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LA couple builds backyard cottage, then moves-in from main home

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A dying garage in Echo Park became a full-time home instead of a remodel.

Paul and Yuki Gasiorkiewicz owned a modest 1930s bungalow in Los Angeles’s Echo Park neighborhood, the kind of house plenty of owners would gut and expand. Instead, they tore down the crumbling detached garage in the backyard and, working with architecture firm Bunch Design, built a two-story accessory dwelling unit in its place. The project, captured in a video tour by Kirsten Dirksen for faircompanies, ends with the couple doing something most ADU owners don’t: moving out of the main house for good.

• The new structure sits on roughly the same footprint as the demolished garage, preserving the couple’s green yard, and reaches about 650 to 700 square feet through split-level design and cantilevered upper-floor overhangs.
• Yuki’s Japanese heritage shaped the design, most visibly in a wraparound engawa — a traditional wooden veranda used for lounging and moon-watching — and sliding multi-panel wood-framed windows across two walls.
• Large openings and cross ventilation eliminate the need for air conditioning even in Southern California’s climate, while the upper level opens onto sweeping views of the LA basin and surrounding hills.

Building Up, Not Out

Echo Park lots weren’t built for expansion, and California’s tightening rules around accessory dwelling units add another layer of constraint on top of the property line. Rather than fight the small footprint, Paul and Yuki treated it as the design brief: keep the ground-level print close to what the old garage occupied and push the volume upward instead. Bunch Design answered with a split-level interior and overhangs on the upper floor that claw back square footage a boxier structure would have sacrificed, landing the finished cottage at roughly 650 to 700 square feet.

The approach lines up with a broader shift among urban homeowners weighing a full remodel against building smaller and smarter in the backyard — a comparison worth making against a project like the metal house timelapse that walks through costs and tradeoffs for a from-scratch build. For the Gasiorkiewiczes, the payoff wasn’t a rental unit or a guest suite — it was a smaller, better house they preferred to the one they already owned.

Japanese Design Principles at Work

Yuki’s heritage runs through the cottage’s details rather than its overall shape. The engawa — a wraparound wooden veranda traditionally used as a transitional space between indoors and garden — wraps the structure and gives the couple a spot for evening lounging and, as the video tour highlights, moon-watching. Sliding multi-panel, wood-framed windows span two walls, a direct nod to shoji-style openings that blur the line between interior and yard.

The wraparound engawa isn’t decorative — it’s the mechanism that lets the couple treat the small structure like it opens straight into the yard.

Those openings do more than look good. They drive passive cooling and cross ventilation through the house, which is why the couple gets through Southern California summers without central air conditioning. It’s a lesson echoed in other small-footprint builds featured in projects like the shed-to-home-theater conversion, where owners squeeze outsized function out of modest square footage by rethinking the whole envelope rather than just adding rooms.

Views From the Upper Floor

The upper level is where the height-over-width strategy pays off most directly. Because the couple built vertically instead of spreading the structure across the lot, the top floor clears neighboring rooftops enough to catch panoramic views across the LA basin and into the surrounding hills — a vantage point the original single-story garage never offered and the main bungalow, at ground level, couldn’t match either.

Moving In for Good

Most ADUs in Los Angeles get built as rental income or extra space for family. Paul and Yuki went a different direction: once the cottage was finished, they moved out of their original 1930s bungalow and made the backyard unit their full-time residence. It’s a decision that flips the usual math on accessory dwelling units — instead of treating the small structure as the secondary unit, they made it the primary one, leaving the bigger house behind for the smaller, more deliberately designed space they’d built themselves.