Del Valle – Case Study

The Del Valle project began with a straightforward brief: convert the detached garage of a 1930s Spanish-style home in the Wilshire District into a livable ADU and art studio. Demo the interior, add a bathroom, make it work. That’s what we knew going in.

What we didn’t know — what revealed itself slowly, material by material, as finishes began arriving on site — was that our clients Todd and Clay had one of the most specific and intentional design eyes we’ve encountered in years of building. Working alongside CDY Architecture, they had assembled a palette of handcrafted, artisan-made, and hand-imported materials from around the world. Nothing was off the shelf. Nothing was accidental.

This is the story of how we built a space designed to hold imperfection with precision.

The existing garage was not square. That fact — which seems simple on paper — became the central design and construction problem of the entire project. When the 6×6 hand-stained concrete floor tiles went down in the main space, we made a deliberate decision to run them centered on the overhead structural beam. It was the right call for the room.

Then we hit the wall. Literally. The beam was crooked. And when the tile grout lines reached the Pinky’s iron door threshold — running perpendicular — the misalignment produced a pizza-wedge effect: grout joints deep on one side, flush on the other across a 20-foot run. There was no cosmetic fix. We pulled three full rows of tile across the length of the space, demolished the exterior wall, and moved it out three inches to make it parallel with the beam. Only then did the floor, the door, and the room align.

That same ethos threaded through every detail. The floating hand-cut stone sinks had to align with the 2×2 tile grout lines so that the lines centered precisely on the plumbing fixtures. One of the specified sink basins had an off-center basin — which meant a decision had to be made: align the wall-mounted faucet to the basin, or to the drain. We worked through it with the clients. We landed on the basin, because the weighted stone is what the eye follows first. The plumbing coordinates from there.

When a detail wasn’t right, we fixed it. On the front entry tile, the error was shared — and the change order reflected that: 50/50. That’s how we work.

The material palette at Del Valle is unlike anything we’d built with before. The Zia Tile in the bathroom is hand-cut — the irregularities in each piece are not defects, they are the point. The concrete floor tiles were hand-stained and designed to show wear over time, to read differently in five years than they do today. The Moroccan cedar screens that became the cabinet doors for the art studio were hand-built and full of natural variation. Even the floor-to-ceiling tile walls in the bathroom — with their linear drain and flush tile grate — demanded that every imperfect piece land exactly where it was supposed to.

Honestly, when the materials were first described to us, I wasn’t sure it would hold together. So many different shades within the same neutral palette. So many handmade pieces with baked-in irregularity. What I came to understand — and what the finished space makes clear — is that the rigor of alignment is what gives the materials room to breathe. When the grout lines are precise, when the fixtures center, when the geometry holds, the handmade surfaces stop competing and start composing.

Clean lines carry imperfect things beautifully. That’s the lesson of Del Valle.

The millwork package at Del Valle is the piece I’m most proud of. The Moroccan cedar screens — hand-built, imported, full of the kind of irregularity you can’t manufacture — became the cabinet door faces for the art studio cabinetry. We built the cabinet boxes in natural maple with a clear Rubio Monocoat finish, letting the grain speak. The screens were sprayed in a deep emerald green lacquer that pulled color from the garden beyond the Pinky’s door and held its own against the stone and tile.

The result is a millwork package that looks like it was always there — like the house grew it over decades. That’s what custom means at Umpa Millworks.

One of the truest things you can say about a client with a real design vision is that the brief keeps evolving. Not because they don’t know what they want — but because they know it well enough to recognize new possibilities as the project opens up. At Del Valle, two significant exterior additions emerged mid-construction, both of them designed to set the stage for what comes next.

The first was a plaster L-shaped bench running along the side of the ADU. Conceived as a future seating area around a fire pit, it was built as a seamless extension of the exterior facade — same plaster, same plane, same language as the building itself. From the outside it reads not as furniture added to a wall, but as the wall itself deciding to become a place to sit. When the landscape transformation that Todd and Clay have in mind eventually takes shape around it, the bench will already be there, waiting.

The second addition was a steel pergola — skeletal by design, deliberately light. It was never meant to make shade. It was meant to become a structure for vines to inhabit over time, to let nature build the canopy that steel only suggests. A matching pergola was added to the rear of the main house during the same period, and the visual relationship between the two structures — the ADU and the primary residence connected by the same steel grammar — is almost certainly the architect’s intent. Two buildings on one site, bound by the same line.

Both additions were change orders. Both belong to the story. They’re evidence of clients who stayed engaged through the entire build and kept making it better — and of a project relationship where that kind of trust was earned.

The relationship with Todd and Clay didn’t end when the ADU closed out. It grew into the backyard.

The full site transformation now underway includes a pool, along with a range of hardscape and softscape elements being executed by landscape architecture specialists. Kink’s role in the next chapter is focused on what we do best: the built elements that require craft and permanence. We’re designing and building a site wall for the BBQ area in the same material language as the main house — the kind of architectural continuity that makes a backyard feel like it belongs to the building rather than just happening behind it.

We’re also building the outdoor kitchen — an integrated masonry structure with a built-in countertop BBQ. The countertop and finishing details are being designed and fabricated through Umpa Millworks, bringing the same standard of custom fabrication that defined the interior millwork package outside into the landscape.

The plaster bench and the steel pergolas that arrived mid-construction were always pointing toward this. They were the first moves in a site composition that’s still being designed. That’s the kind of project — and the kind of client relationship — that we build toward.

Every material in this project was selected by the clients with intention. Each one has a story worth knowing.