A Los Angeles Director’s Garage Is Recast as an ADU With a Screening Room

It all started with a vision, as these things tend to go when you’re a director like Wash Westmoreland is. With architect John Colter, he had just renovated the Craftsman where he’s lived for 20 years in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Now, they were ready to create the sequel. "At first, he wanted to add a workspace to his backyard," Colter remembers. "But the more we talked about it, the longer the list of things we wanted became."

As the two zoomed out, the scope, in fact, became much broader than a place to toil. It would still serve as such with a writing and editing enclave, but that area would double as a bedroom, and the unit would also include a full bathroom and powder room, an efficient kitchen, and a living area that would also work as a screening room.

"We also thought it could be a place to rent out when Wash is away on long projects," says Colter. The footprint would be small, since most of it would have to be tucked away behind the home’s existing one-car garage, but it would at least be open to the garden, an oasis that’s tucked away from bustling Sunset Boulevard.

But the garage also provided a lot of privacy, and was even used as a starting point for the design. "We located the entry vestibule and one of the bathrooms inside of it, and it allowed us to build in a stealthy way—you can barely see anything new from the street," Colter says. "It also allowed us to make the studio feel much larger than its 728 square feet. The circulation through the space starts at the garage and runs diagonally through the building with smaller spaces peeling off behind you."