In Los Angeles, a city known for its dearth of public spaces, architects have expressed the issues of privacy and transparency in the home in often-unusual ways, typically motivated by a perceived break with architectural tradition. The optimistic Case Study architects of the 1950s and 1960s gave us the glass house on the hill, exposed to the entire city. A less optimistic generation of the 1970s and 1980s designed either compounds, hidden behind walls, or faux ruins—houses constructed of common, tough materials that appear outwardly hostile toward the public domain—responses to the city’s worsening urban situation.

Santa Monica–based lee+mundwiler architects responded to this local legacy in a 2005 project, the Coconut House, which neatly explores the conceptual dichotomy of open and closed, public and private domains. “We like to provide privacy, but we didn’t want to overdo it, either,” says Stephan Mundwiler, AIA, who designed the house with his partner Cara Lee. “We had no desire for the client to sit on the street, which led us to design an interior courtyard.”