Get in the KNOW Â
 on LA Startups & Tech Â
X
Design, Bitches
Looking to Build a Granny Flat in Your Backyard? Meet the Firms and Designs Pre-Approved in LA
Sarah Favot
Favot is an award-winning journalist and adjunct instructor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She previously was an investigative and data reporter at national education news site The 74 and local news site LA School Report. She's also worked at the Los Angeles Daily News. She was a Livingston Award finalist in 2011 and holds a Master's degree in journalism from Boston University and BA from the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.
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
Led by Cristobal Amunátegui and Alejandro Valdés, the firm was founded in 2011 and has offices in Los Angeles and Santiago, Chile. Amunátegui is an assistant professor at the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA.
The firm designs work in various scales and mediums, including buildings, furniture and exhibitions.
Its one-story, two-bedroom with a covered roof deck 934-square-foot unit is pending approval from the city.
Connect Homes
Connect Homes has a 100,000-square foot factory in San Bernardino and an architecture studio in Downtown L.A.
It specializes in glass and steel homes and has completed 80 homes in California. Its designs have an aesthetic of mid-century modern California residential architecture.
It has two one-bedroom models pre-approved by the city, one is 460 square feet, which costs $144,500 with a total average project cost of $205,000. The other is 640 square feet, which costs $195,200 with a total project cost of $280,000.
Design, Bitches
The Los Angeles-based architectural firm founded in 2010 describes itself as having a "bold and irreverent vision." Its projects include urban infill ground-up offices to single-family homes, adaptive re-use of derelict commercial buildings and renovations of historic landmarks.
Its pre-approved design, named "Midnight Room," is a guest house/ studio. Its bedroom can be left open for a loft feel or enclosed as a separate room. The design is a one-story, one-bedroom at 454 square feet.
Escher GuneWardena Architecture
Founded in Los Angeles in 1996, Escher GuneWardena Architecture has received international recognition and has collaborated with contemporary artists, worked on historical preservation projects and more.
The company has been approved for two different one-story, one- or two-bedroom units, one at 532 square feet with an estimated cost of $200,000 and another at 784 square feet with an estimated cost of $300,000. The firm noted the costs depend on site conditions and do not include soft costs. Those could add 10% to 12% to the total construction costs.
First Office
First Office is an architecture firm based in Downtown Los Angeles. Its approved ADUs will be built using prefabricated structural insulated panels, which allow for expedited construction schedules and high environmental ratings.
The interior finishes include concrete floors, stainless steel counters and an occasional element of conduit.
There are five options:
- A one-story studio, 309 to 589 square feet
- A one-story one-bedroom, 534 to 794 square feet
- And a one-story two-bedroom, 1,200 square feet
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.
The design team behind "IT House" is Los Angeles-based studio Taalman Architecture. Over the past 15 years, IT House has built more than 20 homes throughout California and the U.S.
The IT House ADU standard plans include the tower, bar, box, cube, pod and court.
The city has approved four options, including:
- A two-story including mechanical room, 660 square feet
- A two-story including mechanical room, 430 square feet
- A one-story studio, 200 square feet
- A one-story including mechanical room, 700 square feet
The firm also has another two projects pending approval: a 360-square-foot one-story studio and a one-story, three-bedroom at 1,149 square feet.
LA Más
LA Más is a nonprofit based in Northeast Los Angeles that designs and builds initiatives promoting neighborhood resilience and elevating the agency of working-class communities of color. Homeowners who are considering their design must commit to renting to Section 8 tenants.
The city has approved two of LA Más' designs: a one-story, one-bedroom, 528 square feet unit and a one-story, two-bedroom, 768 square feet unit. The firm has another design for a one-story studio pending approval. That design would be the first 3D-printed ADU design in the city's program.
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
Founded in 2004, wHY is based in Los Angeles and New York City. It has taken on a landmark affordable housing and historic renovation initiative in Watts.
Its one-story, one- or two-bedroom 480 to 800-square-foot unit is pending approval.
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.
From Your Site Articles
- United Dwelling Raises $10M to Address the Housing Shortage ... ›
- Plant Prefab Raises An Additional $30 Million - dot.LA ›
- How 3D Printing Could Help Tackle Homelessness in LA - dot.LA ›
- New Bills, New Startups Address Housing in California - dot.LA ›
- LA's ADU Culture Still Faces Financial Barriers - dot.LA ›
- What Will Take To Make Modular Homes Mainstream? - dot.LA ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Sarah Favot
Favot is an award-winning journalist and adjunct instructor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She previously was an investigative and data reporter at national education news site The 74 and local news site LA School Report. She's also worked at the Los Angeles Daily News. She was a Livingston Award finalist in 2011 and holds a Master's degree in journalism from Boston University and BA from the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.
There’s No Real Plan for Preserving Internet Content. Here’s Why That’s a Problem
09:09 AM | May 10, 2023
Evan Xie
Back in April, image hosting site Imgur – a popular option for users of Reddit and similar forums seeking to post memes or photos – announced a sweeping change to its Terms of Service. As of May 15, the site will no longer host “nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content,” and it also plans to purge “old, unused, and inactive content” that’s not tied to an active user account. Though some of the terminology in Imgur’s blog post – like “old” and “inactive” – leaves them lots of wiggle room to decide what gets to stay on the site, and they have even allowed a general exception for “artistic nudity,” the overall message is clear: the site plans to rid itself of NSFW content.
No one would deny that Imgur is perfectly within its right to host or not host whatever content it pleases. But the fact remains that, as of May 15, a large chunk of content that has been available on the platform for the entire internet to view and enjoy will simply disappear. In this particular case, most people will likely not notice that anything has happened to old pornographic images from Imgur, many of them uploaded years ago by people who have long since moved on.
Still, the situation points to a much larger issue that has loomed over the internet for its entire life cycle, and seems to still have no immediate answer or solution. Will useful or worthwhile content that’s on the internet always remain available? And if so, whose job is it to preserve and maintain this vast and unruly collection of information and data?
Over time, internet users come to rely on resources like Imgur, to think of them as something of a digital filing cabinet that you can always return to, open up, and find exactly what you need. But websites are not furniture; they’re the public faces of living, active businesses and organizations, and like everything else, they are ephemeral.
Twitter, for example, launched in 2006 and now sits on a massive compendium of real-time data and information about basically every aspect of human life for the last 15 years or so. Despite its utility as a resource and research tool, we now get daily reminders that all of this information is privately owned by a relatively unpredictable man who could do with it whatever he pleases. The Library of Congress used to archive all tweets but gave up in 2017. Now they only hang on to tweets of significant national importance. WhyNow notes that, on just about any big Wikipedia page, jumping down to the footnotes and references leads to a bevy of broken links, either totally dead or pointing to something different than they did when the article was first written.
In the case of Imgur, the Something Awful community has actually jumped in to respond. Forums like Something Awful, which goes back over 2 decades at this point, have been down this road many times before, with services like Flickr, ImageShack, and others once filling the role now occupied by Imgur before they also changed their terms of service or went out of business. So once members of that storied and controversial internet forum heard the announcement about the Imgur purge, they snapped into action and organized a massive project – dubbed the Great Imgur Download Caper – to preserve the image hosting site’s complete library.
This is something of a special case, though. Imgur’s library contains almost entirely still images or brief video clips, which are easy for a big group of interested users to divvy up, download, and personally store. As well, Something Awful is a devoted community, made up of a self-selected group with a particular interest in shocking, sexy, or memeable images. It’s only natural they’d want to preserve the Imgur collection for all times, even if other people are more than happy to see that particular archive go away. (The Verge notes that some on social media have cracked jokes about finally being free of their adolescent Imgur accounts.)
For internet sites and communities with a less passionate following, or with content that’s more time-consuming or cumbersome to download and preserve, casual internet community organization may not be enough to save them from permanent deletion.
Most streaming video platforms don’t provide users with any ability to fully download shows, let alone storing them permanently on a third-party device. While previous generations had physical media releases to fall back on, a lot of films and shows simply don’t get DVD or Blu-Ray releases any more, particularly if they’re widely available on streaming services. So when a streaming platform goes away, often its entire programming library disappears as well. That’s what happened to NBCU’s subscription-based comedy platform, Seeso, the K-pop focused livestreaming app V Live, and the streaming platform launched by Fullscreen Media.
I actually made one of those streaming shows for Fullscreen that disappeared from the internet forever save for the first episode which lives on as a YouTube clip.
To that end, mobile-exclusive streaming service Quibi also folded very quickly, but they worked out a deal to push a lot of their most popular content over to Roku Channel. Some of those Quibi shows have actually lived on in their new home; “Die Hart” and “The Most Dangerous Game” got renewed for second seasons.
The situation got some extra scrutiny earlier this year, when a federal judge ruled in favor of book publishers over the nonprofit Internet Archive, in what could ultimately prove a landmark decision. Four publishing houses – Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House – sued the Internet Archive for “mass copyright infringement.”
The Archive – whose stated goal is providing “universal access to all knowledge” – does not pay to license books from publishers, but practices what it calls “controlled digital lending.” (Under this system, the owner of a book scans their physical copy and then lends out the scanned versions.) They argued that this counted as fair use, but U.S. District Court Judge John G. Koeltl of the Southern District of New York disagreed. The Internet Archive plans to appeal the ruling; in a statement, founder Brewster Kahle argued that “libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products.”
If the ruling stands, it could prove devastating to widespread efforts to preserve internet content. Preservationists rely on non-profits like the Internet Archive (which also runs the popular “Wayback Machine” website showcasing classic internet content) specifically because they aren’t privately-owned companies. A paid subscription platform can’t take over Imgur’s content and claim it for its own; there are copyright issues and legal liabilities to worry about. So for now, this is primarily the domain of libraries, museums, and other community-based organizations. But if they’re under threat of lawsuit for downloading and providing access to copywritten material, it could potentially stymie all their efforts.
From Your Site Articles
- With Sky-High Stakes, What Can Studios Do to Fight Piracy? ›
- Watch: The Future of Content Moderation Online ›
- How Redditors Convinced ChatGPT To Break All Its Rules ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read moreShow less
Lon Harris
Lon Harris is a contributor to dot.LA. His work has also appeared on ScreenJunkies, RottenTomatoes and Inside Streaming.
Watch: Exploring Relativity Space With Tim Ellis and Spencer Rascoff
05:00 PM | April 28, 2020
dot.LA Co-founder and Executive Chairman Spencer Rascoff speaks with Relativity Space Co-Founder and CEO Tim Ellis about 3D printing in manufacturing, going to Mars, and the future of the new space race in the latest Strategy Session.
Strategy Session: Exploring Relativity Space With Tim Ellis and Spencer Rascoffwww.youtube.com
​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.
From Your Site Articles
- Long Beach is Becoming Home to the Aerospace Industry Once ... ›
- Relativity Space CEO: 20K Satellites Will Launch in the Next Five ... ›
- relativity-space - dot.LA ›
- Relativity Space CEO Tim Ellis On 3-D Printing Rockets - dot.LA ›
- Relativity Space Will Have a Launch Site in California - dot.LA ›
- Relativity Space Co-Founder Jordan Noone Steps Down, Hints at 'Next Venture' - dot.LA ›
- Relativity Space Soars, Lands $500M Investment - dot.LA ›
- Relativity Space to Launch 3-D Rocket Mission with TriSept - dot.LA ›
- Relativity Space Is Planning a Reusable Rocket - dot.LA ›
- Relativity Space Scores Department of Defense Contract - dot.LA ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read moreShow less
Annie Burford
Annie Burford is dot.LA's director of events. She's an event marketing pro with over ten years of experience producing innovative corporate events, activations and summits for tech startups to Fortune 500 companies. Annie has produced over 200 programs in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City working most recently for a China-based investment bank heading the CEC Capital Tech & Media Summit, formally the Siemer Summit.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/annieburford
annie@dot.la
RELATEDTRENDING
LA TECH JOBS