Is it possible for an architect to be adopted by a client?

To hear Dan Brunn talk about Hedy and Samy Kamienowicz, for whom he built a clean-lined but structurally complicated beach house in the Venice neighborhood, one senses he would be happy to move in and call the owners Mom and Dad.

“Samy is a great guy,” Mr. Brunn, 35, said. As for Ms. Kamienowicz, a small, sun-tanned woman of 66 with a direct conversation style, Mr. Brunn gushed, “Hedy is very special.”

Ms. Kamienowicz’s specialness, it seems, rests in large part on the fact that she gave Mr. Brunn the things that every architect craves: a healthy budget and unfettered creative freedom.

“All of my other clients ask: ‘What is this? Can I gain another foot?’ ” Mr. Brunn said. “Here it was just about the art of the building.” The blank areas that a less imaginative homeowner might eye suspiciously as wasted space are there “to experience the house and to experience the beach in different ways,” he added.