Tilley-Kuhlenschmidt Guesthouse

This ADU in Pacific Palisades was completed in June 2019. Betty-Jo Tilley and Richard Kuhlenschmidt have lived on the property for 25 years where they raised their two children. They always intended to build a guest house/pool cabana but it wasn’t until California passed the ADU (Accessory Dwelling Unit) law that they decided the time was right. With Kuhlenschmidt’s background as an art dealer and Tilley’s career as a luxury real estate agent on LA’s Westside, they knew from the start they wanted to build something contemporary. They decided to work with Eva Sobesky of EIS Studios. Sobesky worked as project manager for Frank Gehry in Europe and on the Disney Center in Los Angeles before starting her own firm in Venice, California.

The project was originally intended as an extended entertainment space for fundraisers, such as cooking or yoga classes and also as a home-away-from-home for their adult children, with the ultimate eventual opportunity to rent it out for supplemental retirement income.

With those varied intentions in mind, they planned every detail of the space as if they were going to live there, including high end appliances and finishes. The more the project developed, the more they became excited with the idea of moving into it themselves, initially as a sort of adventure, to see how difficult it would be to adapt to a minimalist lifestyle.

The result is a 640 sq. ft., two story, one bedroom, one and a half bath guest house at the back of their property. They took extreme care to privatize th
e two units as much as possible. No windows in either house looks into a window of the other.

Tilley and Kuhlenschmidt moved into the unit in July 2019.