Terracotta Stack

Twenty-six hundred square feet of lot on a Highland Park cross street, hemmed on three sides. The only direction available was up, which is what the old houses on this road did too, and the building takes that lineage seriously without dressing up as a period piece. Four levels, each one a single room deep, stacked around a stair that runs up the western party wall. The terracotta blocks are exposed inside and out and were laid in a stretcher bond with the perforations turned to face outward on the upper two floors, so the wall becomes progressively more porous as it rises. From the street the building reads as solid at the base and almost woven at the top. Red oxide floors were laid by a contractor out of Oxnard and have the deep, slightly uneven sheen that comes from the traditional process. They will need re-waxing every four or five years and the owner has the name of the man who does it. The top floor is a single open room under a clay tile roof with the rafters exposed, currently used as a studio. It gets cross ventilation on all four sides and is the coolest room in the building for most of the year, which is not what anyone expects of a top floor in this county. Three bedrooms across the middle two levels, none of them large. This is a house for two or three people who like stairs.