Location: 708 N Kenter Ave, Los Angeles, California

Price: $5,498,000

Year Built: 1956

Renovation Date: 2025

Renovation Designers: Joelle Kutner and Jesse Rudolph of Ome Dezin

Footprint: 3,175 square feet (4 bedrooms, 3.5 baths)

Lot Size: 0.33 Acres

From the Agent: “Step inside this masterfully reimagined single-level midcentury home. At the heart of the house, the open-concept living and dining areas are anchored by a sleek fireplace, creating the perfect space for intimate gatherings or lively entertaining. A custom-built banquette offers a cozy spot for morning coffee, while the kitchen boasts high-end appliances, custom cabinetry, and impeccable finishes. The family room provides a flexible retreat, opening directly to the backyard for seamless indoor/outdoor flow. The primary suite is a sanctuary unto itself, with a spa-like en suite bathroom. Three additional en suite bedrooms offer ample space for kids, guests, or a home office. Every system in the home has been fully updated, ensuring modern efficiency without compromising its midcentury soul. A brand-new pool and lush landscaping create a serene retreat.”

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Gavin Cater

When I was a kid, bath time for animals meant rinsing Ellie, our family’s eager-to-please Yorkie-poo, in an unfinished concrete sink or, during one misguided incident, plunging our distraught cat, Chester, alongside me in an alcove tub. The awkwardness of bathing our dirty pets—whether you care for a fluffy Pomeranian or a scruffy retriever—is universal, which is why some are tackling the problem head-on with design.

In 2025, pets are rarely relegated to the doghouse. The proof is in the numbers: Millennials, many of whom are delaying or not having children, are investing in their fur babies: 70 percent of 983 surveyed millennial and Gen Z pet owners report having a budget solely for their pets, according to a study by The Harris Poll. “When I was younger, our dog was in the yard,” says interior designer Kishani Perera, whose recent work includes a laundry room with a walk-in dog shower and a home office with an eight-foot-tall cat tree. “Now my dogs sleep on cashmere blankets.”

For Frederick Tang Architecture, designing for clients’ lifestyles is always part of the deal, so the idea for a dog spa came somewhat naturally. When working with homeowners in Manhattan to renovate their postwar co-op apartment, firm founder Frederick Tang transformed roughly 55 square feet of underused space into a surprisingly luxe dog spa for about $10,000. Tang had envisioned the former utility room as a full bath, but the nearby guest room already had a shower. Being tucked away near the service elevator made it the perfect place for bathing a pair of dirty dogs. With the plumbing already in place—and the scope built into the budget—Tang modified the shower footprint to counter height and added a surround to contain errant splashing.

“A pet area doesn’t have to be purely functional,” says Tang. “It can be well designed and suited for the context of the house.” Blending modernity with quintessential Upper East Side traditionalism, Tang stuck with a black-and-white palette: The basket-weave stone-mosaic floor is clad with Carrara and veined black Nero Marquina trim, which extends upward to form the crisp basin.

Subsequently approached by a couple renovating a recently built farmhouse in the upstate hamlet of Pine Plains, New York, Tang designed a sculptural spa for Albee, the family’s bernedoodle. At a cost of around $15,000, it is similarly steep in budget; however, comparisons end there. The design is tailored to the home’s rural location and contemporary aesthetic. Conceived as a modified apron-front sink, the basin has tall, curving sides that keep water in and soapstone with a supple look. It rests on white oak millwork that doubles as storage space for Albee’s food—turning a pet feature into something more like a pet room.

If a custom dog bath sounds indulgent, it doesn’t have to be just for the dog. For Emilie and Brandon Conaway, living on a lake with their three boys and Australian labradoodle, Harry, means things get messy. Between rinsing a muddy canine, soaking laundry, and washing postgame cleats, there was never a doubt that a generous washbasin would get good use.

“These spaces are designed for pets, but they’re not stainless-steel sinks. They’re sensitive to the contexts in which they were built.”

—Frederick Tang, architect

The couple worked with Popix Designs to renovate their 1970s A-frame house in Canyon Lake, California, with dreams for a dog bath that matched the playfully retro aesthetic. Popix founder Lizzie Green chose cream-and-tan ceramic tiles for the checkered basin and gray porcelain floor tiles—both of which, Green says, are durable and easy to clean. The family spent a combined $4,482 on the tiling and faucet, but saved on the sink’s vintage light pendant—a relic from the original home. “The dog bath is just pretty,” says Emilie. “I don’t wash my dog as often as I probably should, but when I do it’s so handy.”

Details aside, the secret, it seems, is the same. “It’s about listening to the client and incorporating all of their loved ones,” says Tang. “Even the animals.”

On a street of gray Vancouver specials (a boxy style of home mass-produced from the 1960s through the ’80s) and plain-vanilla, vinyl-sided ranchers, the Fluevog family’s jagged, mint-colored house, with its wild, wonderful cutouts, will make you look twice. “The neighbors call it a ‘shape sorter’ house,” says homeowner Ali Palmer-Fluevog, who lives there with her husband, Adrian Fluevog, and their two young sons, Jonah and Lucas. It’s a moniker she and Adrian—CEO of John Fluevog Shoes, the cult fave Canadian brand founded by his dad in 1970—take as a compliment. “I’ve grown up making ‘unique soles for unique souls,’” says Adrian. “I’m used to quirkiness.”

Vancouver firm MA+HG Architects is to thank for this eye-catching, 3,155-square-foot salute to Euclidean geometry. “We were trying to riff on this notion of ‘How would you create architectural designs in a similar way to how you would design footwear?’” explains MA+HG coprincipal Harley Grusko. “They use two-dimensional patterns to create three-dimensional objects, so we developed the facades as a singular pattern and folded it to create the home’s shape.”

A large wooden table in the center of the communal kitchen/dining room is the gathering spot. Here, women are learning to make modern takes on traditional Native American ribbon skirts or create vision boards as part of the cultural, wellness, and life skills programming offered by Anduhyaun, the oldest Indigenous women’s shelter in Canada (and the only one of its kind in Toronto). The table has been refurbished and brought over from the shelter’s former location, a cramped, city-owned historic home, to Anduhyaun’s new, 11,862-square-foot building designed by LGA Architectural Partners, a local firm with years of experience designing transitional shelters and affordable housing.

“That’s the original house meeting table from the beginning of Anduhyaun,” says Danielle Belyea, shelter director of the nonprofit, which was founded by four Indigenous grandmothers in 1973. “That table has been present with us since the beginning of all the programs, every house meeting, all the tears.”

Honoring the cultural identities of Anduhyaun’s women and children clients (most but not all of whom are Indigenous) informed the design for the three-story emergency shelter, which opened in summer 2024. Architect Brock James, a partner at LGA, recalls planning conversations with Anduhyaun’s former executive director Blanche Meawassige (who retired just as the new center was opening). “She would talk to us about an Indigenous way of seeing, where things are interconnected,” he says. This concept influenced the fluid layout of the common and private spaces, as well as the palette of soft blues and mauves representing the sky and flowing water. “The building has to feel alive because what’s happening in here is that transformation and growth,” James adds. Anduhyaun—meaning “our home” in Ojibwe—aims to envelop the people within and protect them.

In 2017, Deborah Castillo was walking on the beach in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, with no other people except a lone fisherman: “It was like a dream,” she says. “I love being on my own on a beach, reading or listening to opera.” The artist was visiting from New York City for an art fair, but she felt a pull to stay. She scoured the area for For Sale signs with no success, but after enough asking around, she found and bought a lot just a six-minute stroll from the beach.

Together with her longtime friend, Los Angeles designer Ana Lasala, Deborah began envisioning a home that could embrace Puerto Escondido’s contrasts. Here, the Pacific brings waves that attract surfers from all over the world but also hurricanes. And the abundant sunshine—another tourist draw—demands creative solutions for shade and cooling.

Deborah and Lasala, who runs the architecture firm Lasala & Lasala with her sister, came up with Palapa Concreta, a 1,560-square-foot structure reminiscent of an A-frame cabin with a concrete base enclosed by a palapa roof—a traditional thatching made with palm leaves. The design sheds rain easily while also providing ample shade, and by making the roof steep rather than wide, Lasala reduced the home’s footprint and preserved more space for the yard.

In the spring of 2020, when Covid lockdowns began, Manny Rionda retreated from his home in Guatemala City to his family’s finca, or ranch, in the highlands 35 miles to the west. At first he lived with his parents in their two-bedroom 1960s house on the mountainous estate, but he fell in love with country living and decided to stay. His parents granted him some space on the working farm to build his own home, and Manny, a fashion photographer and furniture designer, got to work on his first architectural project.

Casa Zanate, as Manny named it, doesn’t immediately reveal itself. Manny minimized its footprint to avoid damaging the coffee, macadamia, and guava trees on the site, and the home—a 1,480-square-foot, single-story box—is shrouded in greenery. “The trees here are sacred, since it takes almost a decade for them to flower,” Manny says. Cantilevered concrete steps draw visitors in and lead to a floating deck that wraps around the home’s flat front facade, connecting to a spacious side terrace hovering among the leaves.

To meet the $80,000 to $100,000 U.S. dollars budget, Manny had the walls built with cinder block and coated in chukum, a low-cost material made of tree resin mixed with limestone. “It was used by the Maya, and it can be easily colored, though we left it in its natural shade,” he says. “It’s waterproof, heavy duty, and I don’t have to paint the exterior.” After the home’s first rainy season, the walls began to stain naturally, blending with the landscape.

When Sean Famoso, cofounder of LVRN Records, started searching for a second home in Los Angeles, he knew exactly what he was—and wasn’t—looking for. Having grown up in a Craftsman house in Atlanta, he was set on finding a midcentury with warmth and character rather than a minimalist white box. “I wanted a house with a soul of its own,” he says.

When he put in a bid for a 2,022-square-foot Hollywood Hills home built in 1950 by architects Armet & Davis, he initially lost out to another buyer. But as luck would have it, the two-bedroom, three-bathroom house went back on the market almost immediately—albeit for an additional $200,000. Charmed by its floor-to-ceiling views of the city and the ample surrounding parking, Sean swooped in to close the deal.

Sean envisioned the house—which he calls “Before Brentwood”—as his final bachelor pad before he ultimately settles down in a tony L.A. neighborhood a bit farther west. He commissioned Christopher Cahill of CASC Design Inc. to knock out the wall between the kitchen and the dining room, but he left the original layout largely intact. “My biggest pet peeve is when people find the most beautiful home and modernize it beyond belief,” Sean explains.

When Amalia Branaa Donner and Uzi Sabah moved from Los Angeles to Montevideo, Uruguay, their hometown, at the height of the pandemic, they had to find a rental quickly. They had moved back because Covid was less prevalent there, and they wanted to reconnect with family. A brisk search led them to a house in a residential area that had been off their radar: Punta Gorda, a neighborhood built on a low hill overlooking Montevideo’s riverside promenade, known as La Rambla.

The couple enjoyed staying there and, during one of their afternoon walks, noticed a midcentury house that was uninhabited—and for sale. It had a simple, rectangular exterior, and because it was built on a slope, the back of the property had views over the neighborhood’s rooftops and treetops and all the way down to the Rio de la Plata in the distance. It also had a huge garage occupying the entire ground level, which they immediately envisioned as a living space.

They decided to buy it, but they needed an architect to help them transform the two-story structure, built in 1950 and never renovated, into a contemporary family home for themselves and their two children, now 10 and 8. Amalia and Uzi are both creatives—she’s a graphic designer, he’s a filmmaker and an artist—so they wanted to work with someone willing to push the boundaries of convention.

“Everything was the way it had been designed in the ’50s—the closets, kitchen, bathrooms all were from that era, and small.”

—Uzi Sabah, resident

Welcome to Origin Story, a series that chronicles the lesser-known histories of designs that have shaped how we live.

The porch, as part of the American home, is more than an architectural feature: It’s a viewpoint into the country’s changing cultural (and literal) climate. Since the mid-19th-century golden age of this classic U.S. domestic design element, its look and role have revealed wider societal fluctuations, from the car’s impact on suburbia to the more recent push for walkable neighborhoods. The porch is so important that it’s the subject of this year’s U.S. Pavilion exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Here, we trace the road to its revival.

A Welcome Arrival

Outdoor coverings connected to a building have existed in various forms across cultures for millennia, from Greco-Roman porticos and Venetian loggias to ancient Indian alindas (verandas), among others. It wasn’t until the second half of the 19th century, however, that the porch became a ubiquitous part of American homes—particularly in the South, where French Colonial–style galleries, which echoed features of cabins built by enslaved people of African descent, provided shade and air circulation in hot, humid climates. Early American porches were often wooden structures with columns, railings, and roof overhangs and were characterized by their symmetry and restrained ornamentation.

Evolving Purpose…

Before air-conditioning or electric fans, “sleeping porches“—screened-in spaces allowing cool nighttime breezes—became popular in many Victorian-era and early-20th-century American residences. People also saw using these spaces, usually on the second floor, next to bedrooms, as a way to avoid one of the leading causes of death at the time: tuberculosis. (Before antibiotics, the standard treatment for the disease was extended fresh-air exposure.) Meanwhile, at its peak popularity, the front porch served as a prominent open-air parlor for socializing in American households. In some communities, the porch carried an even deeper cultural significance: As Black Americans faced discrimination in public spaces, porches became places where families and friends could safely congregate and build community.

…and Expanding Aesthetic

As the American porch endured as a staple residential feature and site for socializing, it became embedded in diverse architectural styles across the growing country. Porch designs became more elaborate and distinctive, largely reflecting vernacular styles of their regions. The Victorian era saw the introduction of intricate wraparound porches adorned with delicate spindle work, which was often painted in vibrant colors, reflecting the era’s penchant for excess. The Craftsman style, emerging in the early 20th century, favored sturdy, exposed beams, unpainted wood, and deep eaves. The front porches of New Orleans shotgun houses were often extensions of the living rooms inside.