Honorable Mention: International Architecture Awards 2024
AlpIce Home | Los Angeles, California, USA | 2023

Architects: Minarc
Design Team: Tryggvi Thorsteinsson and Erla Dogg Ingjaldsdottir
General Contractor: ERLAconstruction
Client: Private
Photographers: Art Gray

The AlpIce home is multifaceted and places simultaneous focus on clean simplicity, thoughtful sustainability, and aesthetically pleasing functionality. Inspired by the beautifully dramatic landscapes found in nature, the design for the AlpIce Residence creates subtly contrasting interior spaces to stimulate the senses while a profusion of natural light streams through expansive windows, increasing the home’s overall fluidity while blurring the line between the interior and exterior.

The AlpIce Residence has a mid-level entryway, allowing entrants direct access to the study, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and laundry located on the street level. From the entrance, one can go downstairs to the guest suite with its own ensuite bathroom and family room that opens up to the deck, or upstairs to the main common areas of the home. The top floor opens to the living and dining areas as well as the master bedroom suite, all of which are surrounded by floor to ceiling windows and sliding glass doors with balconies along the south side of the house with dazzling views of the surrounding canyon and the majestic Santa Monica mountains abound.

The deck area located at the bottom floor, takes optimal advantage of the home’s location providing residents with additional living space that, thanks to Southern California’s temperate mediterranean climate, can be enjoyed all year long. Accent walls of obsidian rock and sand mural “New Earth, New Life”, a beautiful black sand wall with accents of volcanic lava, inspired by Icelandic nature. Extending the concept of inside - out by bringing nature inside. Volcanic activity, brings new movement brings in new life which represents this house. Ascending the artful staircase, intentionally placed lava rocks with custom lighting.

Simple, eco-conscious design demands placing a continuous focus on creating comprehensively healthy environments throughout the entire home. Because of this long-standing passion, the choice was made to utilize the highly efficient mnmMOD building material in place of lesser traditional methods. A sustainable, VOC-free panelized building system that features the economy and waste reduction of prefab construction while yielding net zero efficiency and a range of other builder and homeowner advantages.

Chief among these advantages, the panel system affords builders a streamlined construction process, significantly reducing necessary manpower needs while entirely replacing traditional wood framing techniques. Utilization of the panels was instrumental in ensuring the AlpIce Residence attained the goal of maximizing environmental sustainability without sacrificing aesthetics and functionality. A true nature-inspired sustainable design, the AlpIce Residence epitomizes a vision of merging architectural design and environmental awareness to bring the outside in.