ALLA KAZOVSKY did not take the gut-and-rebuild approach in renovating her modest, ranch-style house in the Hollywood Hills. With the exception of a new aboveground lap pool in front, the 70-year-old dwelling looks much as it did before -- an unprepossessing wood-and-stucco structure set behind a rose garden. So, what was remodeled?
Kindly step inside. Without denaturing the old house, the USC-trained architect reinvented the structure completely. Kazovsky stripped the old ranch to its structural bones, creating warmth with brick and exposed wood beams, while adding new details throughout in steel and concrete.
Only 500 square feet were added to the footprint of the house, primarily in an underground sauna, bath and laundry. The change is really in the carefully considered details, including a dozen new pieces of steel furniture, hard-edged and minimalist, of Kazovsky's own design.
The original house and the austere new additions live together compatibly. Much of that peaceful co-existence of old and new is due to the palette of materials.
"She made a very interesting choice to use only a few materials, and only natural materials, like brick and limestone and the hardwoods," says Marina Mizruh, an interior designer and friend of Kazovsky's who watched the redesign process.
The architect also simplified and opened the floor plan and created an intimate backyard patio where only dirt existed before, building a short retaining wall and covering the ground in slate.
--
KAZOVSKY'S husband, internist Dr. Alexander Popov, initially expressed doubts about the livability of the home four years ago, before the couple closed escrow on the 2,300-square-foot, three-bedroom house in Nichols Canyon.
"It was too dark," Popov says. "I wasn't sure we should buy this house." Indeed, the dilapidated structure stood behind a 50-foot-deep tangle of rose bushes. Instead of a backyard, a near-vertical hill bare of vegetation loomed near the back of the house.
Kazovsky's reaction was completely different than her husband's.
"I fell in love with the house the first time I saw it," she says with a trace of a Russian accent, left over from her childhood in St. Petersburg. Part of the charm, she says, was the 122 rose bushes in front. More important: She had a vision of how the completed house would look, and . . .
"I got a very good price," she says.
