Urban Operations

The Floating Addition lifts a 500-square-foot second story master bedroom suite above an existing single-story residence in Sherman Oaks, supported on a steel moment frame that holds the new volume clear of the existing structure. Once raised, the addition is rotated off the existing house's axis to orient its primary rooms toward the San Gabriel Mountains. The geometry is then chopped at the base to negotiate the junction between new and old. Clad in dark fiber-cement panels against the original stucco, the addition reads as a distinct object hovering above, rather than growing from the house below.

Designed and constructed by Urban Operations, the Clip and Shift House is a contemporary hillside home ,featuring a multi-tiered cascade of domestic volumes.

The Hulk Addition begins by cutting into the existing 1920s single-story home. A third of the existing residence was removed and reworked into a single flowing living and dining room — then a compact second-story master suite was extruded above it, cantilevering off the new volume to provide views from the master bedroom and a more generous public patio below. Shiplapped Hardie board ties the addition back to the original house, carrying the existing siding up into the new charcoal mass so the two read as one.

The Fast-Twitch ADU is a 1,200-square-foot, two-bedroom unit tucked behind an existing duplex in Silver Lake. Its street elevation reads as a white stucco mass caught mid-motion — projecting frames, ledges, and balconies that slip out of alignment floor to floor, as though the building were breaking apart into its own components. Completed in 2022 on a tight infill lot, the composition draws on the slipped-plane language of R.M. Schindler — giving a small building the formal charge of something much larger.

The Sparrow Addition reworks an existing single-story house from the inside out, inserting two new volumes that each create a dialogue with the old roof rather than erasing it. At the center, the kitchen massing is extruded upward and outward — gaining height for a series of faceted lightwells that pull daylight deep into the plan, and conjoining living, dining, cooking, and entertaining into one continuous space. The new master suite takes the opposite strategy: an angled ceiling folds up to allow for paired clerestories, its pitched roof reaching out over the existing hip to trace the original ridgeline without ever touching it.

The Cove Avenue ADU’s are an infill project on an existing multi-family property in Echo Park. Urban Operations was able to produce three 800 SF ADU’s for the parcel and retain ample space around each unit for future landscape opportunities.

A true hilside hustle, Bridge House digs into the terrain at grade and bridges over the slope on the second floor — reducing building mass, excavation, and foundation costs in one move. This 2,400 SF home turns the usual hillside problem into the organizing idea. A massing strategy of sliced forms keeps the plan open while turning closed faces toward the neighboring lots for privacy. Diagonal cuts pull daylight deep into the interior without opening sightlines to the properties next door. The result delivers garden terraces at each level and tucks a sheltered patio beneath the bridge itself, where the hillside passes under the house — landscape running straight through the architecture rather than stopping at its walls.

Carve House begins with the full zoning envelope and works subtractively, removing volume to create cantilevered balconies that produce outdoor space for every room in the house. What reads from the street as a stack of projecting planes and volumes is in fact the opposite gesture — mass eroded away rather than added on. Inside, the same logic turns additive: an open plan where individual rooms are articulated by drop soffits, and a stepped, continuous volume that visually links the ground floor to the pool in the rear yard beyond.

Strata House occupies a steep 1.5:1 slope in Highland Park, where the buildable envelope — capped by L.A.'s Hillside Code — would not contain the full program. The house begins as a box that exceeds those limits, then shears away everything that breaks the code profile and shifts the remaining floors vertically to nest beneath it, staggering the section to follow the grade by digging into the slope. What results reads as geological strata: three white slab edges, each warped to its own profile, peeling from the dark stucco mass like layers folded under pressure. Punched balconies give every level its own outdoor space, while a selective pattern of windows frames the Elysian Valley below and holds privacy against the neighbors close on either side.

Duck and Cover slips three new housing units into the rear yard of a 1920s two-story home without ever showing its face to the street. In an HPOZ, where a contributing house holds the Avenue 52 frontage, the project does exactly what its name says: it ducks below the street's sightlines and takes cover behind the historic structure, reached by a footpath from the front and by cars from the rear alley.

Rather than mimic the old house or contradict it, the design abstracts the neighborhood's pitched-gable vernacular into two dark slate-clad volumes flanking a shared courtyard — familiar in form, clearly contemporary in detail. The result reads as quiet from Avenue 52 and sharp up close, and earned approval from the area's historic review board on exactly those terms.

The Split and Slide House begins as a single volume that is divided along its length and pulled apart, the two halves sliding in opposite directions in order to create front and rear courtyards between them. That fracture becomes the spine of the house — the entry threads into it from the street, and public programs and circulation unfold along its length, with secondary volumes of bedrooms stacked above each half. The move is also contextual: set in a former avocado-farm tract of mixed R1–R3 fabric, the house breaks what could have been one large mass into a cluster of smaller forms, a scaled, mixed-material massing more reminiscent of the older Craftsman farmhouses that once dotted the area. The rear volumes open through broad glazing to the pool and garden, with framed views toward the Hollywood Hills; the street face stays deliberately reserved.

Pitched sits on an irregular hillside lot on Sunset Drive, where a strict 28'-0" height limit governs what can be built above grade. The house consolidates its program into a single stepped mass that follows the slope downward from a street-level carport, then folds its roof planes to fit beneath the height line — producing a series of colliding pitched forms that are a product of the zoning constraints. Inside, these angled planes inform the interior architecture: a faceted ceiling of intersecting ridges and valleys, with skylights punched through where the folds pull apart, flooding the open living level with light from above. Each floor steps down to its own balcony and terrace, turning the section into a vertical sequence of indoor and outdoor rooms with city views beyond.

The Wedge House occupies one of the narrowest buildable slivers in its Silver Lake hillside — hemmed in by zoning regulations, pinched between two existing neighbors, and falling steeply toward a downtown skyline view. The house answers these constraints at once: rather than standing plumb within the tight envelope, its walls cant and taper, leaning the living spaces and their glass toward the view while shaping the plan to the slope and setbacks that define the site. Entry is from above — the street face reads as a single quiet story — and the section then steps down the slope, each level opening to the vista as skylights and pillbox strip windows pull daylight through the narrow plan.

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