It's just, like, so L.A

Ahh, the west coast … West coast USA, that is, California sunshine and palm-fringed beaches – not Weston-Super-Mare's grey skies and amusement arcades. It is images of the Golden State that CZWG Architects' Fulham Island in west London evokes – albeit a British take on that style. The five-storey residential and commercial building exudes a playfulness often lacking in other contemporary urban housing schemes, which the architect describes coolly as "bringing casual LA living to London".

Fulham Island is a £9.5m triangular development squeezed between several roads – the name refers to the traffic variety of island, as well as Pacific. And it is currently stopping traffic with a very Miami Beach (OK, so that's east coast) bright-blue rendered commercial block and a lime-green residential building, both designed by CZWG for joint-venture developer Manhattan Loft Corporation/The Osborne Group.

The development is opposite the imposing St John's Church. The choice of brick as a cladding material for this residential block was the key to the development responding to the church while still adhering to architect Piers Gough's Californian vision. To merge with the church, the predominant facade of CZWG's brick-clad addition is finished in a background-colour brick of pale yellow buff – similar to the weathered brickwork of the church. The fun is provided by coloured brick polka-dots of grey, lilac blue, lime green, yellow, minty turquoise, terracotta and white dotted throughout the facade. Because of the facade's colourful dots, its builders nicknamed it the Smarties building. (Trust builders to name it after a snack …)

Curves are a key aspect of this project. One elevation of the block's double frontage undulates in slow waves, the second elevation is straight, but both have curvaceous balconies of several sizes and shapes hanging from them. The building features a ground-floor restaurant, three floors of high-quality apartments and two penthouses on the fifth storey. The large rooftop balcony area and circular design of the penthouse shell determines the curvature of the facade facing the church. Sweeping inwards from its four-storey extremities, the facade bulges out at its centre as the brickwork continues upwards to include the circular fifth storey. Gough, a partner at CZWG, says: "The front wall is free from the need to hold a normal straight back-of-pavement street line, and the wavy form allows additional light into the living areas of the apartments."

The building's structure is also curved: the load-bearing super-structure of the block is a curving insitu concrete shell, with large window openings punched through. This is a quicker and more rational solution than a conventional in-situ concrete frame and infill, due to the curvature of the facade. The waves are gentle enough to allow it to be clad in standard bricks with no faceting. These are tied back to the building with steel ties in channels.

The brick manufacturer had its work cut out, though, when dealing with the acute angles at almost every corner of the building. Project associate Sanjiv Gohil explains: "There are virtually no right-angles on the project, even though it may look like it. We have had to work very closely with the manufacturer to cut and bond lots of specials that were just a few degrees off 90 in order to successfully complete the project."

This close partnership between architect and brick manufacturer has been the key throughout the project. What may at first seem like the random spacing of coloured blocks on the building's face, is in fact a carefully calculated pattern. The glazed bricks, from the manufacturer's special collection, are first used as a seven-course band at the base of the building. Here, a "random" layout has been created by the architect, in order that no two bricks of the same colour touch and no pattern is formed. "We couldn't leave it to be solved on site," says Gohil, "because it isn't as easy as it sounds to produce a random pattern."

Higher, where the buff brickwork takes over, the five-brick-high stack-bonded polka-dots are also set out with a high degree of precision. In addition to not putting blocks of the same colour near each other, CZWG and the manufacturer had to contend with the wavy facade and the need for special glazed bricks at reveals, corners and soffits. Gohil explains: "Once we had designed the wavy facade, we realised that calculating the numbers of glazed bricks and their positioning would be difficult. There was to be no deviating from our layout for the specials and so, if one came at a corner or intersection with a window, it had to be manufactured with two glazed faces or a glazed soffit and so on." The architect flattened out the facade on paper to allow the manufacturer to calculate the exact number of bricks and what specials were required.

As if all of this wasn't enough for a bricklayer to contend with, the glazed bricks are specified in a larger size than the background bricks (see "Pin-point precision"). And, they had to be bedded in black mortar, as opposed to the sandy buff mortar used on the main facade brickwork, in order to disguise the joints. Unfortunately, this demanding specification was an onerous task for the bricklaying contractor, who nevertheless seems to have coped adequately.

Overall, the building strikes an eye-catching pose in the centre of Fulham, and the laid-back LA living ethos at the heart of the design seems to have spread to the surrounding area, with residents lounging in the watery English sunshine outside adjacent cafes. CZWG's design for this building and its colourful neighbours has turned what was a collection of rundown streets into west London's very own corner of California.