Budget Breakdown: He Designed and Built a Bright-Pink Duplex in Los Angeles for Less Than $400K

Chalk it up to the ceilings, which peak at nearly 15 feet, the skylights casting patches of sun on the concrete floors, or windows and doors opening to green vistas, but there’s an undeniable Zen to designer Hannah Go and songwriter-producer Rami Jrade’s home in northeast L.A. Standing in the airy living/dining room, you’d never guess there was an auto shop next door or a busy boulevard just up the street. And that’s just what architect Hunter Knight envisioned. "The focus was on beauty, simplicity, and livability while working within a minimalist budget," he says.

Searching for a place to build a multifamily compound, Knight, the founder of local firm Weather Projects, landed on a 6,250-square-foot corner lot in Cypress Park that was vacant save for a 1905 bungalow. After purchasing the property for $1.025 million, he prioritized renovating the house and renting it out to shave his monthly expenses while he built a duplex at the rear of the lot. Over the course of the nine-month project, he wore multiple hats: architect, owner, builder, and landscape designer. Saving money was key, but Knight was just as interested in exercising his creative chops. "I’ve been doing architecture for twenty-odd years, and I was construction manager for one of my firm’s first projects," he explains. "That saved the clients money, and I got to get my hands dirty. So I thought, I can do this."

From the start, Knight resolved to stay within the neighborhood context of modest, mostly one-story structures, designing a 1,442-square-foot duplex with a single-family dwelling on one side and a slightly larger ADU on the other, where Hannah and Rami live. To enhance the feeling of space, he vaulted the ceilings and used natural materials where possible. "I have a bias toward wood, so exposing the ceilings was an important design idea," he notes. Glass sliders open to the private entrance patio along one side of the ADU’s living area and fill it with light. Down what Hannah and Rami call the "tall hall" is the compact bedroom, an office, and a skylit bathroom.