San Onofre Drive

First, there was the perfect setting, a remarkable location high in the hills of Pacific Palisades with sweeping views from downtown Los Angeles to the Palos Verdes Peninsula. The owners, after raising a large family, wanted to construct a special place just for them. Having learned much from building several previous homes, they knew that they wanted something smaller and tailor-made in this exciting new phase of their lives.

Their pursuit resulted in a residence that not only responded to its local context, but was designed to derive its essence from a rich architectural history of Mediterranean hilltop homes and to evoke the feel of a Provencal farmhouse. The property, it turns out, is in an area that shares the same longitudinal coordinates and balmy Mediterranean climate of southern France.

The main living spaces are located on the upper level where the great room, formal dining room, kitchen, and breakfast room all look out above the lower-level gardens and the panorama through shaded windows and balconies.  Placing the main spaces on the entry level allows each of these rooms to have a uniquely shaped ceiling resulting in a silhouette cluster of roofs that appear to have been progressively added over time. Like roofs of a Provencal farmhouse that grew from a small enclosure into a composition of many rooms.

The more private spaces reside on the ground floor behind thick stone walls. An elliptical staircase rises from the wine cellar through a library of books set into niches in the curved stone wall. An enclosed courtyard accessed from the lower level borders a swimming pool fed by two fountains. Trellises and trees offer shade, while rosemary and basil grow in a nearby kitchen garden.