Tour an Architect and Designer’s Playful Home and Studio

What Laurel Consuelo Broughton describes as originally “a funny property” shoulders quite a few serious topics. A conversation with the architect while strolling through the Irving Gill–inspired breezeway outside her studio might touch upon subjects such as housing in Los Angeles, community identity, and responsive architecture.

These themes help explain the Welcome Projects founder’s approach to designing her home and office on a parcel that was like “a strange missing tooth” on this block in Angelino Heights, the city’s first designated Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ). What was LA’s first streetcar suburb just west of downtown is now known for its stately moments of Victorian Era curb appeal. It’s undoubtedly historic, yet not uniformly pristine thanks to what Broughton calls “an interesting pattern of opulence, decline, and infill.” Her project continues this idiosyncratic local heritage, as well as LA’s rich legacy of architects’ own unorthodox homes.

Laurel Consuelo Broughton of Welcome Projects needed time living on the unconventional property to devise a plan for creating a fully realized live-work compound after purchasing it in 2017. Thoughtfully responding to the local context, she added an Irving Gill–influenced take on a “carriage house” that synthetizes multiple elements of California’s visual vernacular towards the front to serve as her studio with a rental unit upstairs. Behind stands a loosely Spanish colonial–style former duplex that now functions as the family’s home, where Broughton created a new multipurpose kitchen wing and the guest room became the primary suite.

When Broughton bought the site in 2017, whatever original structure had stood closest to the street was long gone. It had journeyed from a perhaps once-distinguished single-family residence to a rooming house to a phase whose conspicuous absence reflected a changing neighborhood. Most importantly, this gap was a potential ground-up project. “I was intrigued in the ability to do something [in this] 75-foot front yard that you could build [upon],” she says. It took living there and thinking it through to figure out the functions and forms of a live-work compound.

Before having a daughter in 2021 with her partner, Andre Morales, Broughton made strategic and flexible interventions in the two-story, loosely Spanish colonial–style former duplex that was added to the site in the late 1930s. It had been hastily combined into a single-family house totaling 1,400 square feet before she moved in. Broughton ended up liking being in the back, away from the street, but it called for a 400-square-foot expansion to add a multipurpose kitchen, dining, and sitting room. In front, Broughton designed a smooth white stucco-clad 1,100-square-foot riff on a carriage house to serve as the studio with a rental unit above. Because she wanted to preserve the yard and didn’t want it to eat up the whole lot, a central landscaped courtyard designed by Sally Reynolds of SR-LA stands between the two buildings.