Life in a Laboratory of Ideas

In the Los Feliz house that designer April Greiman shares with architect Michael Rotondi, experimentation and artful details play a major role. Take the collection of children’s chairs lined up in Shaker-like simplicity next to a wood ladder. “I have to be able to sit on them even if they’re really tiny,” Greiman says. Or the large eucalyptus limb found by a friend that’s wedged under an archway between the living room and kitchen. “I took the wall out and figured something had to keep the ceiling up.” Or the ever-changing palette of rooms that once included blue and ochre but now consists of more muted greens and browns. “I’m working on color theory and its relation to myths. I just paint the walls myself to try ideas out.”

Greiman, a pioneer in using computers for art and design, bought her Spanish-style bungalow about seven years ago. With no overall plan in mind, she decided to leave the facade intact and turned the small rooms inside into one large living space that includes a combined cooking, dining and sitting area. “My accountant thinks I’m crazy,” she says. “I’ve turned a two-bedroom house into a single-bedroom loft.”

Every time Greiman rips out a wall or otherwise alters the structure of the house, Rotondi is there to help, as well as “remind her of certain simple forces, like gravity,” he says. Often, they collaborate. Their fireplace, with its chain-mail screen and mantel of steel and purple heartwood, has become a sculptural focal point in the living room. A plywood headboard in the bedroom neatly conceals a rack for clothing behind it. White wood boxes with piano-hinged lids serve as storage units, seating and tables throughout. Greiman and Rotondi also worked with other local architects and artists, such as Michele Saee, who designed the steel-rod light fixtures that arc through the media room, and Claire Dishman, who created the copper-clad front door.

The overall result is open space, not the sequence of rooms you expect in most bungalows. Instead, objects and colors--both unusual and mundane--come together in intriguing still lifes. To Rotondi, the house is “a domestic church with lots of shrines and altars. There is something very spiritual about it, and it makes me feel at home.” Though Greiman’s many assemblages are always in flux, she, too, is content: “I feel free here. I just keep building.”