Where Art and Architecture Collide

Venice, Calif.

Sculptor Cliff Garten is known for his grand public pieces. His wife, Molly Reid, is a residential architect. The couple's first collaboration: an overhaul of a dilapidated house and garage on the 11,000-square-foot lot they bought for $800,000 in 2002.

The resulting compound reflects elements of each of them. Ms. Reid, 49, said she tends to think more about alignment and measurements. Mr. Garten, 59, said he understands a space by "feeling" its energy and finding a way to make a place and a sculpture fit together.

Photos: Where Art and Architecture Collide

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Photographs by Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

Sculptor Cliff Garten and his wife, architect Molly Reid, overhauled a dilapidated house and garage on the 11,000-square-foot lot they bought for $800,000 in 2002. 

Ms. Reid drew the plans, keeping the footprint of the 3,000-square-foot house but raising the ceilings to 9 feet in the kitchen and living room from 7 feet, installing skylights and opening up the living room to the yard with large glass walls that push open. The two-car garage that had been converted into a guesthouse was torn down and replaced by a 1,500-square-foot corrugated metal studio with 20-foot ceilings for the couple to work in.

Finished in 2009 for a cost of about $500,000, the house and the studio are connected by a courtyard. The entire compound is concealed by a tall hedge, separating it from the hectic neighborhood of narrow streets and eclectic houses about a mile from the beach. A similar-size house with six bedrooms nearby is currently for sale for $3.5 million.

Mr. Garten made sculptures to help make the house and yard relate to the studio. One way he did that was by incorporating a sculpture into the main house. He built a wall-like screen that divides the kitchen and living room yet maintains a sense of the room's large size. The sculpture, which cost about $30,000 to make, consists of slices of finished plywood with a maple veneer, offset to create a look of undulating waves of wood. "It was generated by the energy and the volume of the room," he said.