(This article was published in Metropolitan Home magazine) The enigmatic new house on the block doesn’t exactly stand out among the two-story California ranch houses of Diamond Bar (not far from L. A.), but it doesn’t really conform either. With a long, horizontal garage and hipped roofs, it seems perfectly at home among its neighbors. But the canted walls and tiered eaves also recall buildings in more exotic places. They suggest that its architect designed to a different, perhaps Asian, drummer. This suggestion becomes stronger where a heavy yoke-shaped roof shelters a front door facing a side yard. As Los Angeles architect Steven Ehlrich explains it: “The feng shui master said the door had to face away from the main street.” Ehlrich’s reputation is based on crisp, white designs that belong to the venerable tradition of Southern California modernism. But having lived in Africa and traveled extensively in Asia, he has also acquired an abiding respect for the simplicity of vernacular construction. The owners of this custom-made home are part of a new sophisticated wave of immigrants who have come here not to melt into America’s pot but to proudly contribute their cultural piece to a rich mosaic. They belong to a new generation of Asians who have largely bypassed old-style Chinatowns in favor of more affluent enclaves. As in other cities, some new Angelenos have built homes that marry American and Chinese traditions. He welcomed the request of his clients, a recently immigrated Taiwanese couple with two young children, to translate traditional Chinese architecture into an American idiom – and to accommodate the rules of feng shui, the ancient wisdom of balancing forces to conserve a building’s energy. “I said I had no problem working with a higher authority,” Ehlrich remembers, “as long as it was not inconsistent with Western logic.” But Ehlrich’s capacious solution is hardly an exercise in kitsch sentimentality. His Asian-American design exemplifies cultural fusion. The homeowners here followed the same path and engaged feng shui masters to help create an auspicious design. In the spirit of what Ehlrich calls “architectural anthropology,” he planned the structure with the wisdom of this ancient discipline. Doors throughout the house never face each other across corridors but open instead onto blank walls. The staircase points away from the entry – lest prosperity and luck fly straight out the door. Ehlrich based the house on the “bagua” of feng shui, a nine-chambered “map” of home’s attributes. The couple made the same request of their interior designer, Luis Ortega. “They asked for a contemporary house that would reflect their background and culture, so there’s a great deal of influence from China,” says the Cuban-born Ortega, who practices in Beverly Hills. “Some of the silks are Italian, but the weaves and colors remind you of Chinese fabrics.” The designer also used Chinese antiques and pieces influenced by Chinese design. Mixing old and new, he combined an opium bed in the informal inglenook with a leather ottoman and contemporary wing chairs by McGuire. “Sometimes we put things intended for one use to a different function,” says Ortega. In the inglenook, a painter’s table for calligraphy holds the table lamp; in the dining room, an altar table became a buffet. Frequently, Chinese temples are two-story structures organized around a tall, colonnaded central hall, and Ehlrich adapted that plan to the house. The hall, with a cherry staircase leading to a gallery that rings the two-story entry atrium, comes at a monumental moment within a house, the scale of which is otherwise modest and intimate. The atrium provides the design’s great surprise – a tall and inspiring secret that lends subtle religious connotations. It also turns the ranch house, which is traditionally low-slung, into a vertical shape. The atrium is flanked by two-story wings. Downstairs, the more informal wing, with a media room and kitchen, lies to the right; to the left is the formal wing – including the dining room and living room, with an intimate inglenook. At the rear of the house, a separate one-story wing perpendicular to the living room contains the five-car garage, guest bedroom, home office, and spa. Ortega fused cultures in the interiors as Ehlrich did in the architecture, mixing textures and materials as well as furnishings. In the dining room a 17th-century Ming altar stands behind the polished mahogany table that Ortega designed for the space – complete with a traditional Asian lazy susan in its center. (Leaves can be added along the table’s perimeter to expand it). According to feng shui precepts, dining tables must be round. The kitchen’s Arts and Crafts sensibility is also infused with an East/West theme. Feng shui affected Ortega’s layout down to the location of appliances. Other Eastern accents include cabinets fronted with dragon glass – rice paper sandwiched between two layers of glass. Publications : 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8