Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Louis Darosa lives in a charming little house--and we do mean little--behind a white picket fence near downtown Los Gatos.

Darosa's Roost

Smallest house arose, phoenix-like, from an abode that once housed chickens

By Sandy Sims

French music floats through the windows at 304 Nicholson Ave. It's late afternoon, about 3 p.m., and Louis Darosa is sitting on his shady 6-foot-by-6-foot deck reading the paper; his chair rests against the back wall of the house next door. A car slows out front as the passengers look and point at Darosa's house. He smiles at them.

The rooster perched atop his roof twists slightly in the breeze. The wrought-iron weathervane is an icon for the house's long metamorphosis from a carriage-barn/chicken coop into the tiny luxury home Darosa bought last year for $292,000.

When 35-year-old Darosa bought the house in the historic Almond Grove District of Los Gatos, he'd wanted a home in a genteel neighborhood close to downtown. What he got was the smallest house in Santa Clara County. At 514 square feet, the place is wedged like a puzzle piece into a 956-square-foot trapezoid-shaped lot.

"I had to sell most of my things, including my king-size bed, to fit in here," Darosa explains. He considers himself lucky to have won out over the many who bid on the house.

His cozy cottage-with-a-white-picket-fence has all the essential rooms: a living room, kitchen, bedroom and bath. There's even what passes for a dining area, where two can sit on tall stools with their knees tucked under a one-by-three-foot-wide table and gnaw on chicken bones. Or because Darosa owns Gervais--the charming French restaurant in the Rose Garden area of San Jose--they might sip French wine and savor poulet roti a la setois.

If Darosa were to have more than one guest arrive, one at his front door and one at his back door, he could almost reach from the middle of the small living room to answer both doors at the same time. The proximity of those doors also means he could create extra space in the living room for guests by opening both doors and placing a chair in each one.

Then, with the couch that almost reaches from one wall to the next and the overstuffed French-style chair that eclipses one end of the couch, a whopping group of five could have a little conversation. However, if he wanted to serve them dinner, they would have to balance their plates on their laps and scrunch in their elbows for room to eat.

History and circumstance changed this tiny place from a rickety little barn-like structure to a house with hardwood floors, granite kitchen counters, a green marble bathroom floor, 13-foot vaulted ceilings, and a little deck off the back door.

The small lot was originally the back yard of the house next door at the corner of Tait and Nicholson. It sported a carriage barn that mainly housed chickens. In 1920, before building codes and earthquake standards, the chicken coop was transformed into a mother-in-law cottage.

Los Gatos historian Bill Wulf explains that "during the '20s, we were in a small Depression." Almond District home owners were converting anything they could into living space to rent out. The mother-in-law cottage was eventually parceled off and sold for taxes.

Barbara Herlihy, owner of the house for the 10 years before Darosa bought it, says the place seemed like it had been tacked together in stages, which made the floor plan a mishmash of corners. Herlihy says it was cramped living there, with the forced-air heater in the living room, the water heater in the bathroom, ceilings only seven feet high and no eating space.

She had to tear out a kitchen wall just to get a new shower into the bathroom, and she hired two men with hand shovels to dig out a regulation crawl space under the house. However, during the 1989 earthquake, while many houses in the historical Almond Grove District shook right off their foundations, 304 Nicholson stayed put. Herlihy laughs when she says, "It had no place to go."

The tiny house is a tourist attraction. Sometimes gawkers are intense. Herlihy recalls the owner before her saying that one rubber-necker took out two parked cars, and another ran into the front of the house, causing extensive damage.

Herlihy's desire to add an upstairs took her to the Planning Commission several times. First, she approached them with a Tudor design, then a Victorian design. After spending much money and time trying to get this project approved, she knew her plans were doomed when the commission passed the ratio standard mandating that residents cannot build on more than 40 percent of the lot. Herlihy's house already covered 90 percent of the lot.

In 1996, a fire (for which a cause was never found) severely damaged the house. During the attempt to fix it, the little house's flimsy structure was finally laid bare.

Originally, the plan was to repair the fire damage. When Saratoga builder Jim Parden took the blackened roof off, he discovered the house's walls were only 1 1/2 inches thick, no two-by-fours anywhere. The thin walls couldn't support a new roof, so he tore down the walls. He would rebuild on the old foundation. Then he discovered the foundation was thrown together with bricks and rocks. "The place was a Cracker Jack box," Parden says. "We found old medicine bottles and things under the bedroom," he recalls, and explains that this must be where they dumped the garbage before the house was built. Parden also discovered that the sewer line for the neighborhood ran right under the middle of the house. With the permission of the town, he was able to leave the sewer line where it was and put clean-outs on either side of the house.

What remains of the old house is the "footprint." This means the current foundation follows the lines of the old foundation. From there the new house arose.

Most architects are designing 3,000- to 4,000-square-foot houses these days, so when Herlihy approached Los Gatos architect Gary Schloh to redesign the tiny house, Schloh had to make a major mind shift. He needed to make the house as efficient and as seemingly big as possible.

"I used all the tricks I could," Schloh says. To create a feeling of more space, he designed vaulted ceilings and placed windows strategically in every room to connect with light and outside areas. He pored over details, tweaking here and there to make every little square foot as compact and efficient as a ship's cabin.

He put the hot-water heater and the forced-air heater in the attic above the bedroom; he placed a pedestal sink in the bathroom and slipped the toilet in the corner; he hid a small double-deck washer and dryer in a little closet off the left side of the roomy bedroom. On the other side of the bedroom, he snuck in a walk-in closet, and above the bedroom's eight-foot ceiling he put an attic with a pull-down staircase. "I could put a loft up in the attic," Dorosa boasts. But for now that's his only storage area.

Circulation space (walking areas) served double purposes. For instance, the short walking space that connects the living room, the kitchen and the bedroom is also the dining area, where a tall table is tucked into a corner. Schloh explains that it was important to put a corner window in there, so the dining area would connect spatially with the deck.

This smoke-and-mirrors design has yielded a small house that feels much bigger than it is, and it is up to code and earthquake standards.

As a busy restaurateur, Darosa is pleased that his housekeeping takes about one hour a week, and his yard work requires little more than watering a few plants. His monthly heating bill is a mere $32, but this summer his little house became terribly hot, and he regretted not putting in air conditioning.

Darosa has to do his part to keep the place feeling roomy. "I have to put everything away or the place looks a mess," he says. Very few pictures clutter the white walls. One, high on the kitchen wall, is Le Petit Ville do Bolene by Sabina Anna Haaberg. The dominant image of the French country scene is a rooster.

The house is just right for one person with no pets, Darosa says. The only animals he's had were the ants that invaded the place after he first moved in. They might actually be about the right size.

Darosa's girlfriend, who lives in Fremont, claims the house is just right for two. "The patio works for two, the table, the bed, all the things that matter," she says. "Both Louis and I are very neat and organized," she explains, "or it wouldn't work."

She loves the way the lighting changes over the span of a day. She says it's a romantic little place in a romantic neighborhood. "I fell in love with it when I first saw it," she gushes. But she explains that she has to be very careful because when she was a child she had a tendency to break things.

When Louis sits relaxing on his deck at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, it's a rare and precious moment because most of the time, he's tending to the needs of his thriving restaurant. Chances are he even takes most of his meals there. Which may even be why this tiny place works for him. Still, when he's home, he's living just as he wanted to--in a genteel neighborhood, close to downtown Los Gatos.

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