What happens when a longtime residential developer of design-forward spec homes finally builds his own personal abode? The 30-something homebuilder goes buck wild. Well, sort of. As owner and Dallas-based Pierce Jordan says, “I’ve always had to kind of play it safe.” When, for the first time, he had no restraints, “I wanted the opposite of what I think a spec home would be.” Cue descriptors including eclectic, moody, inviting, and European.
Jordan had already broken ground on his home—designed by Austin architect Juan Carlos deLeon—when a large commercial project brought designer Evan Krenzien, of Evan Shane Design Build, to Dallas part-time. The two already followed each other’s work on Instagram, and it was kismet that they ran into each other at the gym and struck up a friendship. Partway through his build, Jordan said to Krenzien, “‘Let’s collaborate on my house and see what happens.’ I know a lot about design and construction, but with Evan being from LA, I wanted someone who could push me into looking at things outside my arena.”
Jordan was not interested in building a typical home for an unwed young person. For the 5,000-square-foot four-bedroom new build (with a one-bedroom guesthouse) in Dallas’s Bluffview neighborhood, with an exterior influenced by French Normandy architecture, the two concentrated on layering modernity atop classical European aesthetics. In this vein it was Jordan who pushed Krenzien into new territory. The Mississippi-born developer says growing up in the South gave him an appreciation for antiques and heirlooms. “I told Evan, ‘I want to incorporate things that I got from my grandmother or my mom,’ and I think at first he was kind of taken aback.”
“It is an example of a perspective that I wasn’t used to seeing and it’s honestly incredible,” says homeowner Pierce Jordan of the handmade ceramic installation by LA artist Ben Medansky that hangs on his foyer wall—the idea of designer Evan Krenzien, of Evan Shane Design Build. It pairs with a vintage bench from Box Road Antiques at Round Top and a Forom Platoon table. The home itself was designed by Austin architect Juan Carlos deLeon.
Art: Ben Medansky
The designer, who grew up in a 1990s Southern California home, was not used to looking back so far into history. His approach was to pair something contemporary with antiquity to make it “feel fresh and young.” To wit, a framed 12-foot stretch of salvaged 1700s European wallpaper that Jordan had purchased years prior hangs in the living room around the corner from a 3D Ben Medansky ceramic wall installation they commissioned in the same scale and tones. “Making the new feel more established and making the old feel fresh and current became the driving force of the house,” says Krenzien. “And it pushed both of us—me to the older and Pierce to the newer.”
When the designer came on board, Jordan had other defining design details already secured, namely stone. He’d traveled to Carrera, Italy, with Dallas’s Aria Stone Gallery and chose unique marbles that ended up acting as the project’s primary mood board. The saturated selections include Calacatta Viola slabs with a beige undertone and deep red and green veins that Krenzien says defined the whole home’s palette. “I used that as the grounding starting point for colors,” Jordan adds, including an all-red parlor, a brick-y butler’s pantry, and a sage green morning room. “When it’s nighttime and you have a moody red, the feeling you get is calm,” says the builder. “It was very important for me that the house feels like a safe haven when I come home, because I’m in construction all day.”
Underground living holds many negative connotations. Obscurity, claustrophobia, darkness. Yet, despite the premium we put on natural light and fresh air, there are benefits to subterranean habitation. Underground spaces benefit from thermal insulation against heat and cold, and building beneath the earth’s surface could help preserve ecosystems in the open air. What if we could embrace the benefits of subterranean dwelling while ameliorating the shortcomings? The Belgian design firmClaerhout–Van Biervliet Architects has a radical plan to do just this. The craziest part? Their prototype for the Periscope House could become a reality.
The project’s intricate complexity almost defies conventional design descriptions; it not only challenges common expectations of what architecture can and should do but also asks us to rethink the utility of imposing a dichotomy between physical and virtual realms, which are already merged in our lived realities. In short, the Periscope House — which is built completely below terrain level yet features a large central patio and a contour of outdoor space — addresses common issues associated with underground environments by introducing a dynamic system of movable double mirrors. These mirrors, functioning as periscopes, can be adjusted to bring natural light and expansive views into the heart of the subterranean dwelling, transforming the typically dark and oppressive atmosphere into a verdant oasis.
During the day, solar-powered mechanisms elevate the mirrors, while at night, they retract, blending back into the landscape. This dual-purpose design also supports sustainability by utilizing gravitational energy, which is converted into mechanical energy to generate power (the upper mirror doubles as a plant container for hanging vegetation), integrating green infrastructure with cutting-edge technology. Most crucially, the project’s thesis is that the periscope system is “more than a reflection of reality. It revolutionizes our perception by entirely displacing it.”
In this exclusive interview, Architizer’s Managing Editor, Hannah Feniak, sits down with with Xaveer Claerhout, cofounder and architect at Claerhout–Van Biervliet Architects, to uncover the ideas, inspirations and details behind the visionary design and to explore how a radical proposal is also a buildable reality and a plausible vision for the future.
Hannah Feniak: Congratulations on winning your first A+Award! What does this kind of recognition mean for your firm, and how does it aid in developing your practice?
Xaveer Claerhout: It is an important endorsement for us. Our architectural firm Claerhout – Van Biervliet is engaged daily in designing and realizing architectural projects. These projects are continuously tested against reality. With Metamorphic Art Studio — our artistic and creative studio, which operates from within our architectural firm — we, together with our son and visual artist Adriaan Claerhout, conceive and develop innovative concepts such as the Periscope project on our own initiative. The common thread here for nearly two decades now has been our conviction that artifacts in the near future will partially be able to physically metamorphose, meaning that they will have the capacity to transform and adapt.
In 2008, we launched the principle of this ‘Metamorphic Architecture’ in conjunction with an exhibition of our first manifest movie, ‘Kinetower,’ and the first metamorphic prototypes of transforming lamps in Verona (Italy). Today, this A+Award indicates that the Periscope project is relevant and appreciated by both a specialized architectural jury and a global audience of architecture enthusiasts.
View over landscape on level -1: upper mirror up/lower mirror up
No view over landscape: upper mirror down/lower mirror up | PERISCOPE – reality displacement as space enhancer and energy storage device by Claerhout – Van Biervliet Architects, Concept | Popular Choice Winner, Unbuilt Private House (L > 3000 sq ft) | Visualizations by Adriaan Claerhout
HF: Your portfolio largely consists of context-driven residential designs with striking geometric and textural elements. How would you define your firm’s architectural approach and design philosophy?
XC: This is true for our specific architectural assignments we have realized so far with our architectural firm Claerhout – Van Biervliet. We have clients who approach us for a tailor-made building for their specific program and context. We create their house, apartment, retreat or office with an organic and flowing feeling and functionality, where light and space play the key role. Our driving force is creating spaces that inspire happiness and well-being. Within Metamorphic Art Studio, we are looking for more archetype-driven solutions and innovations. The aim is not only to conceive but to also effectively realize these innovations as much as possible through integration into context-driven architectural designs.
We have become convinced through designing and developing many transformative prototypes, metamorphic light fixtures, buildings and artworks that there is an archetypal relationship between open forms and a lot of light and air — and vice versa. Some of our metamorphic artifacts, such as the artwork named ‘Cuts’ and the lamp named ‘New York,’ make part of the permanent collection of the Museum Centre Pompidou in Paris since 2016. Artifacts that can transform and metamorphose their shape in order to adapt to the needs of the moment are often intuitively and universally understood. Buildings come to life and open up in order to receive light and air where and when needed and can then close up again as if they were an organism.
Right: Upper mirror down, building closed | Left: Upper mirror up, building accessible
Upper mirror up; view over the landscape | PERISCOPE – reality displacement as space enhancer and energy storage device by Claerhout – Van Biervliet Architects, Concept | Popular Choice Winner, Unbuilt Private House (L > 3000 sq ft) | Visualizations by Adriaan Claerhout
HF: Your A+Award-winning project, PERISCOPE, imagines a semi-subterranean structure that uses retractable mirrors to bring light and atmosphere below grade to create a microclimate. What inspired — or, led you to develop — this project?
A combination of several elements: • The primal idea of retreating and being protected by a hole in the ground is a typically pandemic thought that triggered our imagination. • The COVID-19 crisis gave us time to conceive and develop this innovative concept. • The increasing scarcity of building land often results in enormous basements that nevertheless need to house primary living and working functions but always suffer from dreary ‘basement architecture’ with a lack of light and view. • By extrapolating the idea of retractable periscope mirrors on an architectural scale, light and view can be brought to underground levels, solving the above issue. • The basic fascination of finding solutions to discreetly nesting a building in a valuable natural environment. • The challenge of reactivating a Roman or Palladian building scheme by making it four-dimensional and adaptive. • Finally, the intriguing challenge of combining the centuries-old periscope system to bring light and view to a subterranean level with a gravity battery.
We have tried to bring all these elements together in a synergetic way. The short film, featured at the top of this article, illustrates how an underground building can come to life.
Left: Upper mirror down/lower mirror up, providing a view over the inner gardens | Center: Upper mirror rising | Right: Upper mirror up
Upper mirror up/lower mirror -2, providing a view over the landscape for level -2 | PERISCOPE – reality displacement as space enhancer and energy storage device by Claerhout – Van Biervliet Architects, Concept | Popular Choice Winner, Unbuilt Private House (L > 3000 sq ft) | Visualizations by Adriaan Claerhout
HF: With its dynamic solar-powered framework, imagined as a “space enhancer,” PERISCOPE presents an architecture that blurs the distinction between the physical and virtual realms — a phenomenon we experience daily. Why do you think it is important that architects explore this concept?
The physical reality is increasingly cannibalized by virtual reality. The latter tries more and more to compete with the ‘static’ physical world. It is Metamorphic Art Studio’s aspiration to provide a counterbalance by focusing on virtualizing the physical reality. Hence our fascination to make this physical reality four-dimensional cinematographic or metamorphic through art, design and architecture. This opens up a new truly dynamic world. Architecture designed and functioning as a living organism where all parts will have to interact extremely sparingly and efficiently. The tools are already available: Parametrics to design skin and bone architecture and by implementing mechatronica, Metamorphics to make this architecture smart.
HF: Conceptual projects are key for firms to hone their design approaches and fine-tune visualization styles. What role do “paper projects” like this one play in your studio’s culture?
In our view, Periscope is not a ‘paper project’ that fits within a utopian tradition. It is a visual 4-dimensional manifesto that opens up a world of possibilities and longs to be built in order to prove its case. The project goes beyond being an innovative concept, since the technical aspects and feasibility have already been elaborated quite extensively. Our goal is to find a client with vision, combined with a skilled team of executors in order to create magic, push boundaries and bring this project to life in this shape or another.
Left: Lower mirror descending | Right: View over the landscape, lower mirror down
Angle view of the upper mirror up and the lower mirror up, reflecting the inside | PERISCOPE – reality displacement as space enhancer and energy storage device by Claerhout – Van Biervliet Architects, Concept | Popular Choice Winner, Unbuilt Private House (L > 3000 sq ft) | Visualizations by Adriaan Claerhout
HF: What are some of the key aspects of the process of creating PERISCOPE that will impact your built output moving forward?
A periscope is bidirectional. From underground, the view over the landscape suddenly comes inside. But what is underground is suddenly also displayed above ground. Art or car collections can be stored underground and displayed above ground when desired. Geologically interesting layers or archaeological findings can be made visible at a higher level. The mirrors can also be tilted, varying the field of view. We are currently designing a ritual building where the mirrors transition from the earthly to the heavenly. The mirrors can also become screens and bring digital content. In other words, architecture in the sharp middle between the virtual and the physical world, or in Platonic terms the Periscope as a cave explores the difference between reality and shadow. Within a broader context, the Periscope project indicates that we are always looking to discover new design paths so we can create interesting buildings.
HF: If you had one piece of advice to architecture firms considering entering the A+Awards next year, what would it be?
An opportunity not to be missed!
To see more of Claerhout – Van Biervliet Architects’ visionary work, visit the firm’s in-depth Architizer profile, and be sure to explore the work of Metamorphic Art Studio and Adriaan Claerhout Studio as well.
This article was produced in partnership with Claerhout – Van Biervliet Architects as part of an A+Awards special feature series. Top image: PERISCOPE – reality displacement as space enhancer and energy storage device by Claerhout – Van Biervliet Architects, Concept | Popular Choice Winner, Unbuilt Private House (L > 3000 sq ft)
Cities in the US are embracing Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) to address the nationwide housing crisis. Often built on existing single-family home lots, ADUs offer an affordable option for increasing housing availability in established neighborhoods. However, like any new housing development, effective regulations are critical for widespread adoption. Los Angeles has emerged as a testing ground in using ADUs to address its housing shortage, providing valuable insights for other cities. The city’s experience underlines the challenges of establishing regulations, while also promoting the benefits of ADUs as an affordable housing solution.
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In 2017, a California law aimed at easing regulations for Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) – basement suites, garage apartments, and backhouses – went into effect. The impact in Los Angeles was dramatic. Within two years, building permits for ADUs jumped by 30%, making up a significant one-fifth of all new housing permits issued. In stark contrast, big cities in other states like Seattle saw a much smaller impact, with ADUs making up only 2% of new housing permits during the same period.
Across the country, ADU adoption has been slow. However, Los Angeles’ success suggests they implemented effective policies. This experience serves as a valuable blueprint for other cities struggling with housing shortages:
One of the earliest hurdles faced by Los Angeles was the cumbersome and costly permitting process for ADU construction. Recognizing this barrier, the city streamlined the approval process, reducing fees and eliminating certain zoning restrictions. By simplifying the permitting requirements, Los Angeles made ADUs more accessible to a broader range of homeowners, encouraging greater participation in the program.
As ADUs became more prevalent in Los Angeles neighborhoods, concerns emerged regarding potential impacts on parking, privacy, and neighborhood character. To address these issues, the city implemented guidelines and standards to ensure that ADUs complemented their surroundings’ existing aesthetics and scale. These guidelines covered size limitations, setback requirements, and styles.
A major concern in Los Angeles has been the potential for ADUs to become short-term rentals, further squeezing the already tight housing market. The city addressed this by implementing the Home Sharing Ordinance, which regulates short-term rentals in ADUs. This aims to strike a balance: ensuring ADUs remain a source of long-term, affordable housing while allowing homeowners some income from rentals.
Encouraging Affordability
Cosmic Studio. Image Courtesy of Cosmic Buildings
Los Angeles recognizes the potential impact of ADUs on affordability and has taken steps to encourage the creation of accessible housing options. The Backyard Homes Project provides a comprehensive package for homeowners willing to rent their ADUs to very low-income residents through Section 8 housing. This includes project management, affordable design and construction, and even landlord training – making the process more manageable. The LA ADU Accelerator Program connects homeowners with qualified older adults as tenants, offering stable rent payments and streamlining the process in exchange for affordable rent.
Los Angeles’ experience with regulating ADUs has been a learning curve, that offers valuable insights for other cities on similar paths. By addressing issues such as permitting, neighborhood compatibility, short-term rentals, affordability, and safety, Los Angeles has demonstrated the importance of comprehensive regulation in maximizing the benefits of ADUs while mitigating potential downsides.
LivingHomes / Alchemy Architects. Image Courtesy of Plant Prefab
The housing crisis continues to grip the US, but Los Angeles offers valuable lessons for other cities. Their success with ADUs illustrates an effective mechanism for boosting housing supply and ensuring affordability. By implementing well-designed regulations and adapting to challenges, cities can experience the benefits of ADUs to solve housing crises.
While most of the show was filmed at the Warner Bros. Studios in Los Angeles, the exterior shots of the Full House house were shot in San Francisco, California. When watching the iconic opening credits of the show, one might think the Tanner family lived in one of the Painted Ladies (or Postcard Row) on Steiner Street. In reality, the Tanners lived about a mile north of Alamo Square Park, at 1709 Broderick Street in Lower Pacific Heights, an affluent neighborhood rich in history, architecture, and culture.
The famous row of houses known as the Painted Ladies appears in the opening credits of Full House.
Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
The Victorian home, built by famed architect Charles Lewis Hinkel, is distinctly San Franciscan, with intricate moldings, bay windows, a brick stoop, and a red front door. It’s a real-estate-lover’s dream. You can visit the home, as well as Hinkel’s personal residence, a transitional Second French Empire home at 280 Divisadero Street in the Lower Haight neighborhood.
According to an article for MeTV, Bob Saget called the Full House home architecturally impossible. “While the real home may seem like it could possibly fit the Tanner family from an outside perspective, Saget said the house would have to have a rather unique shape if it were to actually represent what fans saw on the show,” MeTV states. According to Landis Construction, row houses are usually no wider than 12 to 25 feet, making 1709 Broderick Street much too long and narrow to house the spaciously wide living room seen in the show. In a Full House home tour for Entertainment Tonight, Saget joked that the house would have to be about 12,000-square-feet to fit the family. The real Full House house is just over 3,700-square-feet with three stories, four bedrooms, and four bathrooms, according to Zillow.
The renovation
In the years since Full House wrapped filming, the Victorian residence has undergone quite the transformation. According to Business Insider,Full House creator Jeff Franklin purchased 1709 Broderick Street for $4 million in 2016. His intention was to turn the home into a replica of the TV show set, using it to film the show’s reboot, Fuller House.According to Travel and Leisure, building permits fell through after some neighborhood pushback.
Rachel Swann, the director of luxury division for The Swann group (Coldwell Banker), came onto the project at the start of the renovation in 2016 and saw it through to the sale in 2019. The project was spearheaded by architect Richard Landry of Landry Design Group, an award-winning design studio founded in 1987. “I personally have done a lot of development myself and have overseen and worked for a lot of developers, builders, and architects,” Swann tells AD. “Typically on projects, I see a range. Some people have okay appliances, but then they’ve got great countertops. Or they’ve got cheap cabinets and cheap countertops but nice appliances. Everything they did here was top-of-the-line.”
