The Stateside Effect
 
When not visiting the islands to check on his projects, California architect Michael Kollin has a new hale to call home
 

You can always spot an architect’s home. That is, you can always spot the home of an inspired residential architect. The harmony is unmistakable. Every façade, every fixture, every finish blends seamlessly yet subtly into a perfect package, like a box gift-wrapped by Martha Stewart (or some other convicted felon with good craft skills). Such a home shows what can happen when a creative mind is commissioned to please only itself—no client, no compromises, no clichés. 
 
There’s a newly-rebuilt house like that in Long Beach, a port city 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. The house sits in the city’s Belmont Park district on a flat, slender street full of ordinary homes sardined against each other on small lots. A designed house perched between ho-hum adobes and Craftsmans, the place stops traffic—literally. “They stop, they look,” says Tracy Kollin, whose husband Michael Kollin was the inspired architect who also served as the general contractor and interior designer of the project.

When Kollin bought the place last year, the property drew stares for a different reason. It was a powder-blue eyesore, a tacky bungalow that had been underwhelming visitors since its construction in 1929. Kollin saw the house as an opportunity—not just to do the neighborhood a favor, but to bring the look of Hawai’i, where his firm Kollin Altomare Architects does a steady stream of residential and commercial work, to Southern California. Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawai’i kept coming to mind as he pondered the most beautiful, yet comfortable, structure he could cram onto a 90-by-40 foot lot. “I imagined coming home at the end of the day and having a mai-tai,” he says.

So he got to work. He tore the place down to the exposed studs, leaving only the raised floor and about 80 percent of the walls. “We chopped off the roof,” Kollin says. The generic bungalow became a postcard-ready hale i luna a i lalo (two-story house). Completed in March, the house now measures 3,100 square feet, has four bedrooms three baths, and seems even taller when you visit the rooftop sun deck. The exterior is now clad in smooth, hand-troweled stucco in a shade Kollin calls “Maui brown” and wainscoted with Coronado stone veneers that evoke the popular blue stone of the islands. The trim is finished teak; the fixtures are oil-rubbed bronze. The front courtyard, which is balanced by a rear garden patio, was finished with a two-tone stain in terra cotta and brown.

Inside, “the floor plan came together pretty easily,” says Kollin. Together with the kitchen, living room, and family room, a guest bedroom and a small media room complete the first level. Upstairs are the master suite, the bedroom of Kollin’s daughter, Olivia, a second guest bedroom, and a somewhat unfinished loft area currently stacked with toys. The layout is bright and breezy, with light glowing through the bamboo-glass window over the big round dining table and a sea-salted zephyr whisking through the teak lift-and-slide doors at the front courtyard and back patio.

The idea for the interior was an island motif—a leitmotif. “I didn’t want to theme the house too much,” says Kollin, whose office is a whopping three blocks from his new home. He visits Hawai’i several times a year to manage projects. “The Hawaiian style starts at the front facade and carries through the entire house.” Indeed it’s visible in the palette of rich, deep earth tones, the wicker dining chairs, and the Tommy Bahama ceiling fans. It’s even more present in the pitch of the family room ceiling, which soars a vertiginous 25 feet.In the new kitchen, Kollin’s wife’s culinary talent needed room to run, so he anchored the long space with a center island and gave her a full suite of stainless steel Dacor appliances—including a 48-inch, six--burner oven and range, a warming drawer, a convection microwave, a French-door fridge, and a broadband-equipped undercounter entertainment center where she can call up lasagna and aspic recipes on the touch screen. For a final touch, the futuristic, built-in coffeemaker glows with an outré blue backlight.

Meanwhile, the interior flooring creates two distinct environments. On the ground floor, a space that awaits guests like a boutique hotel, the LEED certified engineered wood flooring system, dark and planky like the deck of an old frigate, tones down the finishes. Upstairs, where an air of modish privacy pervades, the forest-green Berber carpet feels like thick terrycloth underfoot.

In the bathrooms, Kollin cobbled a sophisticated tile palette anchored by 4x4-inch tumbled travertine, complemented by split-face limestone. The master bath has a large soaking tub and a rain showerhead. In the downstairs guest bath, the antique-looking vanity is actually a buffet hutch from the local furniture and art chain Z Gallerie. The hutch, like the rest of the furniture—a mostly-modern collection in suedes and dark woods—was redeployed from the couple’s former home in Sacramento, where they lived for two years before moving to Long Beach.

In his daughter’s Jack-and-Jill-style bedroom, Kollin deferred to the two-year-old’s request for a pink and green motif—two of the nine paint hues found on the home’s walls. “Michael’s so incredible with color,” says his wife. He’s subtle, too: the chameleon-like dark olive tone in the master bedroom looks chocolate brown in the evening but practically blooms with organic warmth with the light of morning. “It totally depends on what light is hitting it,” she says.

The last fixture installed this spring was the rear patio’s waterfall, the fitting final element of the island theme. With the place officially complete, Kollin and Kollin are looking forward to sitting in the front courtyard, drinking mai-tais, and stopping more traffic. And he’s especially happy with the inspired architect who handled the project, he says with an easy chuckle. “I always tell people the most important thing is finding the right architect. So I think we hit this one on the head.”