Ranch in style, but Zen in spirit

DEBORAH FURLAN saw something in the ramshackle ranch-style house off a busy street in Toluca Lake: a Japanese-inspired oasis with a soaring glass entrance. Uncluttered rooms with sliding doors and screens could let the outside in. Lush groves of bronzy maple and bamboo could rise from the neglected concrete yards.

It took seven years, a blown budget and the burden of a do-it-yourself strategy, but like a plain piece of paper that is folded into an origami swan, the flat original structure became a graceful two-story with low-lying outstretched wings.

The size of the house almost doubled to 4,000 square feet, but the remodel blends with the tract-home neighborhood. A wood gate and vine-covered concrete wall separate the property from the outside world. A Zen meditation garden with a trickling water basin beckons visitors at the front door.

“People sometimes have difficulty imagining something better,� says Furlan, sitting next to husband David Kane at their dining room table. Once skeptical of the project, Kane is smiling now. On this early Sunday morning, the sun is filtering into the vaulted great room Furlan envisioned.

That others doubted her didn’t push Furlan off her track. At the time, she had little experience in home remodeling but could call upon a degree in engineering, a passion for plants and a Japanese mother who had taught her to create beauty through simplicity, arrangement, proportion.

“Deborah could see what it could be,� says David, the president of a small aerospace manufacturing company, “but I’m the type who could see something 85% complete and still wouldn’t get it.�

Furlan knew that transforming a ranch-style house into one with distinct Japanese elements was not as radical as it sounded. In the 20th century, architectural pioneers -- including Arts and Crafts’ Greene & Greene and Frank Lloyd Wright, and Modernism’s R.M. Schindler and John Lautner -- studied traditional wood-frame Japanese construction, with its recognition of the importance of natural light and shadows, to build functional, air-flowing California homes.

After WWII, houses went up quickly to meet demand and time-consuming craftsmanship went out the aluminum windows. But still, Furlan could see beauty in her 1940s ho-hum house.

The new double-door entry area in the couple’s home has wood windows on three sides, with bougainvillea and wisteria covering the exterior trellises and pressing against the glass. “This is where we greet friends and hang coats and take off our shoes,� Furlan says.

When shoes are deposited in built-in bins, stocking feet slide across white oak planks and concrete floors that have been acid-stained in fern green, walnut and black. Earth tones are used throughout the house, a traditional palette in Japan.

The concrete floors are heated in the master suite’s glass-wrapped sitting room and bath. Separating the sitting room from the bedroom is an interior sliding door. At night, the couple closes it for privacy, but during the day it’s left open to capture the view of the landscape around the pool and to create a larger area. A carved wood transom over the receding door lets in light and circulates the air.

An austere tearoom near the den shows the Japanese approach to restraint and pleasing proportion. The floor is laid with movable straw mats. Since the 15th century, tatami mats have been used to cover floors. Each mat is the same size -- about 3 by 6 feet -- and sets the dimension of the room and the distance between structural supports and wall openings. “This is a six-mat room,� says Furlan, pointing to the rectangles that fit together like a perfect puzzle. This is her favorite part of the house, “a top-of-the-world perch for contemplation.�

When friends come to visit, the couple brings out a red and black lacquered table that is only 14 inches off the ground. They lift out the tatami mat in the middle of the room and place the table over the opening. When guests sit, the space below accommodates legs.

“No one wants to sit on their knees for more than a few minutes,� says Furlan, who decided early on that she could forgo some traditions for comfort. Inside the oak-finished opening is an electrical outlet to plug in a skillet or hot plate to prepare shabu-shabu or sukiyaki.

A tokonoma, or decorative alcove, in the room is regularly dressed with flowers, Japanese artwork and ceramics to pay homage to the changing seasons. It now displays a ceramic Oribe tea vessel, a rectangular glass vase with red holly berries. Furlan’s mother, Sachiko Furlan, is a noted ikebana sensei, a floral teacher.

“I have been inspired by this design style all my life,� says Furlan, who was born in Yokosuka, Japan, but moved to the U.S. as a baby. “It is based on a deep reverence for the beauty and simplicity of nature.�

Although almost bare of adornments, the tearoom is soft and warm with a view of mixed plantings of nandina, euonymus and Japanese iris.

When she started the remodel after they bought the house in 1998, Furlan was just launching her residential landscape company, Mikino Design. For this project, she teamed up with Pasadena architect and structural engineer George A. Padilla.

Her husband remembers her examining the angles and imagining window and landscape placement on the one-third-acre lot. He called it “power pottering.�

The payoff is that windows and glass doors frame picturesque sections of the garden. At night, when translucent shoji screens have been pulled across the glass for privacy, branches from a Monterey pine and wispy black bamboo cast shadows like Sumi-e Japanese brush paintings on the creamy white screens. The couple sees the shadows as artwork.

Because gardens are as important as interiors in Japanese culture, the couple started the transformation project at the outskirts of the property.

They had a circular flagstone driveway installed to make it easy to turn around on the narrow street. A 160-foot-long gray wall now runs the length of the property. Two custom wooden doors and four shuttered windows were cut into the 8-foot-tall wall for access, airflow and visual interest. At its base are stacked boulders and clusters of succulents.

Furlan used slabs of high-desert flagstone to guide visitors on a path from the Zen garden in the front, past the raised herb and vegetable garden on the side and to the backyard’s pool area.

The stones’ placement looks natural, random, but each was carefully thought out. “There are lots of rules,� says Furlan. “Each stone has a unique spirit and form and must be placed correctly, relative to each other and the surrounding landscape.�

The budget-conscious couple continued to live in the slowly evolving house and stopped the work twice as funds ran low. At one point, they were crawling through a bedroom window because tarps and tools made outside doors less accessible, and they cooked on a Bunsen burner. Sometimes they felt defeated, but Furlan charged on.

“We scraped off every wall and finish, replaced every window and door,� says Furlan, who also oversaw the landscape, custom millwork, interior fixtures and furnishings.

In Japanese, Furlan’s middle name, Miki, refers to the flowering of trees, such as sakura (cherry blossom) in the spring. In her home, there are two dozen flowering and fruit trees that bloom in stages.

“We wanted to surround ourselves with nature,� she says. “It was a challenge to create this in compressed Los Angeles, but here it is, finally, our private refuge.�