Some homes are placed on a site. Others are designed in conversation with it.
Stradella Residence belongs to the second kind. The residence follows the fall of its Bel Air hillside rather than resisting it, so that architecture, landscape and ordinary daily life unfold together across a sequence of levels — each one turned toward air, trees and the long western horizon.
Architecture
A House in Conversation with the Hillside
The house is organized as a series of ledges. Each level takes its own footing in the slope and opens west, so the plan reads less as floors stacked on a lot than as terraces cut into a hillside.
Glass walls pocket away at the living level. The distinction between the room and the terrace thins until it nearly disappears, and the same stone and plaster carry from inside to out.
The palette is deliberately quiet — plaster, stone, warm timber. Light does the work. Through the day the rooms change temperature, and by late afternoon the western openings hold the sun until it goes.
