The Westside

The marine layer arrives most mornings between May and July and does not lift until early afternoon. Everything on this side of the 405 is designed around it, whether the architect admitted it or not: deep soffits that never see direct sun, steel specified two grades up, timber that silvers within a year and then stops.

The tract that started it

Gregory Ain’s Mar Vista tract — fifty-two houses, 1948, landscape by Garrett Eckbo — is still the most useful thing built on the Westside, because it proved that a modest plan repeated well beats a large plan done once. House Without Hallways is a direct descendant. Every room opens off another room, and the corridor, the most expensive square footage in any house, has simply been deleted.

Rustic Canyon runs the opposite argument. It is wooded, quiet and slightly damp, and its houses are darker and more inward than anything nearer the water. The Courtyard of Nine Trees keeps its nine trees; the plan is arranged so that none of them had to come down.

What you are actually buying

Air. The difference between Venice and Highland Park on an August afternoon is routinely fifteen degrees, and it is the most reliable price signal in the county. Add a beach path that works and schools people move for. Subtract an hour of every weekday, spent in traffic.

Long Section, in Venice, is thirty feet wide and a hundred and ten deep — the standard walk-street lot, and the hardest brief on this list. The Quiet Plinth, in Brentwood, has the opposite problem: a flat acre and no excuse.