A Domestic Cube Open to the City
A compelling 25’ white cubic ADU, punctuated by crisp rectilinear cutouts across the façade, becomes the newest trending neighborhood locus in Angelino Heights, widely embraced by coffee aficionados. Its inhabitants and designers, Sydney Wayser and Isaac Watters are interdisciplinary creatives—both musicians, while Wayser is also an interior designer and Watters, an architect.
Together, they co-lead their design practice, Granada Studio, sharing the same name as the café. The couple first renovated and lived in the existing street-facing 1939 duplex in 2019 and later, constructed and moved into the ADU at the back of the lot in 2025. They reside upstairs in the two-storey home while they open up their living room Wednesday-Friday from 9AM—2PM for guests to come enjoy their space while their three-year-old daughter is at school—transforming a domestic setting into a communal gathering space for several hours a day. The public-facing café is allowed under the recently adopted MEHKO permit, an LA County-wide program which now allows individuals to prepare and sell items directly from their home kitchens.
Designed with the intention of hosting parties, long-table dinners, concerts and art shows, the downstairs was built to be flexible and durable with a cement floor that could support a heavy usage while the upstairs transitions to white oak floors and tile. 12’ aluminum sliding doors open the 600 SF living, dining, and kitchen area into the garden, creating a seamless indoor-outdoor environment that supports fluid movement and gathering. Embedded in the landscape, the ground floor reads as nearly twice its footprint—functioning as both enclosure and open-air extension.
The modernist, geometric volume sits in contrast to the neighborhood’s late 19th-century Victorian homes, inserting a restrained contemporary structure into the local historic vernacular. The rectilinear form is further expressed in continuity as the majority of the rooms in plan are squares; tiles in the bathroom are 4 x 4 square tiles. The subtle repetition of form is embraced. Upstairs, the home comprises two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two balconies and an open rooftop casting views upon downtown, Century City, the Griffith Observatory, the Hollywood sign and the Pacific Ocean.
The rawness and honesty of material are foregrounded as the designers allow each element to exist in its truest state. A restrained palette—white oak, concrete, steel, tile, and a distinctive quartzite for the kitchen island, anchors the interior. With as few materials as possible used throughout, the framework becomes a stage for vibrant, eclectic objects, art, and décor, including furniture designed by Granada Studio itself such as the long outdoor aluminum dining table, cabinetry and corner bench.
The façade is finished in a white integral color acrylic stucco with a fine sand float texture—the monolithic material reinforces the clarity and simplicity of the cubic form. Perched on a hillside, apertures and openings allow for maximum daylight and ventilation, calibrated intentionally to the shifting seasons, and the trajectory of sun throughout the day and the year. The architecture lends a cinematic backdrop to the arid landscape of Southern California, allowing the ADU to read as a floating cube in a wash or arroyo. A sprawling gravel ground plane is dotted with loose vignettes of native and drought-tolerant plantings, interspersed with river boulders. Both landscape and architecture were organized around the 150-year old pomegranate tree that greets visitors upon entry through the gate.
Within this carefully framed setting, Granada becomes a living experiment—an architecture that collapses boundaries between domestic life, creative practice, and community gathering. What began as a private home expands into a public salon. In a city defined by sprawl and privatization, the project proposes an alternative model of intimacy and proximity: a modest cubic form that fosters exchange, conversation, and shared experience at a hyper local scale.
