Nice, but Can It Wash Itself?

Venice, Calif.

Thomas Ennis' house has glass walls that open to the exterior.

IT was a balmy Friday afternoon on the Southern California coast, and Thomas Ennis was in weekend mode, which means he was working on his house. Actually, he was trying to figure out how to make his house work for him.

"This is just temporary," Mr. Ennis said, standing on the roof, looking down on a row of glass-and-stucco-sided houses hugging the shoreline three stories below. He was holding a 25-foot piece of PVC pipe, which he dipped over the side of the roof until it hung parallel to the house. "But it works pretty well at the moment."

Mr. Ennis, a tanned 65-year-old with closely cropped, graying hair and a serious gadget habit, turned on a valve. High-pressure water jets erupted from a series of nozzles lining the plastic tube. Pipe in hand, he walked his newfangled sprinkler around the perimeter of the house, and a week's worth of saltwater deposits, bird droppings and dirt vanished.

"It won't leave any water spots because all the water in the house is filtered to remove impurities," he said with a slight Midwestern drawl. "That's something I learned a long time ago."

Mr. Ennis knows clean. He is the founder and chief executive of NS Wash Systems, a company based in Inglewood, Calif., that manufactures automated washing equipment for cars, trucks, trains and just about every municipal bus in New York City, Los Angeles and more. His own water filtering system is simply a small-scale version of what he developed for car washes years ago.

"I figured that if I knew how to wash buses, trucks and even army tanks, I should be able to figure out how to wash a house," said Mr. Ennis, a divorced father of four who holds nearly two dozen patents, for things like vacuum-cleaning devices and mechanized brush systems. But he hasn't yet, which is why he was dragging a pipe around his roof on a Friday afternoon instead of pressing a button and heading for the beach.

He has been working on it since 2003, when he bought a three-bedroom 1920s cottage here for .5 million and leveled it. "It wasn't much to look at," he said. "It was just another flophouse." (A flophouse that was once home to Jim Morrison, Mr. Ennis said.)

To the dismay of local preservationists, who fondly recall a time when Venice Beach was the Coney Island of the Pacific (complete with gondola-lined canals, amusement park rides and aquariums), many of the properties in the area have followed a similar evolution: quaint cottage to hippy shack to multimillion-dollar minimansion.

But some of the new houses are examples of the experimental architecture for which the area is now known. There are buildings by the likes of Morphosis and Frank Gehry (whose take on the classic beach bungalow, the Norton house, is just a few blocks away), as well as emerging architects like David Hertz, who designed Mr. Ennis's house.

At 3,500 square feet, the Ennis house is a four-bedroom, five-bath glass-and-steel playground for its owner's active imagination. Mr. Hertz, 47, whose own house is a few blocks away, played yin to Mr. Ennis's yang, yielding when necessary while keeping many of his more outlandish ideas in check (like weaving colored mood lighting throughout the house and installing human-size statues in the pond). Mr. Ennis, after all, wanted the quintessential James Bond-style house.

That explains the 9-by-15-foot window at the front of the house, produced at Mr. Ennis's Inglewood plant, which operates the way a car window does. Press a button and the facade of the house drops into the floor, leaving the living room open to the beach. Mr. Ennis and his 10-year-old son, Jack, have taken to playing catch football there, with Mr. Ennis inside the house and Jack on the beach going long.

Mr. Hertz took advantage of having a client who had not only big ideas but a manufacturing plant with which to bring them to fruition. Push the button for the fire pit and flames leap out from a gas jet under a decorative bed of aluminum shavings on the living room floor, shavings that came from Mr. Ennis's manufacturing plant.

He and his engineers also built a two-person aluminum elevator (open, no walls, just a platform and waist-high restraints). It runs from the five-car basement garage to the living room and kitchen on the first floor to a landing outside the bedrooms on the second floor to a terrace on the rooftop (with a swimming pool to come).