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Amazing Indoor-Outdoor Architecture Near Venice Beach

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Steven Ehrlich built his own house half a mile from the sand — and skipped the air conditioner entirely.

Houzz TV’s “Amazing Indoor-Outdoor Architecture Near Venice Beach” goes inside architect Steven Ehrlich’s own residence at 700 Palms Boulevard in Venice, California, a compact lot he shares with his wife, author Nancy Griffin. Ehrlich, a founding partner of EYRC Architects, designed the house to squeeze maximum light, air and openness out of a narrow urban parcel a short walk from Abbot Kinney Boulevard. The result reads less like a typical Los Angeles residence and more like a working demonstration of how far passive design can carry a house in a coastal Southern California climate.

• The 700 Palms residence, home to architect Steven Ehrlich and author Nancy Griffin, sits about a half-mile from Venice Beach and a short walk from Abbot Kinney Boulevard.
• Instead of conventional air conditioning, the house runs on deep overhangs, exterior fabric sunshades, cross-ventilation, concrete thermal mass and a lap pool.
• The project earned a 2009 AIA National Housing Award, and its design draws directly on vernacular architecture Ehrlich studied in Nigeria and Morocco’s medinas.

A Narrow Lot Solved With Glass

Venice’s residential lots tend to run long and skinny, and 700 Palms is no exception. Ehrlich’s answer was to carve an internal courtyard/garden into the plan and wrap it with large pivoting and sliding glass walls that fully retract, dissolving the boundary between the living areas and the outdoors. A glass-floored bridge walkway ties the upper-level spaces together, letting light drop straight through the section of the house that would otherwise be its darkest zone.

Multicultural Modernism

Ehrlich calls his design language “multicultural modernism,” and on this house the influence isn’t abstract. He has cited the courtyard housing he encountered while living and working in Nigeria and the layout of traditional Moroccan medinas as direct references for how 700 Palms channels air and light inward rather than out toward the street. The same logic that keeps a medina courtyard cool without mechanical help is what keeps this Venice lot livable through the summer.

Engineering Away the Air Conditioner

The most striking claim in the tour isn’t aesthetic — it’s technical. The house has no conventional air conditioning system. Deep roof overhangs and exterior fabric sunshades cut direct solar gain, cross-ventilation pulls ocean air through the open plan, exposed concrete acts as thermal mass to even out temperature swings, and the lap pool adds a passive cooling effect near the living spaces. It’s the same category of climate-responsive thinking that shows up in other passive builds, from Australia’s underground homes to bush retreats built around a lap pool instead of a compressor.

A 2009 AIA National Housing Award — for a Venice house with no central air conditioning.

Steel, Concrete and Griffin’s Textiles

Structurally, 700 Palms leans industrial: exposed steel framing and raw concrete dominate the shell. Griffin, a writer, is credited with softening that palette from the inside, bringing in warm, colorful furnishings and global textiles that keep the raw materials from feeling cold. It’s a contrast that shows up in other high-end builds too, where hard architectural bones get warmed up by interior choices — see the material mixing in this $65 million Beverly Hills mega mansion for a similar push-pull between industrial structure and livable finish.

Ehrlich has talked about the payoff of the location as much as the design itself — the pleasure of an open-air house that works with, rather than against, the coastal climate, in a neighborhood where you can walk to Abbot Kinney instead of driving everywhere. That’s the actual test of a passive house: not the awards jury, but whether the owners still want the windows open a decade later. At 700 Palms, more than ten years after the AIA recognition, they apparently still do.