Melinda Gray, AIA

Principal, Melinda Gray Architect

Santa Monica

Specialty: Modern residential

Melinda Gray is the quintessential outside-the-box thinker and designer. In a number of single- and multi-family homes that she has designed in Los Angeles, Gray consistently knocks down preconceived notions of what residences should look like.

Take, for instance, her unconventional coupling of traditional log cabin elements with modern, steel fittings for a residence she designed in 1991 in Topanga. Or her use of deep forest-green stucco on another L.A. house, where traditional homes in white and pastel colors dominate the landscape.

That unconventionality extends to the shape of her structures, too, and has made her a much sought-after local architect. Gray says she strives to “see what happens when you push one shape into another shape, or when you cut one off, what’s the next shape that you get. That’s carried into the shape of rooms as well.”

One of her most notable works is the “Exploded Barn” house in Santa Monica Canyon, so called because it looks like a traditional barn that has been blown open.

A modernist by training, Gray’s main influences are Le Corbusier and Eric Owen Moss, with whom she worked and shared a studio for eight years before setting up her own studio in 1984.

Gray came to Los Angeles from her native Chicago to study architecture at UCLA and decided to stay because of the mild climate, which allows her freedom from some climate restrictions in her designs. But local conditions dictate their own restrictions. Since the Northridge earthquake, Gray has been using more steel and diagonal bracing in her single-family residences, which range from $500,000 to $1.5 million.