Mary Blodgett and her husband, Carlton Calvin, came close to demolishing their modernist home in a leafy suburb of Los Angeles after buying the land in the mid-2000s. The single-story house in San Marino had been designed in 1954 by Calvin Straub, a leading proponent of Californian modernism, but it was falling into disrepair. The couple had even gone as far as to commission plans for an ambitious new home for the site before they eventually decided to remodel it and build a series of pavilions on the grounds.

“The main house has a kind of structural rhythm,” says Alice Fung, a founding principal of Los Angeles–based Fung + Blatt Architects, whom Blodgett and Calvin enlisted to lead the sensitive restoration and redevelopment of the estate. “We came to understand that rhythm and improvised around it.”

Fung’s practice had initially been contacted in 2009 to convert an “obsolete pergola” in the garden into a ceramics studio for Blodgett, the existing garage into a bedroom suite and to build a library for Calvin. Their approach was experimental: The only elements that remain of the original pergola are the roof beams and eight columns—the new walls are an infill of wood shelving and glass that looks a vitrine when viewed from outside; one wall cuts dramatically across a corner, diverging from the otherwise rectangular building to run parallel to the house. 

“We were really just testing the waters,” Fung says of an approach that would ultimately come to define the five-year project, establishing a sense of harmony between the man-made structures and the gently undulating landscape. In the main house, this guided how they opened up the interior while preserving the post-and-beam construction typical of the era. The house was extended and reconfigured to make room for a larger kitchen and to re-envision three en-suite bedrooms having direct access to the surrounding woodland, including from a private outdoor shower in the primary suite. 

It was a process that Fung characterizes as a “collaboration” with Straub and the site, one which was developed further when the architects were asked to design a guesthouse, library and pool house. “At that point, we created the master plan,” Fung says, explaining that they used the existing house to create a grid system on which the new pavilions were constructed. The form of the striking Brutalist-style pool house, for example, was informed by the orientation of the house, “but we also had to break from that so we could follow the landscape,” she says. As a result, in the guesthouse, there is another play of levels that allows the built-in cabinetry and banquette in the entry space to extend to become a desk in the higher bedroom area. “There’s a real flexibility in the estate,” Fung says. “It allows for a lot of variety in your experience of the landscape—it’s just a very exciting place to be.”