This Willo Neighborhood addition is a masterpiece of high design and function. 

Designing a home for someone can be a long road,” the architect Benjamin Hall says. “You spend a lot of time with the client, talking about what they want from their home. It helps if you really like them.”

Hall had previously worked with—and already “really liked”—the couple who wanted a primary suite grafted onto their midcentury Willo home. They were after an indoor-outdoor space that accommodated both their busy lives as parents and their work as physical therapists.

“They wanted to feel like they were outside, even when all the doors and windows were closed,” Hall explains, “and a space where their kids could play while the adults were working outside or practicing meditation.”

Toward that end, Hall suggested a garden in a setback that gets virtually no direct sunlight. “I placed 30-foot-tall bamboo behind a glass wall in the bathroom, so that when they’re in the shower, they’re looking at this giant, meditative space full of golden bamboo. Their kids call it their secret hiding space.”

Hall wanted to reference the existing home, a masonry block structure built in the 1950s. He liked how the roofline sloped upward, and replicated that line in the addition; he connected the new 638-square-foot wing, located in a portion of the property’s backyard, to the main house via a slim hallway.

“I have a tendency to look for the most economical approach to every project,” admits Hall, who credits renowned architect Tom Kundig, a former employer, for inspiring his creative parsimony. “Kundig told me, ‘You can make fancy architecture and end up spending your entire budget to pull that off. Start with a simple box and add interesting details later.’”

Hall points to the suite’s storage space as an example of Kundig’s theory. “The closets here are from IKEA, with custom maple doors,” he says. “The maple makes a strong statement, and using a prebuilt system let me allocate funds to other custom details throughout the addition.”

Those details include the floor-to-ceiling main door; its pull handle is a piece of curved steel Hall fashioned himself. The door is held open with a custom “invisible” bolt that drops into the floor. And then there’s the bedroom slider that pockets into a wall, an open-air feature that allows the family to go glamping at home. “You open that slider,” Hall says, “and the bed feels like it’s outside. Behind that same wall, I built a little outdoor storage space for their workout equipment.” 

Hall is especially proud of the floating metal bookcase in the suite’s hallway. “It’s made with folded steel. I go to an automotive shop in Glendale where they’ll fold any angle I ask them for.”

Many of Hall’s projects have steelwork in them. He says that’s for a specific, and very personal, reason.

“My dad was a carpenter, and he was always really judgmental of my craftsmanship,” he says with a laugh. “But Dad never touched metal. In college, I discovered metalwork and gravitated to steel. I knew my father didn’t know enough about metal to be critical of my work with it.”

The facade of the building provides another example of Hall’s use of unique and economical materials. 

“Everything in the budget was pointing to a stucco exterior,” he remembers. “But I’d seen a building in San Diego that was covered in asphalt shingle. I thought, ‘I like this, but I can do it better.’ I made a mock-up for the clients and I knew it was going to be hard to sell, the idea of lining the entire exterior of a building in roofing shingles. But they loved it.”

That asphalt facade grabs summertime heat and directs it into a wall cavity behind, ventilating it up through the roof ridge before it can sink into the walls and heat up the house. It’s the kind of functional detail that Hall likes to bring to every new project. What he likes more, he says, is connecting with his clients. 

“Every six months or so, the clients I designed this addition for send me a photo of their kids, building forts and playing in their secret bamboo garden,” Hall says. “That kind of connection is something you can’t design.”

SOURCES

• Architect: Benjamin Hall, Benjamin Hall Design, Phoenix, benjaminhalldesign.com.

BEDROOM

• Pax System closet boxes: ikea.com.
• Closet doors: Spellman Hardwoods, Phoenix, spellmanhardwoods.com.

BATHROOM

• Toilet: totousa.com.
• Sliding glass door: Arcadia Window and Door, arcadiawd.com.
• Bathroom tile:  daltile.com.
• Ipe shower wood: Advantage Lumber, Phoenix, advantagelumber.com.
• Asphalt shingles: Malarkey Roofing Products, malarkeyroofing.com