU" project, reinterpreting the stucco box and exaggerated false front, both Los Angeles architectural mainstays.
The design has been approved for a 525-square-foot one-story, one-bedroom unit with a 125-square-foot roof deck.
sekou cooke STUDIO
New York-based sekou cooke STUDIO is the sole Black-owned architectural firm on the project.
"The twisted forms of this ADU recalls the spin and scratch of a DJ's records" from the early 90s, the firm said.
Its design, still pending approval, is for a 1,200-square-foot, two bedroom and two bathroom can be adapted to a smaller one-bedroom unit or to include an additional half bath.
SO-IL
New York-based SO-IL was founded in 2008. It has completed projects in Leon, Seoul, Lisbon and Brooklyn.
Its one-story, one-bedroom 693-square-foot unit is pending approval. It is estimated the construction cost will be between $200,000 and $250,000.
WELCOME PROJECTS
Los Angeles-based Welcome Projects has worked on projects ranging from buildings, houses and interiors to handbags, games and toys.
Its ADU is nicknamed The Breadbox "for its curved topped walls and slight resemblance to that vintage counter accessory."
It has been approved for a one-story, one-bedroom 560-square-foot unit.
wHY Architecture
Firms that want to participate in the program can learn more here . Angelenos interested in building a standard ADU plan can learn more the approved projects here.
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But as Ring expands its user base, it is also drawing increased scrutiny from privacy and social justice advocates who are concerned about the Amazon-owned subsidiary's partnerships with law enforcement agencies and reports of racial profiling by users of Ring's Neighbors app.
Ring Chief Technology Officer Josh Roth spoke to dot.la about Ring's product development process and how his company approaches privacy and neighborhood safety.
Since the Amazon acquisition, Ring has developed some integrations with the Alexa system and other Amazon products. Are there ways this relationship may become even closer in the future?
Ring Chief Technology Officer Josh Roth
At the end of the day it comes down to what we call a "better together" story. From our side, we can create better solutions and systems that aggregate devices in your home and give you a better way of leveraging those devices together—whether that's interactions between an alarm system and a light, or your Alexa acting as a sensor for other things. There's a tremendous amount of work to continue to iterate and improve on that. No doubt about it, there will be future integrations that continue to enhance that experience.
How much do you see Ring as a smart home company vs. a home security company? Are there ways you might use the tech stack you've developed in ways that move away from the home security focus you've had thus far?
Our mission is to make neighborhoods safer. I don't see that mission changing. We are a safety and security company. With that being said, things you may not think of as safety and security at the end of the day can become part of a safety and security system. An example of that would be anything that can give awareness about the state of a home. Your thermostat has home and away modes so that it can turn itself hotter or cooler depending on whether someone is at home. If you can integrate that into an IoT system to leverage that awareness and tie it to your alarm system, there's tremendous benefit for your safety and security. There's not always this cut-and-dry IoT space and safety and security space. The reality is that if you do things correctly, they actually merge into one.
And of course as more of these functions become automated, there's going to be growing concern about security. There have been some horror stories about hackers being able to spy on families through their Ring systems. How are you alleviating concerns that someone might gain access to a customer's footage?
Privacy and security are really foundational to everything we build. We start with a security and privacy-first mindset and then we try to introduce those features to our customers, and we try to do it in the quickest fashion possible. If you take a look back historically, Ring was the first in the safety and security space to require two-step verification; we were the first to introduce end-to-end encryption. Ring has never been breached, but we put things in place constantly to improve on security. Where we have to, we put in tighter controls. But when we do it, we make it extremely transparent to the customer. From my perspective, security is of the utmost importance, and I think everyone at Ring and Amazon would tell you the same thing.
You rolled out the end-to-end encryption feature earlier this year, but it's turned off by default. Why make it an opt-in setting rather than an opt-out?
End-to-end encryption implies that there's a key that can only be used by a very specific system or user. It requires us to actually turn off some features that our users actually like to have, because those keys can't be shared in all situations. For example, with the iteration of end-to-end encryption out there today you can't have a shared user. The reason for that is key management and how you would actually hand those keys off that shared user for a temporary or permanent amount of time, and which videos you would give access to. We opted to give something that was the most stringent control we could at launch, and to give the users asking for that the ability to turn it on—with the intent of iterating over time and adding more features like shared users.
There's a handful of items like that. Another use case would be a third-party integration. If you use Alexa, for example, to do video recall or to see who's at the front door, they don't have the keys because we don't have a method to pass the keys from a user's phone to Alexa devices. It would break our user promise around encryption and privacy. We really wanted to focus on the beginning experience of end-to-end encryption being as tight as we could, and then adding to it over time based on customer feedback.
How do you balance privacy concerns with the desire to give customers access to new features?
The baseline default experience that a user gets is the highest level of security that can be provided, and we constantly iterate and improve on that. I look at end-to-end encryption as an advanced security feature. I use the analogy of a hotel room. You have the top lock and you lock the door and you put the sign on the door. You may find you don't necessarily need all that, but it gives you peace of mind. So we want to offer that to our users. But the default standard encryption we provide still provides encryption in transit and encryption at rest. And we always examine it to see if we can improve on that. There is a tradeoff between end-to-end encryption and some of the features we know our users like. But I can tell you as a promise from Ring: We will always push toward providing more security and more options for our users with increased transparency. Any time we add something new they are going to have awareness of it. Any time we give them something around security, we're going to give them a choice to enable those items or not.
You mentioned that Ring's goal is to make neighborhoods safer. Is there an evaluation process as you add features to ensure that you are meeting this goal?
We believe in the power of the community and the power of the neighborhood. We also believe in the privacy of the neighborhood. In addition to privacy shutters on our cameras, we also have privacy zones. When you set up a motion zone, you can block out certain areas to respect the privacy of your neighbors if you choose to do so. Again, it's all put in the hands of customers for customer choice.
We also work with public safety agencies. We've been a great resource for COVID-19 information. We work with local fire and police departments. What that means is they have the ability to request videos (through the Neighbors app). They provide requests in a public way so that everyone is completely aware and it's transparent to the entire community what's being asked of them.
Those partnerships with law enforcement have been controversial. Are there ways you approach product development to ensure devices aren't being used as tools for mass surveillance?
Everything we do is customer first. Our customers are the neighbors who live in those neighborhoods. Our customer is not the police department. It's not the fire department. Our customer is the user who has a home, who's putting a Ring doorbell on their house. We start with that premise, and we build everything around that from a privacy and security perspective. Any time that there's anything involving a public safety agency, users have a choice and it's entirely up to them when and if they share information, when and if they share videos, when and if they work with those agencies. We've seen nothing but positive things come out of that. Kidnappings have been solved because of people working with neighborhood agencies. Neighbor advocates are helping track down things like package theft. We're big believers in people working together. We're big believers in customer choice.
Is there a limit to customer choice? Ring has said in the past it won't use facial recognition technology. What if customers want it? And are there other features that may be off the table?
It's a hard question to answer because I can't predict the future of what I haven't built yet. What I can tell you is we don't use facial recognition on any of our devices or services and we will never sell facial recognition technology to law enforcement. Privacy is so important to us. Anything we build will include these strong privacy protections for our neighbors.
We go through privacy reviews, legal reviews, customer reviews, and internal discussions. We make decisions as to whether we think the items we want to build meet the mission to make neighborhoods safer. Is it in the customer's best interest? Is it providing additional privacy, security, and transparency to the customer? If we can say yes to all of those things, I think we are able to build them. If we have question marks, we don't build them.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Tim Ellis
Tim Ellis is the co-founder and CEO of Relativity, the first autonomous factory and launch service for rockets. Relativity recently created the largest robotic metal 3D printer in the world and has tested our entirely 3D printed Aeon rocket engine over 180 times. Previously responsible for bringing metal 3D printing into Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, and a propulsion development engineer on Crew Capsule RCS thrusters, BE-4, and New Glenn. Alumni of USC and played a leadership role in launching the first student designed and built rocket into near space. Testified to the US Senate on commercial space policy and is the youngest member on the National Space Council UAG by nearly 2 decades, and directly advises the United States White House on all space policy. Has spoken at numerous conferences including CBInsights Aha! and TEDx. Relativity is backed by Playground Global, Social Capital, Y Combinator, Mark Cuban, USC, and Stanford.
Spencer Rascoff
Spencer Rascoff is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire and dot.LA, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. He is currently executive chairman of dot.LA and a board member at TripAdvisor. In the fall of 2019 Spencer was a Visiting Executive Professor at Harvard Business School where he co-taught the "Managing Tech Ventures" course. In 2015, Spencer co-wrote and published his first book, the New York Times' Best Seller "Zillow Talk: Rewriting the Rules of Real Estate." Spencer is the host of "Office Hours," a monthly podcast on dot.LA featuring candid conversations between prominent executives on leadership, diversity and inclusion, and startups.
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