Shaping The World As A Home | Erik Evens
Suzy Chase: When two podcasts collide, magic happens. Welcome to Dinner Party, the podcast where I bring together my two hit shows, cookery by the book and decorating by the book around here. We're all about cooking, sharing stories behind recipes, and creating a cozy home. I'm your host, Suzy Chase, a West Village wife, mom and home cook. Inspired by Martha Stewart trying to live in a Nora Ephron movie, surrounded by toile, plaid, cookbooks, decorating books and magazines, cooking in my galley kitchen and living my best life in my darling New York City apartment in the cutest neighborhood in the city, the West Village. So come hang out and let's get into the show.
Erik Evens: My name's Erik Evens, and I'm an architect in Los Angeles. We specialize in thoughtful, traditional and classical houses for smart, motivated people, and my book is called Shaping The World As A Home.
Suzy Chase: Your book Shaping The World As A Home has such a captivating title. It's a beautiful concept that I think suggests home is more than a place, it's a feeling that can be shaped and carried with us. So what does the title mean to you?
Erik Evens: Oh, well, that's a really good question. On a pragmatic level, it's derived from a quote by the philosopher Roger Scruton, who said, through the pursuit of beauty, we shape the world as a home. And it's an idea that's always resonated with me By creating beauty around us, we make our world a place where we can reside comfortably and live our best lives. And so that's really what the concept of the title is, and I think it's one of the focuses of my work.
Suzy Chase: Is that a random philosopher? I've never heard of him.
Erik Evens: Oh, Roger Scruton. He was a wonderful philosopher. Sadly, he passed away a few years ago, British philosopher who wrote considerably about the nature of beauty and the importance of it in human life. And I encourage all of your listeners to look up Roger Scruton and learn more about him. He did a wonderful video probably 15 years ago called Why Beauty Matters, and you can find it I think on Vimeo or YouTube. Well worth watching.
Suzy Chase: Let's start with you sharing a bit of your childhood home. For me, my own childhood home has such a huge impact on my life and aesthetic as you can see. So tell me about your childhood home.
Erik Evens: When I was born, my parents lived in an apartment in Santa Monica for many years, and my dad was a dentist and he was struggling to build a practice and they lived quite modestly. But eventually my dad, his practice became a success and we eventually, when I was seven, moved to a wonderful old ranch house in the San Fernando Valley here in Los Angeles in Tarzana. It was a house that was built in the 1940s, one of those wonderful California ranch houses that I think just worked so beautifully in the climate of Southern California board and batten siding and broad overhanging eaves, shake roof and big sliding doors that you could just throw wide open and flow from the inside to the outside. And it really supported what's become known as a southern California lifestyle. I think, of living in the out of doors and enjoying dining alfresco. We had a wonderful big veranda covered veranda that became another room of our house, and we would always be dining out there and my dad would be grilling on the barbecue and we'd be playing ball on the lawn or croquet or whatever it was. So I had what I considered to be an idyllic lifestyle as a kid, and I think the house was a big part of it.
Suzy Chase: Your early career took you through various design firms before your time with Mark Appleton cemented your passion for classical design. What drew you to historical architecture?
Erik Evens: Wow. Well, my journey has been a really interesting one. I graduated architecture school from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in the early eighties. And before that I thought I would be an artist and I actually started in art school at UCLA and then eventually took a class, an elective class in architecture and it sort of threw a switch for me and I took a left turn applied to architecture schools, got accepted at Cal Poly, which at the time was a wonderful, wonderful school. And I never kind of looked back and as with most architecture students in the United States, frankly worldwide, my training was exclusively in modernist architecture. All of the academies, that's really all they teach for the most part. Even today there's very few schools that have any kind of thoughtful training in traditional and classical architecture except as the kind of slideshow history class that you kind of fall asleep in architecture school.
So I was trained a modernist. I came out of architecture school, a modernist, true believer, but then I started to travel a bit and I went on European tour and traveled around the United States as well, and particularly in Europe, experiencing the kind of nurturing urbanism in great European cities. I mean, it can be life-changing, walking the streets of Paris can be life-changing. I just fell in love with the humane qualities of great traditional architecture. And so over the years has started to flavor my point of view. I had the thought that we should be able to do architecture like that now and have it be relevant to how we live today. And so I went to work for a variety of eclectic, interesting architects and ultimately spent a few years working closely with Mark and his point of view really helped seal the deal for me. And so now I design exclusively work that's inspired by great traditions of one kind or another, and I love what I do.
Suzy Chase: So in 2013, you founded Evens Architects inside of the KAA Design Group, focusing exclusively as you just said on traditional residential design. What was the vision behind starting your own firm?
Erik Evens: I joined the KAA Design Group as a senior architect in 1998, so it's been quite a while. And the journey to how our studio got founded is an interesting one. When I joined KA, the firm had a great reputation of doing kind of a spectrum of design. We were doing traditional work and modernist work, kind of a broad spectrum of different kinds of styles because Grant Kirkpatrick, the founder and my partner, he enjoyed all of this kind of work. We enjoyed working in so many different kinds of languages, but over the years, Grant's trajectory has been taking him more and more to the modern, and my trajectory has been taking me increasingly to the classical. And so it was about 15 years ago or so we started to talk about specializing. I think we felt like it was in our best interest as a business to take the two portfolios, the traditional work and the modern work and separate them and kind of market them separately because we felt that the best clients were looking for people that specialized in one point of view or another. So initially it was a business decision, which has been very successful, but what we found over the years is that this kind of specialization made us better at what we do, and it certainly has helped refine my point of view to circle back to the beginning on this for still one business, a business that includes both studios, but I have my own staff and my own separate place, and we do traditional and classical architecture.
Suzy Chase: Speaking of that, you describe classical architecture as a language of the beautiful, and many people view classical design as nostalgic, yet you argue it's perfectly suited for the modern world. I'd love for you to chat about that.
Erik Evens: Well, I think the language of traditional and classical architecture has evolved over millennia and it's evolved alongside of us. And I think because of that over those thousands of years, the language and the philosophy of classical architecture has become very finely tuned to our human nature. And so I think that that's one of the reasons why it resonates with so many people is the fact that it's become kind of carefully fine tuned to our needs and our wants, our aspirations, and those things are universal. I think that the modern talks about how we live in the present day and it talks about our technology and we have cell phones and widescreen televisions and the internet and all of these things that we found to be important to us that are backs of our existence. And all of that needs to be addressed. But the other side of the coin are the things that are eternal, the things that don't change, things like our human nature, our need for hearth and home and warmth and safety and security, those are things that are universal that were the same for someone a thousand years ago as they are for us today.
And so I think architecture to be really thoughtfully done needs to balance the modern and the classical. My way of balancing that is to take the language of classical architecture and find ways for it to address the way we live. Now, I think every house that we do in a sense is a modern house in the sense that it addresses the way people live in the modern world. What I'm interested in is finding something special about the language of traditional architecture and have it speak to how we live now.
Suzy Chase: Is that what you talk about in the book when you're talking about translating people's lives and dreams into their homes?
Erik Evens: Yeah, I think that's exactly it. Storytelling is very important for us as a theme. And every project we spend a lot of time at the beginning of the project with our clients purposely not drawing anything, avoiding putting pen to paper in a sense until we've crafted a story, a very thoughtful story about the house with our client, and we're really trying to tease out the story of their lives in an authentic way. And we actually go through a process and document all of this. At the end of that process, we end up with a series of core values for the project, essentially keywords that become touchstones for the way the project unfolds as a design. And those keywords represent a consensus between us and our client. Architects are really clever people for the most part, and they want to solve problems and they're very quick to grab a pencil and solve something, but it's really, really important to understand what it is you're trying to solve before you solve it.
I think sometimes architects will meet with a client and they'll decide that they have a vision for the project and they'll start off on a trajectory and the client starts off on a trajectory, but they may be diverging a bit. And since the client is not sophisticated in the language and the philosophy of architecture, the communication can be difficult. And so what happens often is six months down the road, the client is scratching their head going, how did I even get here? This isn't the house that I wanted. So our process is really designed to make sure that that doesn't happen, and then that makes the design unfold in an easier way because there's common ground that we all agree on upfront.
Suzy Chase: Now, are you referring to place proportion and timelessness when you talk about the values?
Erik Evens: Well, those are all important values to us. Our book is kind of centered around a discussion and an exploration of those values. And place, for example, is paramount for us. We're really interested in designing buildings that look like they belong where they are. It's a core value and it's essential to how we approach projects. I think that if a building looks like it belongs where it is, then it provides a path to a sense of belonging for our clients. It's almost as if they say, well, if the building belongs here, then maybe we do too. And that sense of belonging I think is something that's very powerful.
Suzy Chase: I love that. And that's home though. That's home right there. It's in a nutshell.
Erik Evens: Those kind of values are a big part of why I love doing residential architecture to be able to work closely with clients and understand their aspirations and then be able to kind of reflect their life back to them through architecture. It's why I get up in the morning and do what I do every day and why I enjoy it so much.
Suzy Chase: I'm so curious about one of the values in the book Timelessness.
Erik Evens: Well, for our work, what timelessness means is we're very interested in tapping in, as I said before, tapping into values that are eternal to people. And so when you're able to do that, when you're able to tap into those kind of values, then you stand a good chance of creating an architecture that doesn't feel like it's slavish to the current fashion or will become out of fashion in a few years. We're really interested in architecture that's aligned very closely with things like home and family and belonging and warmth and safety and aligns with those values in a way that kind of aligns with those eternal aspirations of human beings. And if you can do that, then you can create an architecture that will always be a value because human nature doesn't change.
Suzy Chase: On page 128, the old Agoura in Agoura Hills, California, and that house jumped out at me because I love traditional American style. That particular house is exactly what home means to me. Talk a little bit about the clients and how you worked their values in, and they knew that they wanted their house to reflect their values. A visual expression of values is such an interesting idea to me.
Erik Evens: In a sense that's what we try to do in every project, and I think that project is a good example. The wife grew up in the neighborhood there in old Agora, so she had roots that went back generations in that region. Her parents lived nearby, and when they had a chance to buy this wonderful six acre parcel studded with beautiful oak trees, I mean it's really magnificent. They wanted to create a house that felt multi-generational, that felt like it had roots there for a long time. And so we worked really hard to develop a language for the architecture, a style of the architecture that referenced great American rural architecture, farmhouses and country houses in the American tradition. It's a visual cue about the importance of history, and I think that that was very powerful for them. They have three wonderful children, and so creating an environment in the house that allowed them to raise their children in a thoughtful way was also really, really important. And those values kind of flavored the way the architecture was planned.
Suzy Chase: You talked about how you accommodated their desire for informal living and you created a great hall in lieu of the formal living and dining room. Could you chat a little bit about that?
Erik Evens: I think that's really an interesting blending of tradition and modern lifestyle. In a sense, a farmhouse of this kind built at the turn of the century, 20th century for example, probably would've had a formal dining room and a more formal living room. It was just the way houses were at that time. Modern lifestyle is a bit different. The way we live today now is often a bit less formal, particularly in Southern California. So I think it's important to address the facts of that kind of lifestyle, and it was important for our clients. So in order to address that fact of modern life, we actually went back to a concept that harks back to the 18th and 19th century of having a great hall, almost like a drawing room space that accommodated a bunch of different functions. And in this case, it accommodated both living and dining in one great space, which allows for the modern concept of free flowing kind of flow between spaces and provided a little more informal way to dine, which kind of addresses a modern way of living, but it's actually really an old idea in a sense that house is a very real blending of old and new.
Suzy Chase: I love how there's that enormous rug because I would've been like, we need a rug for the dining part and we need a rug for the living part. And I thought that was so clever that the rug filled up the whole space, it pulled it all together.
Erik Evens: It's pretty amazing. Joe Lucas was the wonderful interior designer there, and he really channeled the client's aesthetic and their tastes and everything he did there really supported the concept of the house. It was wonderful to work with him.
Suzy Chase: Talk about how the library informed your thoughts about the bedroom wing. I thought this was cool too.
Erik Evens: Yeah, it's a great story and it really is another aspect of how the client's values are infused into the planning of the house. A culture of reading was very, very important to our clients, and they wanted to raise their kids with a love of books and really kind of a culture of learning and reading. And so they were very determined on two things. One, to have a wonderful cozy library where the whole family could go and pull a book off the shelf and sit down in comfort and read, perhaps do homework for the kids, but they also wanted to make sure that that library wasn't isolated off in a corner, but was used on a day-to-day basis. So we decided to make the library the room that you circulate through in order to get to the bedrooms. So when the kids get up in the morning and they come out for breakfast, they walk right through the library. We created a wonderful kind of circulation aisle down the side of it that was very deliberate, but it opens fluidly into the library. So every day the children are confronted with books and have an opportunity to grab one off the shelf and read. So it's a perfect example of how you can take a philosophy from your client and be able to kind of really infuse it into the architecture in a way that affects the way they live every day.
Suzy Chase: How did you deal with the seven oak trees on the property?
Erik Evens: Well, for anyone that builds in Southern California, they know that oak trees are a precious resource which are very jealously guarded by the state of California. So oak trees, you can't take them out. It's very, very difficult to be able to remove them. And who would want to, and it just so happens this on this parcel, the place that you really want to build the house, the spot on the property, the highest spot that has the most wonderful views to the south is also the place where the seven great oaks were sitting. So rather than put the house in a different place, which nobody wanted to do, and rather than try to go to the trouble of moving or taking the trees out, which nobody wanted to do, we decided to build the house right in the midst of the oaks. It became its own project in a way because we had to maneuver the planning of the house in and around the root zones of these seven magnificent trees. So it meant adjusting the grates and creating low retaining walls around the roots of the trees so that they would be protected. And it meant planning and configuring the house in such a way that it related to the trees in a thoughtful way, not only just protected them from damage, but also allowed the family to be able to flow out of spaces and have the trees be part of their experience, a wonderful locale, and we were blessed to be able to build there.
Suzy Chase: I also love, love, love Stone Canyon in Bel Air from the outside, it reminds me of the Stephens House on Bewitched or the Cleavers and Leave it to Beaver, a beautiful home on a beautiful street. You write in this section that you and your team derive enormous satisfaction from taking a project designed by others and putting your stamp on it, and then you wrote, and there's another side to it too, which comes back to hope or perhaps the lack of it. I'm so curious about that line.
Erik Evens: Thank you. I am glad you like the house. We like it too. At the end of the day, it's a wonderful piece of really interesting colonial architecture. The house was built in the 1930s. It's one of those wonderful traditional builders houses that were built in Los Angeles at that time that were really thoughtfully designed by good architects, but maybe weren't built as well as they could have been. And so they often, by this time, they need some attention. There's usually deferred maintenance and badly remodeled aspects that need to be corrected. So I always enjoy finding a wonderful old piece of architecture and working to bring it back and make it alive again for people. And I'm also interested in taking houses that were designed by others and allowing our clients to make 'em theirs and make the house address their lives and their aspirations. So remodeling and renovating of houses is a whole different game, and it's one that we really enjoy and I think we're very good at regarding this house.
The clients were initially simply interested in solving the back of the house because the yard and property in the back was steeply sloping up one of those crazy Los Angeles hillsides that ascended from the back of the house, and it came down to within about 10 or 15 feet of the back of the house. So they really had no usable outdoor space. So all they wanted to was to be able to recoup this area back there and maybe add a little bit of space to the house. So they had pretty low expectations. And so the lack of ho question, there was simply a function of them not expecting to be able to achieve a lot here, but they were willing to give it a go. And through design process with them, we really discovered how much value they had in that property. We were able to terrace the backyard in a way that gave them several unique and really useful outdoor spaces as we terrace the hill up with some retaining walls, and then we took the inside of the house and completely reworked it in a way that really gave them wonderful utility. It gave them many spaces that they didn't have before. So I'm very proud of that project.
Suzy Chase: So you think they came to you and they thought you were going to say, can't do anything with the backyard, sorry.
Erik Evens: Well, I think they really wanted to try to do what they could there, but they frankly didn't have real high expectations. I think they had been told by others, for example, that it was going to be really challenging to do that. It was challenging, but I think at the end of the day, we really helped them to discover the hidden value that they had both in the house and the property. It gives me great satisfaction as an architect to be able to exceed expectations, and this is one where I feel that we did that
Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called The Perfect Bite, where I ask you to describe your perfect bite of a favorite dish.
Erik Evens: A house specialty for us is a grilled New York strip steak, medium rare, and perhaps a nice red wine reduction with lots of shallots and a simple olive oil, potato mash, and maybe some real asparagus. So put a little bit of each of those things on a fork, and it has to be my favorite way.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Erik Evens: Instagram and Facebook. So you can look us up there. Our website is evens arc.com, E-V-E-N-S-A-R-C.com, and you can see some of our work there.
Suzy Chase: This has been so fabulous. I cannot thank you enough, Erik Evens for coming on Dinner Party podcast.
Erik Evens: Oh, I've so enjoyed it. Thank you for spending some time with me today and had a great time.
Suzy Chase: Okay, so where can you listen to the new Dinner Party podcast series? Well, it's on substack suzy chase.substack.com. You can also subscribe to Dinner Party for free on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Additionally, the episodes will be available on both Decorating by the book and Cook read by the book. Long story short, you'll be able to listen to it virtually everywhere. Thanks for listening. Bye.
