MAD Completes Gardenhouse

John Hill

28. August 2020

Photo: Nic Lehoux

The mixed-use project in Beverly Hills — designed as a "hillside village" with eighteen residences "growing" from a base wrapped in a living green wall — is the first completed building in the United States for Beijing's MAD Architects.

Gardenhouse is located at 8600 Wilshire Boulevard, about one mile west of Peter Zumthor's high-profile LACMA expansion now under construction and another six miles from MAD's own Lucas Museum of Narrative Art underway in Exposition Park. Although it is located in the sprawling flatland of Los Angeles — what Reyner Banham famously coined "The Plains of Id" — Gardenhouse references the city's surrounding hillsides by placing "a cluster of white façaded, irregular-shaped windows, and gabled-roof structures" above the landscaped wrapper, which MAD contends is one of the largest living green walls in the country.

Photo: Nic Lehoux

The project has a mix of four housing types (two studios, eight condominiums, three townhouses and five villas), with each unit given its own "independent entry/exit circulation route." In the center of the development is a courtyard that is rung by a cluster of white, pitched-roofed "houses." The arrangement of the units aims to increase the sense of community for the residents. This being Beverly Hills, where the median household income is more than $100,000, those residents will have to pay at least $3.7 million to live there.