After living for years in a 350-square-foot studio apartment in San Francisco, architect Moshe Porter and his wife, Adanya Lustig, dreamed of having more space to start a family.

Moshe had recently founded a new firm with partner Wayne Erb, and he and Adanya realized that they could design and build their own home for the same price as buying an existing starter house—and Moshe and Wayne could even set up their office there.

After considering small towns and suburbs around the Bay Area, Adanya and Moshe settled on coastal Montara, about a 30-minute drive from downtown San Francisco, which not only was close to Adanya’s extended family but also catered to Moshe’s love of surfing.

“Montara was the closest place to the city, our friends, and Adanya’s work that still felt kind of rural and quiet—and it’s a place where you could actually buy land,” Moshe recalls.

They discovered an ideal lot shaded by tall neighboring cypress trees, within walking distance of both the beach and hiker-friendly Montara Mountain, and they decided to build a modest two-bedroom, 1,200-square-foot house that would demonstrate how Moshe and Wayne’s new firm, Porter & Erb Architects, could achieve smart design on a budget.

$392,101 Grading, Foundation, & Framing	$20,603 Doors & Windows	$29,000 Plumbing
$16,000 Fire Sprinklers	$42,000 Lighting & Electrical	$1,200 HVAC
$30,800 Insulation & Sheetrock	$26,000 Roof & Gutters	$75,209 Siding
$12,500 Coutnertops & Tile	$6,874 Ikea Cabinets	$7,798 Appliances
$15,800 Paint	$4,577 Flooring	$56,313 Landscape & Flatwork
$129,089 General Contractor
Grand Total: $865,864

“When we were buying the land and telling the realtor what we were thinking about doing, he was like, ‘Two bedrooms? You guys are crazy,’” Adanya remembers. “But we were like, ‘To us a two-bedroom single-family home seems like a palace.’ And it was affordable by design.”

“An existing starter home is gonna cost around what we spent here,” Adanya explains. “Granted you’re waiting two to three years for completion—but in the end, you get something new that you really designed yourself.”

They loved the close-knit neighborhood, where kids trick-or-treat every Halloween, but the deep, fairly skinny 50-by-100-foot lots tended toward what Moshe calls “garage-forward architecture; something we really didn’t want. We wanted our house to be in the front of the lot, and the living room to look out on the street.”

The firm thus placed a detached garage behind the house, which also kept the home’s footprint and foundation size modest and “as efficient as it could be,” Moshe adds. They placed the two bedrooms (and main bathroom) upstairs for the same reason. “We honestly went as small as we could go. The bedrooms and bathroom upstairs are tight, but allow for nice sleeping rooms for us and our daughter, who we didn’t know was coming at the time, but I’d say we prepared pretty well. And having the stair hug the side of the house is as efficient as it could get.”

That pitched-roof second floor is set back from the larger, flat-roofed first floor, which helps break up the home’s overall mass. So too does the first floor’s facade, a rhythm of four-by-two-foot bays, faintly reminiscent of midcentury-modern residential design; the left-most bay is indented to create a covered entry. “It’s a distinctive move that we’ve started to do on other projects,” says Wayne.

The project’s priciest expenditure its natural Brazilian ipe hardwood cladding, which the couple chose for its Class-A fire rating—equivalent to that of concrete panel siding. They made the selection shortly after the West Coast experienced one of its worst-ever wildfire seasons in 2020, as the house is close to a large, wooded area. Moshe’s father, who was then working for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, urged them to invest in both fire-resistant siding and a metal roof.

The couple chose to leave the ipe exterior unstained, allowing the material to age over time and take on a silver tone, like cedar. That philosophy guided numerous material choices inside and out.

“We’re really interested in how these things will age over time and show the life that we’ve lived in the house,” Moshe explains. “We didn't want to have to tiptoe around, or feel precious about keeping the floor super clean, or keeping red wine stains off the countertops. We wanted materials that look good with some age.”

Inside, Adanya and Moshe kept costs down by selecting simple finishes like concrete floors, gypsum walls, and an Ikea kitchen, which friends helped them build. Birch countertops add texture, as does the glazed Fireclay brick tile backsplash, and the thick Douglas fir treads on the adjacent stairway.

They also added personal touches from family members, like ceramic light fixtures made by Moshe's brother, Isaih Porter, double-exposure photographs from the 1960s by Adanya’s grandfather, and even doorknobs that had been in her great-grandmother’s house. “They're heavy, they’re brass, and they’re pretty funky to turn,” she says. “It adds a nice layer of oldness to the house.”

The couple also had fun with the main bath upstairs, repainting a used claw-foot tub and matching sink (paired with the same Fireclay tile, in a different glaze), and they chose eye-catching floral wallpaper for the downstairs powder room.

The layout tucks a pantry and half-bath between the kitchen and the home’s back wall, preventing a kitchen window, but both the adjacent window-clad stairway wall and the glass-ensconced French doors to the backyard bring in plenty of natural light.

The home’s modest footprint makes space for a sizable backyard sown with drought-tolerant plants like sticky monkey flower and poppies, complemented by seating cut by a friend from a large cypress tree that fell on the property just before construction; it was actually cheaper than having the log hauled away.

A few months before the October 2023 move-in, the couple welcomed their daughter, Naomi, whose room is just across from Adanya and Moshe’s. Several times a week the family ventures to the beach or the Montara Mountain foothills with their dog, Georgie.

Since Moshe and Wayne are not only business partners working from the home’s on-site office but also fellow surfers, sometimes they’re able to take a break and catch some waves—an experience that still gives them a sense of wonder and perspective. “You’re sort of at the whim of Mother Nature,” Moshe says. “I think Wayne and I definitely both enjoy that part of it.”

Adanya thinks it also makes her husband a better designer. “I don't surf or do architecture, but I think both of them are about noticing small details,” she says. “Mo is always coming home and telling me like, ‘This is what the wind was doing. The surf was breaking on this one little rock, and this is how the sand was positioned.’ I feel like architecture is the same way, where you're noticing the small details of a project, or thinking about how those details will work.”

More Budget Breakdown stories:

Two Designers Lean on Friends to Build a $740K Home During The Pandemic

She Built a $277K Starter Home in Her Childhood Backyard

They Built a Minimalist $437K ADU—to Live and Work Out of Themselves

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Porter & Erb Architects / @porter.erb.arch

Builder: Verdura Construction

Civil Engineer: Sigma Prime Geosciences

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Budget Breakdown: This $865K Coastal Dwelling Is So Much More Than a Starter House