In 2011, self-identified real-estate psychic Lizz Wasserman and her husband, Isaac Resnikoff, found a plot of unbuilt land in the Highland Park section of Los Angeles. To them, it was the perfect place to build a house and raise a family: a clean slate on the side of a hill, overlooking a sea of palm trees that recedes into the San Gabriel Mountains.

To their Milwaukee-based architects—Lizz’s parents, Louis Wasserman and Caren Connolly—the site was less than ideal. If certain areas “had been one percent steeper, it would’ve been unbuildable,” Louis says, taking in the view behind the couple’s recently finished, three-bedroom, net-zero house.

“This house was successful because it had certain challenges, and the site was definitely one of them,” Louis says." layout="" credit="Photo by José Mandojana" photoUserId=""/>

Today, Louis, Lizz, Isaac, and baby Esphyr Rain Superbloom are in the outdoor living room, a space where the wall supports and ceiling beams are exposed to the open air. While those four lounge on IKEA outdoor sofas, Caren and Esphyr’s older brother, Eli, are playing inside. As usual, everyone is in stocking feet; shoes belong on the porch, next to the glass-paned front door, which is lined with rainbow dichroic film.

Like the iconic midcentury L.A. architecture that emerged from similarly precipitous drop-offs, nearly half of the house sits on piers firmly cemented into the hill. And like L.A.’s midcentury architects, Caren, Louis, Isaac, and Lizz allowed the project’s various constraints to shape the design. The site, Louis explains, was just one of the challenges that they embraced.

“No offense,” he adds, turning to his clients and chuckling, “but it wasn’t a great budget, either.”

“We’ve tried to take any kind of budget concern and turn it into a choice.”
—Isaac Resikoff, resident

The design process unfolded amid various differences of opinion and intermittent strokes of ingenuity. The plan for the upper level’s open kitchen/living/dining space, for example, was cause for disagreement early on.

“When we asked for one big room, Louis said we really needed some kind of threshold,” Isaac recounts. The parties compromised with a freestanding wall that Isaac designed, positioned between the front door and the rest of the house. Its primary function is to prevent the house from revealing too much too soon, maintaining a spatial narrative of restraint and release. (As a bonus, it also conceals the HVAC.)

Lizz, the creative director of fashion retailer Fred Segal, and Isaac, an artist and founder of local design collective Project Room (the studio recently won an international competition to redesign L.A.’s streetlights), furnished the light-filled interiors with an eclectic spread of color and texture.

Isaac designed the jewel-toned dichroic glass table in the indoor dining room, as well as a table of recycled marble slabs as its outdoor counterpart. In the more private, compact spaces of the lower floor, below rainbow stripes painted between the rafters, he and Lizz carved out a cozy nook with built-in seating and upholstery that they designed themselves. In contrast to the openness of the upper floor, the Dank Lounge, as it’s called, is “a quiet spot for our family,” Lizz says.

(“That’s not the official architect’s name for it,” Louis would like to point out, “but they insist.”)

Shop the Look

Going all in, the couple also “nerded out,” Lizz says, on sourcing the house’s sustainable features, and Isaac’s dinner party conversation was briefly dominated by talk of rain collection barrels, low-flow toilets, and excessively high-grade roof insulation. Pointing to the living area’s operable skylights, which cool the interior by siphoning out heat, he credits the thinness of the roof to Louis, who came up with the novel idea of sandwiching the track lighting and sprinkler system between pairs of 2-by-12-inch rafters.

Although the Wasserman family has always been passionate about the environment—when she was growing up in Wisconsin, Lizz says, “We were the only people who composted”—the younger couple have found sustainability to be extremely cost-effective as well: The monthly energy bills are less than $20, the cost of hooking up to the city grid.

The overall process brought the family closer. Caren, a landscape architect, had drawn up the master plan after spending time on the empty plot of land, simply observing the path of the sun throughout the day. Then during construction in 2019, Lizz and Isaac experienced a tragedy when they lost their middle child, daughter Katz, to SIDS. “On one hand, sometimes it was hard to see the room that would have been hers,” Lizz says, “but on the other hand, it's really nice because she was here—she came with us [to the construction site] a bunch. It truly feels like our family's house.”

The resulting home also engages the site in ways that the family continues to discover, as the different shadows shift in size, shape, color, and intensity throughout the seasons. Having moved in only a year and a half ago, Lizz adds, “I think about what it will be like to live here for longer, and to know what the light will be.”

Project Credits:

Architecture: Louis Wasserman and Associates and Daniel Linn Architects

Construction: Zorzoli Construction

Structural Engineering: HTK Structural Engineers, LLP

Additional Engineering: B+W Engineering and Design

Landscape Design: Terremoto / @terremoto_landscape

Interior Design: Project Room / @projectroomla

Soil Engineering: Earth Systems

Energy System Engineering: Monterey Energy Group / @montereyenergygroup