TriBeCa, by Way of Venice Beach

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New York Style on a California Beach

On August 18, 1969, Scott Powell took to the stage at Woodstock wearing gold lamé and began belting out doo-wop songs as a member of the retro rock band Sha Na Na.

Over the decade that followed, he performed in the movie “Grease” and starred in the “Sha Na Na” television series. But in 1980 he left the band to pursue a new dream: becoming a doctor.

“I called everybody I knew who had anything to do with medicine, and one of those people was Cinder,” he said, referring to Cynthia Boxrud, his future wife and a classically trained musician who was also keen to study medicine.

Both went back to school for pre-med at Columbia. By the late ’80s, they were married and living in a small loft in then-gritty TriBeCa as they did their residencies. They moved to Los Angeles in 1992.

Today, Dr. Powell, 69, is an orthopedic surgeon and a clinical professor at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. Dr. Boxrud, 67, is an oculofacial plastic surgeon and clinical assistant professor at U.C.L.A.

Along the way, they raised two children in the quiet, affluent Pacific Palisades neighborhood. But when their children eventually moved out, they realized they had been missing something: the creative, free-spirited bustle of a dense urban neighborhood like TriBeCa.

The equivalent in Los Angeles, they decided, was Venice, so they began to hunt for a home there. Hoping for something with the industrial feeling of their old loft, they looked for a commercial building they could convert, rather than a house. In 2011, they found three connected lots with a failed sushi restaurant and an office building, about a block from the boardwalk.

It didn’t look like much from the street, but then they climbed a ladder to the restaurant’s roof. “We got up with all the air-conditioners and equipment, and saw that it had an ocean view,” Dr. Boxrud recalled. “I said, ‘We’re either crazy, or it’s great.’”

“The real estate agent was trying to sell us on what a great location it was for a restaurant — but clearly it wasn’t,” Dr. Powell said. “When he wasn’t looking, we got a hammer and chipped away at the walls to find that there was beautiful brick underneath. When we saw that, it was all systems go.”

They bought the property, which was in foreclosure, for $1.4 million.

To find an architect to overhaul the buildings, they interviewed firms suggested by their friend Christopher Hawthorne, the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, and decided on the up-and-coming architecture firm wHY.

“I really admired them,” said Kulapat Yantrasast, the creative director of wHY, who took on the project with his former partner, Yo-ichiro Hakomori. “The boardwalk is not a desirable location, even for young people. People are afraid of crime, drugs and homelessness. But they said, ‘Oh, this is just like TriBeCa when we were there. It’s perfect.’”

Responding to their clients’ desire for a space with a raw, stripped-down appearance, the architects exposed the brick walls and wood ceilings, added new concrete floors and tied the existing structures together with a new steel-and-glass atrium staircase, for a total of about 3,200 square feet.

The single-story restaurant building became a loft-like living, dining and kitchen area with sliding doors that open onto a courtyard with a lap pool, hot tub and firepit. An ipe deck covers the roof, which is underpinned by new structural members that allow it to hold up to 150 people, as well as big planters with olive trees.

The former office building now houses the private spaces, including three bedrooms and two bathrooms.

To separate the outdoor courtyard from the parking area, the architects created a gabion wall — a fence-like steel cage filled with broken bricks and planted with vines. It not only matches the character of the home, Mr. Yantrasast said, but is also difficult to tag with graffiti.

Because the project required approvals from the city and the California Coastal Commission, as well as structural changes, it took about four years and $900,000 to complete. Dr. Powell and Dr. Boxrud moved in for Thanksgiving in 2015.

But the wait was worth it. Now, when not busy with patients, they cycle the boardwalk, walk to the coffee shops and restaurants along Abbot Kinney Boulevard, and watch outdoor movies projected onto the wall of a neighboring building.

They also occasionally use the home as a concert venue, and for fund-raisers with musicians like Andra Day and Leon Bridges for MusiCares, a charity whose board of directors Dr. Powell serves on. Indeed, music remains an integral part of their lives.

“Cynthia plays piano, and we have guitars,” Dr. Powell said. “People come over and get a chance to play.”