To most people, a home that's a scant 15 feet wide would look like an impossible design challenge. To Los Angeles architect Simon Storey, it looked like an opportunity. Tucked into a tiny 780-square-foot corner lot in Echo Park, the Eel's Nest is a towering slice of maker bliss, filled with Storey's hacks for hyper-efficient living.
He transformed every feature of the house into utilitarian art – making it feel much larger than its 960 square feet. "There's nothing extra in here," he says, looking around his kitchen. On the wall behind him is a molded plywood leg splint designed by Ray and Charles Eames, seeming to epitomize his quest for form meeting function.
Storey designed his house with the intention to sell, but he ended up falling in love with it. He moved in, but as he began to furnish it he realized that he wasn't happy with the Home Depot-style options for fixtures and furnishings.
So he began to reinvent things, customizing or redesigning each element to fit his taste and lifestyle. "We take these off-the-shelf things for granted," he says. "But with a little tweaking they can be completely bespoke."
Take his walls. When he couldn't find the texture he was seeking for the bedroom, he came up with a wallpaper pattern himself. He turned to local wall coverings manufacturer Astek Home to help him produce a silver-on-pewter updated version of flocked wallpaper.
The vanilla, plastic light switch plates also made him cringe, so he designed a touch-sensitive plate modeled after the leaves of a jade plant, using a wax mold to create the shape. To turn the light on, you tap the leaves, which curl out from the wall. "It's like a piece of sculpture," he says. "But it actually does something."
For his living room Storey wanted to create a "mountain of sound" that would evoke a bygone hi-fi era.It was a different kind of sculpture that inspired one of Storey's most striking innovations. While wandering through a local thrift store he found himself mesmerized in the home electronics section, where aging stereo speakers of all shapes and sizes were stacked into a glorious Jenga-like heap.
For his living room Storey wanted to create a similar "mountain of sound" that would evoke a bygone hi-fi era. "Back in the '70s, speaker building used to be really big," he says. "It's really easy to find these old books on how to do it."
He decided on a deep mahogany and ordered the speaker components online, designing them as separates that could both stack into a peak shape and also be rearranged and scattered like blocks (which can also help optimize acoustics). The warm materials and organic shape are a visual antidote to the glossy flatscreens of our entertainment centers, and achieving it is as easy as building a box.
The piece isn't just a focal point in the living room. Storey says it delivers a richer, more golden sound than contemporary speakers with their plastic cases.
Facing the speakers is Storey's Dishwasher Safe table, inspired by the banal beauty of molded fiberglass cafeteria trays. After realizing they'd make the perfect coffee table – no coasters required! – he designed a grooved frame that allows the trays to slide in and out.
It's an elegant update on the TV dinner table. Storey found his trays at a local manufacturer, but they're readily available at restaurant supply stores. "They have such beautiful colors," he says. "And they're great for parties."
Perhaps the greatest testament to Storey's ingenuity is that every custom piece in his house was fabricated in a Lilliputian garage that doubles as a workshop. He backs out his vintage Porsche, pulls down a folding workbench, and performs a Transformer-like conversion of the space – producing everything from a welder to a compressor from built-in nooks.
Although it looks like a pro setup, he says that even with his architecture background he hadn't done that much hands-on work until he bought his house. And there was a steep learning curve.
"I'd burn myself or be bleeding on the weekends and then I'd have to go back to work on Monday," he says with a laugh. But over the course of six months, compelled to solve his own design challenges, he became a confident carpenter.
"I became so much better at woodworking," he says. "I'd look down and say to myself, 'Are these really my hands?'"
All photos: Ariel Zambelich/Wired 
