Gehry Residence Floor Plan Now

The original house’s floor plan remains almost untouched, providing a sharp contrast to the addition.

Scattered across the ground floor plan are what Gehry called "cubes." One is a plywood structure surrounding the front door. Another is a plywood volume housing the master bathroom. These cubes act as "rooms within rooms." On the floor plan, they appear as solid, hatched areas—unmovable blocks that break the flow of the open plan. gehry residence floor plan

Completed in 1978 in Santa Monica, California, the Gehry Residence is widely considered the seminal work that launched Frank Gehry’s career as a deconstructivist architect. While the exterior—with its exposed studs, chain-link fences, and corrugated metal—shocks the viewer with its unfinished aesthetic, the floor plan is where the true architectural innovation lies. It represents a radical rethinking of how domestic space can be organized, merging the traditional "American Dream" home with an avant-garde industrial sensibility. The original house’s floor plan remains almost untouched,

Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the Gehry Residence floor plan is that circulation is not defined by hallways. These cubes act as "rooms within rooms

The heart of the floor plan is a double-height, open-plan living and dining space located entirely within the new addition.

To understand the floor plan, one must understand the existing structure. Gehry did not build a house from scratch; he wrapped a modest, existing 1920s Dutch Colonial bungalow. The floor plan reveals a "house-within-a-house" concept.

The original bungalow remained largely intact in terms of footprint, but Gehry stripped away its siding to expose the framing. He then surrounded this core with angular volumes of glass, metal, and wire. On the floor plan, this creates a fascinating dichotomy between the "old" spaces (the traditional rooms of the original house) and the "new" spaces (the interstitial zones created by the outer shell).