Hillside Homes and the People Who Build Them

A modern cliffhanger

Hillside homes have evolved from stilt-built cabins to technological marvels. In them, we see L.A.'s sense that anything's possible.

By Janet Eastman

Thursday November 18, 2004

THE HILLS of Los Angeles are dripping with them, precarious-looking houses suspended in space. Some are propped up on spindly legs but others seem to levitate on their own, no safety net in sight. Like the imported palm trees and the face-lifted Hollywood sign, they are symbols that this is the home of dreamers. People who believe that anything is possible, even living in the clouds.

L.A. has long been an urban laboratory of building innovation, a benefit of its craggy features and mix of fault lines, ancient landslides and soil types. Traditional, flatland thinking just wouldn't fly here. People wanted houses close to work that had unbridled views of the ocean, mountaintops and eternal horizon. And they made it happen.

In the 1920s, movie-set craftsmen and other creative thinkers bought inexpensive lots on jagged land and hammered together small, wood-framed dwellings. Then progressive architects recognized that hillsides were the perfect pedestals for modernist houses with wraparound windows. Today, with level land almost completely covered, inventive construction methods are allowing for houses to be terraced up and down hillsides like upright dominoes.

Instead of the old style of balancing tiered structures on tiny pads of dirt that could slide, hillside-hugging homes that comply with stricter city requirements are now rooted in predictable bedrock.

Hillside homes are safer, more stable, but their gravity-defying looks still prompt the question: Who feels comfortable sleeping there? Trapeze artists?

Of sorts. Behaviorists and architects say people nesting on serrated sites prefer life on the edge. That is, they don't mind navigating zig-zagging stairways in the dark, 4-wheeling it to get to their porches, strapping on rock-climbing equipment to wash bottom-floor windows or watching the room sway from their bed during strong Santa Ana winds and the occasional earthquake.

"These homes are perches for people who want to live like a bird on a bluff," says Malibu architect Ed Niles. "They like the privacy, freedom and the sense of seeing the scene, but not being in it. It's like a Christmas-card image of flying over a village."

They are people like Niles' client, Maria Moss, who says she sometimes gets carsick driving 1,200 feet up the winding road to her Malibu home, but once she steps inside the steel-and-glass living room that forms a triangle in the sky, she feels safe.

She and her family came to Los Angeles "on a whim" earlier this year because she could no longer stand the frosty weather of her native Philadelphia. Her husband, Nicholas, president of a faucet company, agreed to leave behind their relatives and childhood friends and take the plunge with her. He found the house on the Internet and they and their 5-year-old son, Michael, moved in last month.

"I'm not an architect or engineer, and I couldn't tell you structure, but I love this," says Maria Moss, serving Cheerios to her son in her kitchen, which is tethered to a piece of land tilting at a 55-degree angle. "We used to live in a contemporary home on flat land, but compared to this, that place looks Victorian. This is a spaceship."

The Mosses and other hillside dwellers, says psychologist Peter A. Wish, are thrill seekers. "They aren't worried about heights. If they were, they wouldn't be there," says Wish, who has written a book on overcoming fears and who now has a private practice in Sarasota, Fla. "Fears are hard-wired into us all; they are survival mechanisms. But some people challenge instinct."

Wish says when he first came to California 25 years ago and saw the cliffhanging houses, he wondered, "How do those people sleep?" Since then, he has found that L.A.'s saw-toothed terrain affects the way residents think. "Being out on the edge frees them up and makes them more open to new opportunities," he says. "They step off into life."

That's true about Komal Bhojwani. Radical thoughts had no place to grow in her cocoon of a home in flat Miami, "where speed bumps are considered steep," she says. So the former lawyer packed up her ambition to become a stand-up comedian and bought a platform house in September that juts over Coldwater Canyon.

"I needed to think expansively, to have L.A. at my feet," Bhojwani says, stepping onto her wide terrace, which hovers 50 feet above ground. "And this place, with its windows and feeling of floating, helps me think that way."

Her home was one of three on the street designed by William Beckett and built by Stone Fisher Constructors in 1961. The classic post-and-beam construction on steel supports was dramatic enough, even in the everything-goes housing boom of the '60s, to catch the attention of architectural photographer Julius Shulman. His black-and-white image of two of the houses was shot from the canyon below them, making them look as if they were airborne, taking off from an invisible tarmac.

Liz Anderson is another homeowner who craves a raised view. The multimedia news producer says her elevated contemporary home in the Adams Hills area of Glendale reminds her of a treehouse she played in when she was a kid. "I have to see what's coming and going," she says from her center deck, which is bracketed by sliding-glass doors leading to her living room and bedroom.

When her 42-year-old house was rattled by the Northridge earthquake in 1994, the three skinny wooden legs supporting it didn't buckle, but some of the walls split apart. Anderson could put her arm through the gaps.

"I just about did the one-man luge ride down the hill," says Anderson. "But I love living in my glass treehouse and weather station. If there's a fire, I see it coming and know when to leave. I could not live in a box without a view."

To achieve these lofty vantage points, houses have been built on ground so spiked that only the driveway rests on land. These Sisyphus-like undertakings require a construction cast that includes geologists, structural and soils engineers, and swarms of vertigo-free workers.

Veteran builders tell stories of excavators being buried in dirt while digging deep to make room for concrete supports, helicopters being hired to carry support structures that were too long to truck to the site and architects who rappelled down hills to get a better understanding of a piece of property that drops 15 inches every foot.

Cutting into hillsides is "like opening up a human," says architect Niles, who has designed angled houses in Bel-Air, Brentwood, the Hollywood Hills, Mammoth Lakes and Vail, Colo. He says Malibu is the most challenging, however, because 40% of the lots are in the hills, which consists of "baby soil that wants to slide."

Costs and time delays can add up to double or triple those of a similar house built on level ground. But in Los Angeles, it seems there is no place to go but up. Or down. It depends on the slope of the rare available lot.

"There are fewer vacant lots on flat land, so there is significantly more development in the hillsides," says Robert Steinbach of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety. "And almost anything is buildable today unless it's on an earthquake fault or major landslide. Technology has advanced out of necessity and those advancements make it easier to develop these properties. Some of the older properties didn't have these."

After World War II, freewheeling developers were built everywhere, including high in the hills. They cut and filled pitched property -- called "hillside cropping" -- to build a line of tract homes. When the easiest sites were filled by the late 1960s, they went elsewhere.

Since then, and especially after the Northridge earthquake, soil testing has become more sophisticated, water is collected and controlled, and hillside soft spots are better mapped out. This makes it easier to determine if everything on the surface and below it will stay in place.

Also, there are tougher building requirements. The city shrunk height maximums and established setback ordinances that require driveways and yards. Contractors are installing more retaining walls and securing concrete columns to bedrock. West Hollywood builder Jaime Cantu is working on a house in Laurel Canyon that has 100 columns spaced 8 feet apart.

Cantu, a home builder here for 25 years, says his job has never been harder. "If you don't have experience building in a hill, stay far away," says Cantu, who was reached on his cellphone while he was waiting at the building department's office. "I'm here now trying to work something out on a project I've been doing for 2 1/2 years."

Steinbach of the building department says it's all in the name of safety. He says his office gets calls from neighbors, wondering, "Will that big thing slide down on me?" But he reassures them by telling them, "If left alone, a lot of these hillsides can send surface debris down the hill, but we require everyone to bring the property up to a factor of safety better than it was before."

In the Moss house in Malibu, friction piles, the latest technology in concrete supports, are embedded 50 feet into the ground. Sprouting from them are steel beams and columns that extend throughout the house. "Everyone who comes here is reminded that the building is generated from the earth and reaches to the sky," says Niles.

Two-foot-wide steel bars cross almost in the middle of 5-year-old Michael Moss' room. Like the other supports in the house, these bars absorb earthquake and wind forces. Instead of hiding them in walls, however, Niles uses the X-braces as room dividers. In Michael's room, his bed is on one side, his play area on the other. For fun, a 400-pound Ducati motorcycle, with its visible engine, dangles from the ceiling into the top of the X.

Hillside houses rarely have flat patches surrounding them, which is a drawback for gardeners or a blessing to those who don't want to be bothered with yardwork. Finding a natural level spot for a kid's swing set or even a sandbox is almost impossible.

For Michael Moss, a 25-foot-long concrete pad, like a wide sidewalk, was built alongside the back of the house to serve as his play yard. It floats two feet above the ground, making it seem very futuristic. Steel planters will be bolted to the floor to make sure they don't fall off. A fence at the top of the uphill property keeps deer out and prevents rocks from crashing into the play yard.

Nearby, on narrow Rambla Vista in Malibu, a "For Sale" sign is pitched into a vacant lot so steep that Niles, standing at street level, has to tilt his head back to see where the parcel ends.

As available lots disappear, he wonders if building in thin air is the next step. "I've gotten three calls from prospective buyers asking if I could build a house here," he says, shaking his head at what he calls an unbuildable parachute property, "and I tell them, 'Not unless you have an unbelievable amount of money and still I wouldn't know how to get a car in here.' "

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Rising to the challenge

L.A.'s peaks have long challenged the best architects. Frank Lloyd Wright believed it was arrogant to build on top of a hill, so he designed structures that melded into the sides.

In the 1923 Storer house in West Hollywood, Wright used decorative concrete blocks intertwined with supportive steel rods. This allowed him to create a two-story living room that stretches into front and back terraces, meeting nature.

John Lautner completed the famous octagonal Chemosphere in 1961. It pokes out of the ground on a single concrete column, dislodging it from its steeply sloping site in Hollywood Hills. A funicular track runs up the side of the house.

Richard Neutra wanted to avoid the grading of hillside sites, so he dreamed up the Platform House for a tract of homes overlooking Beverly Glen Canyon in Bel-Air. Almost 75% of the structure hangs off the cliff, tethered by bolts and posts.

Ray Kappe's 4,000-square-foot house in Pacific Palisades' Rustic Canyon rides above the contours of the slope.

"This creates many levels of space, a potential that you don't have on flat land," says Kappe, who has lived in the house since he built it in the 1960s

The wood-framed house is supported by six concrete towers. The top of the house is level to the upper flat portion of the site, allowing Kappe to use it as a deck and yard.

-- Janet Eastman