When Chad Arendsen spotted the small house in an older neighborhood of Solana Beach, he knew he and his wife, Amber, had finally found the home they’d been waiting for.
The house and its street had a special family resonance: all the land had once belonged to Amber’s family. Her great-grandparents had lived in the little pink house still standing directly across from their new home.
The community, just west of Interstate 5, was the home of many farm and day workers employed by large Rancho Santa Fe and Escondido spreads, Arendsen explained.
“Most of the owners [in the small community] were gifted the land by the previous owners,” he said.
Amber’s great-grandfather was given the entire street in the early 20th century. He divided it up among his eight children, who in turn subdivided it for their children.
“Most of the original families here have similar stories, multigenerational families that passed along the land and their homes,” he explained.
By the 1970s, the neighborhood had started to decay and Amber’s father opted to raise his family elsewhere in San Diego.
When the Arendsens, who own Solana Beach-based COAT Design and Remodel, bought the property in April 2017, the area was starting to gentrify, accelerating during the past few years. The enclave offered other advantages: walkability to nearby shops, services, restaurants and a gym, as well as easy freeway access.
The 650-square-foot house plus basement, built about 1936, was set on a nearly 8,000-square-foot lot and was billed as a tear-down that “was barely livable.” Arendsen knew that he’d have to gut the structure, but he wanted to preserve and reuse as much original material as possible, both for sentimental and practical reasons.
During the final walk-through with the sellers, also from a multigenerational owner family, they discovered the home’s staircase was not original but had been built by Amber’s grandfather in the 1970s. To preserve part of the home’s history, the Arendsens decided to save and reuse the staircase materials, repurposing the stringers, treads and even the nails to create a treasured coffee table for their great room.
Arendsen was eager to take on this challenge. He had started COAT as a handyman and gradually expanded it to take on larger construction and remodeling projects. Both he and Amber come from families with multigenerational experience in the building trades and instinctively knew how to tap into their creativity and knowledge to manage the project for maximum speed and efficiency.
“The timeline and budget were most important,” he explained.
In buying the property and planning the remodel, the couple’s key criteria were creating additional functional space for their family of six —including three sons 19, 10 and 7, and a daughter, 17 —while maintaining affordability and speed of construction. They knew they could expedite their project by designing within local construction regulations and building codes.
They were able to complete most of the planning for their 2,600-square-foot remodel during the 40-day escrow and finish construction within seven months in November 2017. Since then, they have tackled additional projects around the property, including adding a pool, deck and landscaping that was completed about three months ago.
“If you ask Amber, everything is a work in progress. I never stop adding,” Arendsen said. But the home’s initial renovation and construction had a strict timetable.
“We designed backwards from the limiting factors,” such as building height limits, Arendsen said. That’s why the home’s ceiling heights vary from 16 feet in their daughter’s bedroom, which features a sleeping loft, to 9.5 feet, with most about 12 feet.
They designed the exterior to blend in with the Mexican/Mediterranean feel of the neighborhood, embedding colorful hand-painted Mexican tile into the risers of the home’s new main entry staircase.
In remodeling the home, they adopted an “addition sandwich” design to construct a house to meet their family-s needs. After taking the original house down to its studs, they sandwiched it between a 650-square-foot front addition and a 1,200-square-foot rear addition.
The original upstairs section was transformed into bedrooms for the children, bisected by a corridor leading to a laundry/mudroom and a staircase leading down to the original basement, now an office that connects with the new front section.
The 650-square-foot front addition incorporates a two-car garage and a flexible downstairs suite with separate access that includes a living room/kitchen designed to be rented as a granny flat or place to vacation.
The 1,200-square-foot rear addition includes the great room/kitchen and master suite, both of which open onto an expansive deck with an outdoor kitchen and bar with seating. The bar also was built from reclaimed wood from the original rafters.
Designing the interior themselves, the couple were able to pivot quickly to secondary choices if needed due to lack of materials.
They installed white oak flooring and ceiling fans throughout the home, marble counters in the bathrooms and customized kitchen cabinets.
The older children helped design their own spaces and chose the color palette and tile for their bathrooms. Their daughter opted for a sleeping loft with study area below for her personal space, while their oldest son’s bedroom opens onto the original home’s front balcony, where he entertains friends.
For the master suite, which includes a large walk-in closet, the Arendsens found a reclaimed double country-style entry door that they adapted into a sliding barn door for their bathroom. The master bath features easy-care, blue-and-white patterned ceramic tile flooring, a double sink with Calacatta marble counters, a travertine-tiled shower with a rain-effect shower head and access directly from the deck for easy rinsing off after surfing or using the pool.
Their goal was to build a house with at least four bedrooms and four bathrooms, but with creative design they achieved five bedrooms and six baths.
Once COVID-19 hit, the Arendsens appreciated the flexibility of their new home as they transformed the garage into a gym and temporarily changed the granny flat into an entertainment area. Then they shifted their focus outdoors.
To turn Amber’s vision of a pool into reality, Arendsen consulted his friend Brooks Crawford of Carlsbad-based Brookside Landscape Design, who leveled their sloping backyard and installed a pool built from a shipping container on the deck, complete with an underwater window.
Crawford’s wife, Jenny, of Branch Out Landscape Design, also in Carlsbad, added drought-tolerant plants to complement the house and deck, including red bougainvillea, plumeria, lomandra, asparagus foxtail ferns, agaves and pittosporum crassifolium.
Now the fourth and fifth generations have settled in and are enjoying their family’s heritage, with the added potential of an income-generating extra unit.
Nicole Sours Larson is a freelance writer.
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