Ossipoff was born November 25, 1907 in Vladivostok, Russia. Because his father, Nicholas Ossipoff, who was an officer with the Imperial Russian Army under Czar Nicholas II, became a military attaché in the Russian embassy in Japan, his family moved in 1909 to Tokyo where Val Ossipoff grew up. Before he was 10, he traveled between Russia and Japan four or five times with his family and was in Petrograd during the Revolution of 1917. Prior to moving to the United States in 1923, he attended Yokohama's St. Joseph's College and the Tokyo Foreign School, which are international schools for children, and was fluent in Russian, Japanese, and English. His family was at their summer home near Mt. Fuji when the Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923 occurred. Immediately after the Great Tokyo Earthquake, he, his siblings, and his mother emigrated from Kobe to the United States by ship which passed through Yokohama and Honolulu along the way. Prior to leaving for the United States, he visited the construction of designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and was greatly influenced by Wright's organic architectural style. His father died tragically in Japan before he could rejoin his family in the United States. After graduating from high school in Berkeley, California in 1926 and from the University of California, Berkeley in 1931, he took two short jobs in California, one with an Los Angeles architect and the other with the San Francisco firm Crim, Reasing, and McGinnis while he did some moonlighting jobs with one of his professors. While at Berkeley, he was trained in the First Bay Region Tradition of vernacular architecture influenced by the style of the Arts and Crafts movement.